Grace Farms 10 Year Celebration

On October 11th, 2025, Grace Farms publicly unveiled a portrait of Empowerment Collective’s Founder, Nasreen Sheikh, along with a symphony crafted to musically convey Nasreen’s journey from survivor to globally-impactful advocate.

The portrait, hand-painted by artist Hannah Rose Thomas, was created using egg tempera paint mixed from natural pigments — a technique traditionally used for religious art. Thomas’s use of iconography and early Renaissance painting techniques and gold leaf for portrait paintings, mirroring those of European royalty or devotional paintings of Catholic saints, is symbolic of the restoration of dignity and the sacred value of each individual. The portrait, simply titled “Nasreen,” is part of the With Every Fiber exhibition, created and displayed at Grace Farms to raise awareness about forced labor and child labor in the building materials supply chain. The portrait features a shawl created by Nasreen herself, along with the lush nature of the Grace Farms. The freedom of the portrait is in stark contrast to the confinement Nasreen was subjected to in her youth.

The symphony, titled Woven in Tears, was composed by Evan Williams this year specifically for Grace Farms’ With Every Fiber exhibit and was performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra. The title of the work is inspired by Nasreen's words. In her TedxVail talk, she speaks of being constantly surrounded by garments in the sweatshop where she worked and slept. She says, “I hated those clothes. They were woven with the energy of my suffering.” In another talk to the 2023 Summit At Sea Conference, Nasreen shares, “I could not talk to anybody, so I started to talk to the clothes that I was making, and I said to those clothes that whoever is going to wear these clothes, I hope that they can feel me, I hope that they can see my tears…”

The title of the symphony is also inspired by Hannah Rose Thomas’ book Tears of Gold. And the musical material is influenced by her painting method. In response to Thomas' renaissance inspirations in her portraits, Woven in Tears employs musical material from the air “Flow, My Tears” by English Renaissance composer John Dowland. The material is presented in the opening using the klangfarbenmelodie or “tone-color melody” technique with a different instrument of the ensemble playing one of the notes of the melody in a unique timbre, representing each individual thread coming together to weave a tapestry. Nasreen's work reminds us that each of us is a thread, coming together as a tapestry for justice.