With artists for a great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother, art is truly all in the family for Donna Haynes. Growing up in Florida, Haynes watched her mother evolve from watercolor artist to math teacher, incorporating art and math into her classes at a time when combining the two was almost unheard of.
“Geometry and art go together so much, Haynes said. “She was able to build her passion back into the curriculum, which was really cool.”
The blend of art and education also define Haynes’ career. As the visual art curriculum supervisor for Broward County Public Schools for the past 10 years, and with more than 10 years of classroom experience, she supports the County’s art teachers and advocates for keeping art in the classroom.
A solo exhibit of her own interdisciplinary art titled Pathways to Light: How Art Can Transform Grief, opened September 4, at the Pompano Beach Cultural Center.
Haynes is a 2025 recipient of the Broward Cultural Division’s Artist Innovation Grant, a program designed to support Broward-based artists by encouraging risk-taking, exploration of new artistic directions, career advancement, and sustained creative commitment. Her exhibit, she says, aims to use the healing power of art to help families process grief after the loss of a loved one.
Haynes says the idea for Pathways to Light started with her own family in 2018 when she received an incubator grant at FATVillage to explore new technology. She experimented with a laser cutter, searching for materials to test when she uncovered a box of her late grandfather’s handwritten sermons in her mother’s garage.
Haynes said, “The sermons had been sitting there for years. My mom was like these are not going anywhere, what do we do with these?”
“I said, What if I made an art piece? I think that would help our family.” “
That idea became her first piece—a work created from her grandfather’s handwritten sermons, a cross, and the mathematical sequence he loved.“The primary image that I used was a cross that he wore every day,” Haynes said. “And he was very interested in the Fibonacci series. So, I used a lot of his sermons, layered with the Fibonacci numbers, and then layered with that cross.”
She gifted the finished work to her aunt, who placed it in her church office, where her grandfather had served as minister.
“The whole community comes there all the time now,” Haynes said, “and she gets to talk about him every day.”
Witnessing how meaningful this was for own family, inspired Haynes to apply for the Innovation Grant so that she could help others process their grief and honor loved ones. With the grant, Haynes worked with four families over six months guiding them through the process of sharing stories of their loved one with her, selecting objects and mementos that Haynes would then transform into art.
“A lot of this work was about objects that are left behind, like what we choose to keep when someone passes,” Haynes said, “It tells so much about that person, but also in a way it’s what we remember them by.”
Each project was deeply personal and specific; a father’s handwriting layered into a collage, a mother’s recipes turned into a digital font recreating her handwriting, a partner’s belongings transformed into shapes and symbols.
Haynes says one participant wakes up every morning and sees her father’s handwriting in the artwork in her home. “She feels like her father is a little bit with her..That’s what I hope this work can do—help people remember the better times and not just the end of life, which can be heartbreaking.”
For Haynes this project is about using art as a tool to help heal.
“I’ve had so many people reach out and say, ‘If you get to do this again, I really think you can help me,” Haynes said. “I can only do four this year, but it shows me how much people are craving something like this.”
She hopes that visitors to Pathways of Light walk away not just thinking about the exhibition but about their own loved ones.
“My hope is that they will know how important it is for us to keep our loved ones’ memories alive,” Haynes said. “If we don’t remember them, you don’t remember the stories. They say they die, too. But when you keep their memories alive, it keeps them alive in our families.”
IF YOU GO
WHAT: Pathways to Light: How Art Can Transform Grief
WHERE: Pompano Beach Cultural Center, 50 W. Atlantic Blvd, Pompano Beach
WHEN: September 4 through 27
TICKETS: Free
INFORMATION: pompanobeacharts.org
