The sign in the shop window says ‘The South Will Never Rise Again’ and when I see it, I cannot help but smile. The word ‘never’ is underlined and I can imagine just how passionately artist Kerry Stavely must have felt when she took her Sharpie to the poster board.
Maybe it's important to note the context of Kerry’s poster. It was only a week after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and protests were erupting across the nation. In our town of Winchester, Virginia, there had been a peaceful rally. More would follow. The turnout was good, the faces and skin tones varied. We were not only appalled by the most recent murder of a black man by a white police officer, we were ready to break the cycle that has existed year upon year: fleeting outrage, shaking heads, maybe tears, and then a sense of resignation. This is just the way things are in a fucked up world.
Like me, Kerry is a native Virginian. We both also grew up in fairly conservative families. I think when a Southerner writes that the south will never rise again, we feel it from our toes up, because we are not only standing up for the oppressed, but on some level we are shouting back at family that could never see things the way we do. We are rejecting the very heritage that has left us no cover - our ancestors were the bad guys in this story. If we do not do more, we are their complicit heirs.
Kerry grew up in Loudoun County, a stretch of hilly then farmlands between Northern Virginia and the eastern edges of the Shenandoah Valley. Populated densely enough that her parents could make a living when they moved there, it was still rural enough at the time to perhaps look just a little like home to a family that hailed from rugged southwestern Virginia. When Kerry left to attend the Memphis College of Art in 1996, the wilds of Loudoun County were few and far between. In their place were the rows of houses that Melvina Reynolds wrote about in her song Little Boxes more than thirty years before. These were big boxes, most often, but just as ticky tacky.
In Memphis, Kerry met her husband, Neil, a fellow artist. They broke it off briefly, but something drew them back together. Before their first summer out of college was over, they were married and, a year later, their daughter Azzy arrived. They’ve been cohorts in marriage, art, and child-rearing for almost twenty-five years. There are differences in the way they approach their art, but they share a lot of the same interests and points of view, and a body of work has emerged that at times appears a seamless fusion of each of them.
Kerry says her husband is the more compulsive of the two, getting up sometimes between one and five in the morning to work on his pieces before his day job begins as a tattoo artist. With a soft laugh, she makes a confession.
“I don’t really think I’m a very ambitious artist, in a way. It’s hard for me to make myself create art all the time.”
She hastens to qualify the comment; compared to Neil, who works every day at it, she can go through periods of greater or lesser productivity. I understood her completely. My writing is touch and go, despite knowing it is supposed to be a daily discipline.
In many ways, Kerry seems to embody a natural adaptivity that has allowed her art career to coexist with other work and with raising her daughter. She explained to me that she and Neil took up small woodblock projects when Azzy was a toddler because it was easier to put a few tools and pieces of wood away than it was a freshly painted canvas. Even now, Kerry is just as apt to draw and carve her ideas in the kitchen or living room as she is in her downtown studio space. She laughs as she describes sweeping wood and vinyl shavings off the sofa at the end of a day of art making. She is not precious about her identity as an artist, something that expresses itself in a calm and unpretentious manner.
"I usually will have a number of pieces started so I may paint a little bit on one thing and then go to something else, toggling back and forth between any number of pieces. I like to have a large chunk of time by myself to work which is kind of rare."
The medium that grew out of expediency for two young parents has shaped her style and her voice as an artist. Working in woodblock and vinyl cut alike, the print works she and Neil create are folkish and primitive, typically highlighting artists, activists, thinkers, and leaders. I asked how to describe their style. Was it fair to call it rockabilly? She said they call it Expressionistic-Folk-Pop, but added that rockabilly seemed a fair enough stab at it.
When we sat down for our Zoom interview in April, Kerry was working on finalizing drawings for a Toni Morrison portrait. Immersing herself in Morrison’s writings was part of her process. She described revisiting The Bluest Eye author for the first time since high school and learning from a documentary how Morrison, like Neil, was a highly disciplined early morning worker.
"Apparently, like Neil, she would get up before dawn to work. When she started doing this, she was a single mom raising two kids. She would get up, work for several hours, then get them ready for school, then go to her job. I admire that discipline."
Just a few weeks after we first talked, further in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she and Neil’s art studio, Horse and Hare, introduced a print that depicted a nurse drawn with the romantic reverence of a religious icon. A red rose blooms at her chest and a red cross frames a veil that spills from her vintage style cap. She is healer, mother, saint. With Kerry's daughter pursuing nursing and her mother a member of the same profession, the love and respect in the drawing seems to have many layers.
It may have been inevitable that Kerry’s art would celebrate counterculture figures. In high school, her bedroom walls were plastered with clippings from Rolling Stone, Spin, Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar. Photographers like Meisel and von Unwerth revealed the thin line between fashion and sexuality. The images of Diane Arbus and Mary Ellen Mark peered back at her as she fell asleep. Here were people you would not meet in Loudoun County’s rows of ticky tacky; female impersonators, a Jewish giant, a pair of twins from a hazy nightmare.
"We're definitely drawn to innovators, reformers, progressive-minded 'weirdos', many of which we share beliefs or values with or in the least respect and want to pay homage to."
Back in high school, her influences informed her style and a look emerged that, in retrospect, was fairly emblematic of artistic, questioning Gen X teens: ripped stockings, cutoff jeans, and Doc Martens. Her mother, though a conservative Christian, was understanding of Kerry’s artistic leanings and unique style - to a point. Kerry hid a partially shaved head with the way she styled her hair.
Her mom had been interested in art and interior design when she was younger, but went into nursing as a more practical career choice. Even Kerry changed majors in school from fashion photography to graphic design, the art school switch often seen as the surest pathway to employment. That move did ultimately lead Kerry into work in the print media world and it would take some years before she found herself deciding to refocus her attention on creating and promoting art. The choice to open her art space, Tin Top Art & Handmade, was not arrived at without some anxiety, but ultimately she found the courage to take a risk and make the commitment.
"Once I did this and made a leap of faith it made me aware of other things I was putting off because of fear, and I realized that I needed to face those things head on."
There is something optimistic about the art Kerry and Neil create. It never renders images of the ideas we loathe or the people who would divide us. Even if some of their subjects were divisive in their day, they are now long known to have been on the right side of history. I am thinking of Charles Darwin and Abe Lincoln. There is a subversive power in this body of work, holding up those who walked among us and made the world fairer, kinder, or more informed. In an era in which our feelings are often manipulated by various platforms of media, taking us on rides awash with fury or terror, the power of simply offering up everyday heroes is not to be overlooked. After all, what are the protestors who are showing up to ask for police reforms if not the very people history will see as the heroes of this moment. No question mark here. The art of the future will hold all the answers.
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