Born at one am on February 15, Judy Steed missed being a Valentine’s Day baby by one hour, but growing up her birthday parties were always Valentine-themed. “I love red, I love hearts,” the stained glass mosaic artist confesses. And hearts occasionally find their way into her artwork, including one of her latest pieces created especially for the St. Edmund Migrant Center in Oak Park where she volunteers helping some of the 14,000 Venezualan refugees that have ended up in Chicago due to political, social, and economic instability in their home country. In the artwork Steed made for a new counseling room at the migrant center, a woman stands with her back to the viewer, looking into the distance, as if contemplating another place, possibly home. “I used the broken pieces of a beautiful set of plates my daughter gave me,” she explains.  “I figured they might want to look at something besides Caucasian people,” says Steed. 

Steed is self taugh; she didn’t study art in school, but took a lot of art classes whenever she could and experimented with different media. It wasn’t until she took a mosaics class that Steed realized she’d found her medium. “I knew I was home, I’d found the thing,” she says. Steed incorporates upcycled, or previously used objects and materials, into her mosaics. “I work with the same stained glass that appears in church windows, but instead of using lead as the substance between the pieces, I use grout.” Currently, she and her daughter, Bridget, are displaying their work together in a mother-daughter exhibit that runs from January through March 28 at the Trailside Museum of Natural History in Thatcher Woods (738 Thatcher Ave, River Forest, Illinois). 

Steed’s husband, Bob, is also an artist, whose recent work features large-scale sculptures of endangered animals that he painstakingly fabricates out of upcycled materials (his lemurs are now on display at the Italian restaurant, Trattoria 225, in Oak Park). The couple met in the halls of Oak Park-River Forest High School in 1966 and the proverbial sweethearts just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.  “We really like each other,” Judy laughs, and ticks off some of their shared interests besides art: travel, bocce, walking, and music. “I’ve always loved to sing and I used to make up songs all the time as a child,” Steed says. She sang in chorus in high school, and brought that love of music to her former profession as a preschool teacher, where she made up songs for her students. 

The Steeds took a voice class at Concordia together and when they heard about Sounds Good Choir from some people in their church, they joined right away and have been enthusiastic members ever since. “We love it. You’re with people in your own age group, you’re learning a lot of music, and there are so many opportunities to practice,” says Steed, referring to the practice tracks for each voice part and the optional online rehearsal with conductor Paul Langford on Friday mornings. “We travel a lot, and it makes it easy for us to practice when we’re not at home.” 

Judy Steed knows firsthand the positive impact singing has on well-being, from improving mood and breathing to creating opportunities to socialize and learn. After singing with Sounds Good for the last seven years, Judy believes the many benefits she gets from singing in the choir are just as valuable as the aerobic workout she does every day. 

“Singing releases endorphins—I just feel great doing it,” she says. “And I love learning more about music; when you stand near someone a little better than you, you learn from them. Then all those voices blend… it’s just beautiful. It lifts you up.”

She also believes deeply in the organization’s mission of offering a choir experience to adults with early stage dementia or memory loss and their care partners. 

Judy’s mother lived with Alzheimer’s for 14 years before she passed away, so Judy is grateful that Sounds Good also offers Good Memories, a choral program designed especially for adults with memory loss. “My mom would have loved singing with the Good Memories choir… so it’s deeply comforting knowing that all the joy and health benefits I’m getting from Sounds Good are now also there for people with memory loss.” 

Steed credits her mother for introducing her to art. “My mom was a creator,” she says. “She was always making, creating—needlepoint, découpage, crewelwork, jewelry-making, decorative furniture painting, even gardening.” Watching that person slowly disappear as the disease overtook her was heartbreaking, says Steed. She shares a photo of the two of them and remarks, “That was taken just before the light started going out in mom’s eyes.” 

In honor of her mother and to help speed a cure, each year Steed participates in and donates proceeds from the sale of her artwork to The Walk for Alzheimer’s. One year she and Bob were out of town during the fundraising event, but they still walked… just on the Great Wall of China, not the Chicago lakefront.