Lorraine Drammer Serena
Artist Who Built Global Bridges Through Tiny Wooden Boxes
Lorraine Drammer Serena, whose vision transformed a small wooden box into a worldwide artistic movement celebrating women’s voices, died peacefully at her home surrounded by family in Ojai, California on Thanksgiving Day, 2024. She was 83.
Born January 20, 1941, in Elmora, New Jersey, Lorraine grew up between the green hills of Vermont and the coastal breezes of Santa Barbara, where she would meet her high school sweetheart and life partner of 68 years, Frank Serena at age 15. Their early courtship included shared daily lunch breaks punctuated by the crunch of Fritos tucked into sandwiches.
After earning both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Fine Arts from UC Santa Barbara, Lorraine began reshaping how art could build community. The Santa Barbara Arts Council recognized her contributions with their Art Advocate of the Year Award in 1984, and the Chamber of Commerce later named her Artist of the Month.
As an art teacher at Santa Barbara High School in the 1960s, each Christmas she transformed the Santa Barbara Museum of Art’s galleries into immersive “Magical Kingdoms,” where hundreds of students created crawl-through environments from reimagined refrigerator boxes. One student, discovering his creative voice under her guidance, declared, “For the first time in my life, I know what I’m doing” – a testament to her belief that everyone was an artist waiting to emerge. This belief in creative freedom extended to her own home, where she encouraged her daughter Stephania to paint directly on her bedroom walls – treating her child’s creative impulses with the same respect she showed her students.
In 1991, a miniature wooden box sitting on her studio table sparked what would become her life’s work. Gathering with fellow women artists, Lorraine proposed sending these boxes – each no larger than a human heart – to artists worldwide. The project, Women Beyond Borders, grew from this seed into a global movement spanning 50 countries and touching over 10,000 lives. From genocide survivors in Rwanda to trafficking victims in Vietnam, women transformed these humble boxes into profound statements of their experiences, hopes, and dreams.
Museum directors who had never exhibited women artists suddenly found their galleries enriched with these powerful voices. A Swedish artist, declaring “the soul of woman is round and cannot fit into a metric box,” stuffed her box with a tennis ball. Another turned hers to sawdust, while others filled them with bullet casings or memories of fleeing war-torn homelands. Each box became a window into the universal experiences connecting women across cultures, languages, and borders.
One morning in Cuba, an artist named Elsa Mora encountered the exhibition and by the next day had created a piece balancing the scales between men and women. Lorraine’s work gently but persistently opened doors that had been closed to women artists for generations. In 2008, she received the Women’s eNews “21 Leaders for the 21st Century” award for building peace and connections worldwide through art.
The critic Josef Woodard described her own works as “liberal landscapes of an imagination-stirred mind,” but her greatest canvas was the human heart. Whether sharing morning coffee with Frank or hosting weekly dinners with her grandchildren and their friends from The Thacher School – who naturally began calling them “Nonno” and “Nonna,” Italian for grandparents. Lorraine made everyone feel like family. This gift for nurturing deep connections extended far beyond Ojai, as she maintained lasting friendships with artists, weaving a tapestry of relationships that spanned continents and cultures.
The Women Beyond Border’s archive, recently gifted to the UCSB Art, Design & Architecture Museum, ensures that future generations will continue discovering how a small wooden box, in the hands of a visionary artist, could help heal the world.
True to her lifelong pattern of pushing artistic boundaries, Lorraine embarked on yet another creative adventure at age 79 when Karyl Lynn Burns, Co-Founder of the Rubicon Theatre Company, envisioned bringing Women Beyond Borders to the stage. While some may view retirement as a time to slow down, Lorraine embraced this new artistic medium with characteristic enthusiasm. In 2019, the Rubicon Theatre Company premiered “Women Beyond Borders,” a play celebrating the project’s global impact. As audiences were transported from a classroom in Rwanda to a boat fleeing Saigon, they witnessed what Lorraine had long understood – that art, at its heart, comes from the Latin “ars, artis”: to join together.
In her final years, Lorraine would still share morning coffee with Frank, now sipped carefully through a straw – determined to savor life’s quiet moments even as dementia gradually dimmed her vibrant mind and her body weakened. It was the same spirit that had led her to send thousands of palm-sized wooden boxes into the world decades earlier, each one carrying an invitation to create, to connect, to be seen. Those boxes, like the countless lives she touched, continue to multiply in ways she could never have imagined: in museum collections that now celebrate women’s voices, in communities forged across continents, and in the courage of artists who learned from her that creativity knows no borders.
Perhaps her greatest legacy lives in something more intimate – the way she showed us that art, at its most profound, is not about the final creation but about the sacred act of sharing one’s truth and recognizing our common humanity. In this way, she achieved what every artist dreams of: her life itself became her masterpiece.
She is survived by her devoted husband Frank; children Stephania and David; daughter-in-love Kelley; grandchildren Wade, Serena, Liam, and Steven; and a global community of artists who carry forward her vision of art as a force for connection and change.
A memorial service and celebration of life will be held at a later date.
You can learn more about Women Beyond Borders Project below:
https://www.arthistory.ucsb.edu/
https://www.hfa.ucsb.edu/news-entries/2024/5/12/96zt3npsb1fy9g0v1tglheo49f38ms