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The 2015 Women in The arTs honorees

robin arthur | Frankie slaughter | heide Trepanier

Katie Ukrop | Jan Guarino | Valley haggard

marcia Thalhimer | Jacquie o’Connor

Tawnya Pettiford-Wates

2015

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There’s one word that perfectly describes Style Weekly’s 2015 Women in the Arts honorees. Not “creative,” although that goes without saying. The word is generous. Every one of these women gives prodigiously of her time, talent and

love to Richmond’s larger arts community. They teach. Theater professionals Robin Arthur and Jan Guarino

direct student productions with relish. Jacquie O’Connor, manag-ing director of Henley Street Theatre and Richmond Shakespeare, sends actors into Richmond schools to create lifelong lovers of Shakespeare. Richmond Young Writers founder Valley Haggard encourages children and adults to nurture their inner writers.

They collaborate. Artist Frankie Slaughter created a line of jew-elry and handmade jackets for the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts’

“Forbidden” exhibit. Professor and playwright Tawnya Pettiford-Wates is planning an ongoing relationship between her theater group, the Conciliation Project, and the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Virginia.

And they envision bold new spaces for art in Richmond. Quirk Gallery owner Katie Ukrop is creating the art-focused Quirk Hotel on Broad Street. Artist Heide Trepanier turned a dilapidated building in Manchester into a community space called Love-bomb. And philanthropist Marcia Thalhimer has been a force in raising funds for the soon-to-rise Institute for Contemporary Art.

These nine women are helping Richmond rise as a true city of the arts.

On stage, does Shrek the ogre need to be green? (Yes.) How do you make Lord Farquaad, his nemesis, appear tiny? And

how can you convince an audience that the characters on stage are traveling hundreds of miles?

“I’m a freak. I love those challenges,” says Robin Arthur, director and cho-reographer for Virginia Repertory Theatre’s 2014 production of the beloved musical. And she pulls them off. Arthur has a gift for bringing big, splashy Broadway shows to Richmond “without losing the magic,” says friend and fan Jacquie O’Connor, managing director of Henley Street Theatre and Rich-mond Shakespeare. “I think she really does bring the magic to it.”

Arthur has a simple strategy. “I be-come 5 years old,” she says: “It’s make-believe time.” She reads the script and listens to the music again and again, but tries to avoid watching other directors’ versions. And she gleefully collaborates with a design team to figure out the best way to tell the story.

Arthur credits her long career in theater to “pure dumb luck” and the generosity of Richmond’s theater com-munity. After college, she auditioned

for Chamberlayne Actors Theatre in what she calls one of the most terrifying moments of her life. Arthur got a role in “Story Theater” and went on to per-form in several shows for it and Barks-dale Theatre. She later began directing shows for Theatre IV. At every step, she says, theater professionals coached and supported her.

She continues to act, dance and sing, most re-cently in “The Honky Tonk Angels Holiday Spectacular” for Swift Creek Mill Theatre. This

summer she’ll be directing “Hairspray” for the School of the Performing Arts in the Richmond Community, known as SPARC.

Arthur has a day job too, teaching math and dance at Orchard House School. “It’s the best of both worlds for me,” she says, because every day she ex-periences the “fearlessness and creativ-ity” of middle school girls.

Mathematics and theater overlap in surprising ways, Arthur says. She finds herself analyzing the patterns dancers make, adjusting blueprints from scene designs and measuring to make sure a voluminous costume will fit through the stage door. “This is all math!” she exclaims.

robin arthurDirector, actress

and choreographer

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I like making people laugh. That’s my favorite thing in the world,” says actress Jan Guari-no. “It’s amazing to have some-

thing that comes out of your mouth move people, especially in a happy way. Of course, it’s OK to make them cry too.” Guarino has done both countless times in her 43 years as an actress and singer.

When Guarino saw her first stage musical — “1776” at Swift Creek Mill Playhouse — she was “so star-struck, I couldn’t even stand it.” After graduating from Huguenot High School, she au-ditioned for “Christmas Promises” at the playhouse. She got the part, and her career began.

Like most young actresses, Guari-no tried to break into theater in New York. But “I wanted to work at my craft,” she says. “I didn’t want to be a waitress.” She returned to her home-town, married playwright Bo Wilson and became one of the best-known faces on the Richmond stage. A few of her favorite shows include “Pump Boys and Dinettes,” which ran for six summers straight; “Beehive,” a mu-

sical inspired by 1960s girl groups; “Sweeney Todd” and “The Clean House.” She also branched out into voiceover work and commercials. Many Richmonders know her as the face of Haynes Furniture.

This spring, Guarino is direct-ing a tour with Virginia Repertory Theatre and is also directing a stu-dent musical for St. Michael’s Episcopal School. Charged with

getting more boys involved with a musical, she found the perfect show: “10 Ways to Survive the Zombie Apocalypse.” It’s a long one-act mu-sical with “lots of zombies,” she says.

