As a tribute to Lisa Nakajima, their event coordinator who passed away last month, the National Arts Honor Society has planned a memorial gallery in which anybody is welcome to attend.

The reception will be from 5:30 – 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 30. The event is for free, and there will be refreshments. Guests will have to go through a walk gate outside since there will be a class taking place inside the building — further directions will be present at the site itself.

“We decided to put on an art show to show, everyone that would like to see, what an amazing artist she was,” said fellow NAHS member Jake Howard. “We originally planned to do it at the school, but when all the art teachers had a work day at the Elm Street Studio, they asked the owners if we could have it there instead and they generously said yes.”

Nakajima was one of Timber Creek’s many talented artists and had been enrolled in four different high school art classes by her junior year: a regular art class, drawing, painting and an AP drawing class. Nakajima also participated in the VASE competitions and had received the highest rating (4) all three times she joined.

“She had experience with different mediums and techniques to finally find her own,” said Howard. “Lisa mastered her own technique in drawing and painting.”

The gallery is themed “Paper Cranes.”

“We made 1000 [cranes to hang up at the set], and I came up with the idea because I remembered a story about Sadako (a fictional story about a victim during the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945) and the 1000 paper cranes,” said Victoria Xu, another artist and a close friend of Nakajima. “There is a Japanese legend where if you make 1000 paper cranes, you get a wish…and I thought it was perfect for Lisa’s family cause they really need a wish right now.”