Lucy Julia Hale is a Georgia mixed-media artist, social activist, and educator. In these roles, she is a passionate advocate for vulnerable populations, which now unfortunately include all creatures on earth. Growing up in the deep South on the shifting cusp of change around the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Lucy Julia Hale experienced wrenching institutional social injustice that especially brutalized black citizens and women. In college, she experienced extreme police brutality, being jailed with SCLC protesters. She has been threatened as a court watcher for Southern Poverty Law Center in volatile racist trials in south Georgia and as a participant in various Quaker and other social justice actions. She has served as president, on boards of directors, and in other leadership roles in AAUW, League of Women Voters, NAACP, and Independent Living initiatives for differently abled people. She was a co-founder of Georgians for Pure Water: a citizen-incorporated coalition that under significant threat from corporate sources, successfully advocated for changing mining practices to protect the local water supply. She served several years on a local history board of directors focused on protecting regional Cherokee heritage. Her work has been published in The Chattahoochee Review, Metadada: The International Journal of Dada Mining, and Hand Magazine. She received the Reece Museum Award from the 2017 Fl3tch3r Exhibition: Social and Politically Engaged Art and selected as the Appalachian Artist of the Year by the Reece Museum, and the Jurors' Award from the 2018 10x10x10xTieton Exhibition. Numerous key galleries and museums have featured her work. Member of The National Collage Society (Signature Member), Georgia Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Georgia WCA Arts + Activism Task Force, Alabama Women’s Caucus for the Arts, Athica Gallery, Fellowship of Quakers in the Arts, Alabama Women’s March. She earned a B. S. in Art Education and an M. S. and Ed. S. in Counseling and Educational Psychology. Because her heart for justice has called her to focus her art on witnessing, her works are often dystopic. But to support the theme of this exhibition, she has honored the gifts of nature that bless us by creating a work that witnesses those joys expressed as flowers.