Help Fund Hey Lola's Environmental Art and Science Dream

Update!

We are fully moved out of our old studio and mostly moved into the new spaces. We’re now in the process of unpacking and setting everything up. We’re aiming to have our first “open to the public” event on First Friday in May! And we’ll of course be sharing the space online, as well. If you’re interested in seeing what some of our educational content will include, we’ll be setting up at the Clean Water Celebration in Peoria, Illinois on April 28th. Thank you so much for your continued support!

Hi! My name is Jessica McGhee, and I go by loveheylola online. Emily is my business partner, and together we run Hey Lola Art Company. After building a successful business selling lots of jewelry out of reclaimed items, I realized that my heart wasn’t fully in it. While I love creating my products, I also want to be able to use my platform to educate kids (and adults!) about art, creative reuse, and healthy environmental stewardship. It’s been difficult to do that while also trying to pay the bills by constantly making jewelry. However, we now have the opportunity to move from our current (and a bit expensive) studio to two new studio spaces, which combined are cheaper than what we currently pay.

We chose two spaces because we are dedicating one of them to art, environmental education, and a creative reuse shopping area, where people can come and get processed garbage from us to turn into art. Our plan is to be open to the public at least one day a week and to use the space to create educational videos. We have lots of art and so many ocean specimens that we can talk about! We’ve wanted to do this for a very long time, but we haven’t been able to because the jewelry pays the bills and that takes most of our labor and energy. In addition, the neighborhood our current studio is in isn’t the best place for kids to be, so we never really committed to making this space work the way we originally envisioned.

Making the switch to more art and educational content is a financial risk, but it’s one we feel is worth taking. And when we brought up the idea of a GoFundMe to help us move and get settled, friends said to go for it, so here we are!

Thank you so much for supporting this project and this move to something even more meaningful. We’ll still have the jewelry, but now it will be even better because our mission and purpose will be front and center.