I first met Emilee Gagnon ’13 two years ago in Arabic class. Most of the time, we wore similar masks of confusion.
I had seen Emilee around campus before I officially met her. Working, smiling and hula hooping, she was a walking piece of art. She was never afraid to be herself, and it showed through her fashion, hair and infectious smile.
Emilee had many passions in life and chose to give of herself to support others. It was in living out one of these passions that her life ended Sept. 23, 2013.
While riding her bicycle from her hometown of Holliston to San Francisco, Calif., in hopes of raising money for multiple sclerosis, she was hit by an SUV in Ohio.
Only 21, a recent graduate of Westfield State and former employee of the school library, she was working at a jewelry store, practicing and selling her artwork.
She decided to ride across the country not only to inspire and express herself, but to meet people and experience other cultures. A cancer survivor, you might have expected her to ride for a nonprofit that supports cancer research, but instead she chose to ride to raise money for multiple sclerosis, the disease that afflicts her grandfather.
Emilee graduated in the spring of 2013, earning a bachelor’s degree in art, along with minors in French and ethnic and gender studies. She pushed herself—hard.
She was named a Commonwealth Honors Scholar, which is the highest honor one can receive in public higher education. And she created her own senior honors project—a combination of her passion for art history and feminist theory.
She looked at five different contemporary women artists whose vision challenges traditional representations of women in art. She aptly titled this, “Revolutionary Beauty: Five Twentieth-Century Women Artists’ Challenges to the Western Art Canon.”
A piece of her artwork is on display in the Honors Center in Mod Hall.
It is all of these things—her passion to help others, her willingness to be the best she could be and her joy—that we will miss. Emilee will live on through the Emilee Dawn Gagnon Memorial Scholarship Fund, established by the Westfield State Foundation, Inc.
