The story below is a preview from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!
How Roanoke is leveraging creativity to build stronger communities … and to tackle tough conversations.
Ashley Wilson Fellers
Maggie Perrin-Key, the 2023 Emerging Artist for Roanoke’s Open Studios tour, is shown here in her downtown studio. “I never thought Roanoke would be a place I could have a career in art,” she admits. “But I’m doing it.”
It’s difficult to think of a more explosively productive season in Roanoke’s arts scene. In the last 12 months, giant, handmade puppets have bobbed down parade routes, and big, bold murals have been splashed across buildings. Meanwhile, crowds thronged performance venues for the first time since COVID. But while it’s easy to track Roanoke’s splashiest arts moments, perhaps some of the most important work has happened in quieter – and perhaps less quantifiable – ways.
Neighbors met together to build those big papier-mâché puppets … and learned they had more in common than they thought.
Communities tackled tough conversations, using art to acknowledge painful histories … and to trace a path forward.
Perhaps Roanoke’s arts scene is becoming a place not just for sparkle and splash, but a nexus for connecting people.
Courtesy of I Heart SE
Participants in I Heart SE line up for the Daisy Art Parade – a community-led project that encouraged neighbors to come together and create large-scale art.
“We’re really trying to look at that intersection between the artist and the community,” says Doug Jackson, Roanoke City’s arts and culture coordinator. “We’re looking for a space where everybody can make a difference, where you can have an idea – you can want to improve the area around you, your organization, your community, you name it – and your neighbors are going to cheer you on … But how do we create that?”
In the past year, creatives across the valley have been working to answer that question.
Fostering Creative Collaboration & Building Community Connections
In May, under deep-blue lights at Mill Mountain Theatre, two dancers skim across the stage, then round their arms and reach toward each other, joining their bodies like links in a chain. To some, these motions might look like simple balletic gestures, but for audience members from the Deaf community, they mean something more – they’re visually resonant of the American Sign Language sign for “linked” or “connected.”
Courtesy of Laura White
Dancers perform “The Lark Ascending,” a ballet by choreographer Will Smith and American Sign Language consultant Betsy Quillen.
This innovative ballet, “The Lark Ascending” – created by Will Smith, who recently retired from Roanoke Ballet Theatre as a principal dancer – was just one piece of a night of arts performances specifically geared toward the local Deaf and Hard-of-Hearing community. There was poetry, song and even a film preview, all thoughtfully interpreted, and funded by an Art Matters grant from the City of Roanoke’s Arts Commission, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts.
“I didn’t know there were so many artists, let alone local, hearing artists, that cared about reaching the Deaf and Hard of Hearing community,” admitted Betsy Quillen, a passionate advocate who served as the evening’s ASL coordinator, and who worked alongside Smith to choreograph the ballet step-by-step. “Sometimes it feels like you’re an island trying to reach this community, or trying to convince others that it’s important to reach this community. But to collaborate with others who also had this vision … it was inspiring.”
Quillen, who experienced significant hearing loss as a teenager, remembers how excited she was when Smith first reached out to her about his idea: could he create a ballet that incorporated the language of ASL into the shapes the dancers made with their bodies? Absolutely, answered Quillen: “I could already see it.”
The collaboration that resulted was just one example of many creative connections sparked in Roanoke in recent months – something encouraged by the Arts Commission’s meetups and workshops in its “Year of the Artist” initiative.
After Eden Photography
Josh and Julie Kinn of Kinnfolk, a Celtic music duo, received an Art Matters grant to create a body of songs capturing stories from Roanoke’s history and geography.
“The cross-pollination we’ve gotten through YOTA … we’ve learned about so many events and artists we wouldn’t have known about otherwise,” agrees Julie Kinn of Kinnfolk, a local Celtic-music duo who also won an Art Matters grant.
And that kind of cross-pollination is critical, because art can be lonely work.
Eva Lynch-Comer, a newcomer to the valley and Roanoke’s 2023 Writer by Bus, agrees. Prior to receiving her grant – a project funded by Ride Solutions, Valley Metro and the City of Roanoke Arts Commission – the New York native and Hollins student labored over her work alone, often writing about trauma or her personal thoughts.
“Usually I write poetry and send it to lit mags, and that’s it,” she says. “I write it in a vacuum and send it out into the void… I don’t have much engagement.”
But this project – which gave Lynch-Comer a stipend to ride the bus and compile her notes into a poetry chapbook to release this fall – forced her to chat with other riders, scribble her ideas on the fly and engage with her community face to face.
“It’s real. It’s tangible … It’s out [for] the world to see, which comes with its fears, but also with its moments of connection,” she explains. “This is pushing me to take more risks, to write about brighter things and different things … I’m finding new entry points into writing.”
Nurturing Emerging Artists
On a balmy Friday night in midsummer, gallery-goers crowd into Art on 1st – one of Roanoke’s newest art spaces, tucked into the shady corner of First and Kirk.
In many ways, this looks like any ordinary art opening. Artists hover near their works, shifting foot-to-foot. There’s a little of that first-night frisson crackling through the air, with passersby pressing faces to the plate-glass windows. But in an important way, this opening is different, because many of the artists are relatively new to the art scene, with some showing work for the very first time. And that, says gallery co-owner Rick Sheridan, is perfectly fine by him.
“It’s very satisfying when you find an artist who’s finding their voice and finding a way to express themselves,” says Sheridan. “You help them along that journey.”
Ashley Wilson Fellers
Anette Martin Lloyd, an art educator at William Fleming High School, peers into the windows at Art on 1st, a downtown gallery where her sculptures were displayed.
Sheridan founded the gallery last December with his partner, painter Annie Schultz. Together, the pair introduced a business model that’s relatively unique in the Valley. In contrast to galleries that show work by member artists, or by special invitation, Art on 1st frequently posts open calls for work that responds to a theme – “Transparency,” for instance – with anyone invited to submit. The model has made space for a diverse group of artists at a wide variety of experience levels.
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The story above is a preview from our September/October 2023 issue. For more stories like it, Subscribe Today. Thank you!