Two improbable journeys found a shared but spectacular final destination this week.

The Bainbridge Island arts community welcomed Jane Chu, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, to the island’s creative cathedral Tuesday. With a crowd of more than a hundred gathered at the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Chu marveled at the museum’s collection of Northwest art and the facility itself.

Chu’s visit was part of a regional tour that started at the Tacoma Museum of Glass and swept through Port Townsend before finishing at BIMA.

Greg Robinson, BIMA’s executive director and curator, noted that the museum, which opened just less than three years ago, has now been open longer than the time it took to plan, build and open the institution.

“Welcome to our thriving, vibrant and wonderful museum,” he told Chu.

Making the tour with Chu was U.S. Rep. Derek Kilmer, as well as officials with the Washington State Arts Commission, including Karen Hanan, the commission’s executive director.

Kilmer recalled the visit earlier in the day to the Museum of Glass, where they met veterans in the “Hot Shop Heroes: Healing with Fire” program, an NEA-supported effort that assists wounded military members and veterans with glassblowing and flame-working classes.

Next came stops at Fort Worden — “where I was in music camp every summer,” Kilmer recalled — and then Copper Canyon Press, a nonprofit poetry publisher in Port Townsend.

The 6th District congressman thanked Chu and the others for taking the tour and “hanging out with me today.”

“It’s been one of the coolest days I’ve had in this job,” Kilmer said.

Bainbridge, and Bremerton, too, he noted, have been transformed by a community commitment to the arts.

“It’s not an accident that we’re ending here in Kitsap County, where we’ve seen the incredible role of the arts and the power of the National Endowment for the Arts,” Kilmer said.

BIMA is a crown jewel in Kitsap, he said. But it also represents so much more.

“I think our arts organizations not just help us share an appreciation for the arts, but they bring us together to share ideas and to share our passions. And this museum is so at the forefront of that.”

The arts, Kilmer said, binds families and communities.

He recalled how he recently took his daughter Sophie, 9, to see “The Martian.”

“It was the first time she had seen a PG-13 movie. And I said, ‘So what did you think?’ And she goes, ‘Dad, that was awesome.’”

Her father, however, was worried about the adult language in the film. The mention brought an exasperated response, Kilmer recalled.

“She said, ‘Dad, I’ve heard all those words. I went to theater camp.’”

The power of art unites and transcends, Kilmer said as he harkened back to the scene outside the concert hall in Paris that was a target in last year’s terrorist attacks in France, and how mourners were transformed when an unknown musician played John Lennon’s “Imagine” on a street piano.

“That is the power of art,” Kilmer said.

Chu shared the details of her own artistic journey, and how her father came to the United States as an immigrant to escape the change in China’s government at the end of World War II. Her mother followed after an eight-day escape, and never saw her family again.

Born in Shawnee, Oklahoma and raised in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, Chu recalled a childhood of speaking English at school but hearing Mandarin at home.

“I juggled a bok choy/corn dog life,” she said.

She remembered her piano lessons as a child, and how they became so much more than lessons when her father died when she was 9.

Straddling different languages, she had no words to express her grief at losing a parent, she recalled.

“But music, for me, was very soothing,” she said.

It stimulated her intellectual pursuits, encouraged her to meld different perspectives, and find a comfortable vocabulary in creativity. It propelled her to bachelor’s degrees in piano performance and music education.

And it’s something that guides her work as the eleventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts in its 50-year history.

“We really want to celebrate and share, to the world … our abilities to express ourselves, our abilities to bring people together, our abilities to solve old problems in new ways, to put a twist on a perspective that no one has seen,” she said.

Chu left quite impressed with Bainbridge’s newest museum.

“This is a beautiful place,” she said as she congratulated BIMA founder Cynthia Sears at the close of a tour of the building and its exhibits.