Richmond’s theater scene has grown “in leaps and bounds” since Guarino started acting, she says, with tremendous talent and new the-ater companies that aren’t afraid to push boundaries. Now it’s time for audiences to catch up. “I wish every-body would go to at least one play a year,” Guarino says. It’s not expen-sive. You don’t have to dress up. “You can just come in your jeans and your moccasins,” she says. Consider your-self invited.

Just like an egg, “our first draft is fragile. We need to protect it,” Valley Haggard says. That’s why she set to work building a nest for

Richmond’s writers.Haggard had been teaching writ-

ing to children through local arts or-ganizations for years when Richmond author Virginia Pye asked her — and kept asking her — if there were any creative writ-ing camps for chil-dren in the area. Hag-gard took the hint. In the spring of 2009, she taught four one-week classes for young writers in a spare room at Chop Suey Books in Carytown. These proved so popular that Haggard launched a business: Richmond Young Writers.

She respects her students as writers, not just kids, she says. And her support-ive approach works. “This was so much fun, it didn’t even feel like writing,” a few young students have told her.

Haggard soon gained a co-director: creative writing teacher Bird Cox, who added after-school classes to the sum-mer sessions. A Kickstarter campaign allowed them to open a bright new space above Chop Suey in June, called the Writing Room. Fundraisers help

Cox and Haggard offer need-based scholarships.

Haggard also teaches creative non-fiction to adults. The intention of these classes is not to critique work or to teach the mechanics of writing, but to help people discover and explore their raw material, she explains. From that

material may come a poem, a memoir or a screenplay.

Every class be-gins with 30 minutes of writing from this prompt: “Right now I

am. …” This phrase, Haggard says, “is like a gossamer thread that connects everything.”

The result, she says, is deep and profoundly beautiful writing that changes lives. To share her students’ writing, and her own, she was inspired to create a site called Life in 10 Min-utes — lifein10minutes.com — which launched in January. She’s working on a book with the same name, a mem-oir culled from her journals.

Why 10? Everyone has 10 minutes, Haggard writes. And it is “enough time to write something strange and beautiful and true without editing the strangeness and beauty and truth out of it.”

Jan GuarinoActress and director

valley haggardWriter, teacher and founder

of Richmond Young Writers

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Shakespeare was meant to be seen,” Jacquie O’Connor says. “And then read.” Thousands of young Rich-

monders are getting that experience for the first time this spring as Rich-mond Shakespeare performs “Ro-meo and Juliet” in every one of the city’s public middle and high schools. The actors also conduct workshops in which the kids practice speaking Shakespeare.

The performances, funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, are dreams come true for O’Connor, who taught acting to chil-dren through SPARC for 12 years. The famous love story is something kids can easily relate to, she says, “and then we have lifelong lovers of Shakespeare and the arts.”

O’Connor has been a fixture in the Richmond theater scene for de-cades. She worked at Theatre IV as an actress, business administrator, director, stage manager and acting teacher for more than 25 years, then served as the business manager for Barksdale Theatre. O’Connor con-tinues to act as well. She was named

2014’s best supporting actress in a play for her role in Cadence The-atre’s “Good People.”

Yet her dream was always to start a theater company. That’s what O’Connor did in 2007, when she co-founded Henley Street Theatre with Alex Previtera. Their intention, she

says, was to produce “rich, thought-provoking, lan-guage-based theater. The-ater worth talking about.”

Previtera left in 2009, and O’Connor built the company to the point where she was able to become its full-time man-aging director in 2012. In 2013, it merged with Richmond Shakespeare.

At the Bootleg Ball in May, the com-pany will announce its new name and mission.

In February, Henley Street per-formed “The Lion in Winter” at the Leslie Cheek Theater at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts. It was the first company to do so since TheatreVir-ginia closed its doors. Now the com-pany lacks only one thing: a perma-nent theater space to call home. “It seems like the stars are really align-ing for us,” O’Connor says. Theater is not merely enter-

tainment, Tawnya Pettiford-Wates believes. Theater, in the form of ritual poetic

drama, has the power to reveal un-comfortable social truths and summon the past into the present.

One example is Petti-ford-Wates’ play “uncle tom: deconstructed,” a new take on Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Stowe sought to condemn the institution of slavery, Pettiford-Wates explains, but instead helped estab-lish the harmful tropes of good and bad slaves, and good and bad masters. The stereotypes proved so popular that in the 1800s, traveling troupes performed Uncle Tom-inspired shows; one of the first such troupes was in Richmond.

Turning this tradition on its head, Pettiford-Wates and the theater group she founded, the Concilia-tion Project, created a minstrel show in which the performers’ race and gender were obscured by makeup. “The audience is always stunned to see who’s under the mask, and how easily they bought into those stereo-types,” Pettiford-Wates says.

At the first performance, in Se-attle in 2001, the unmasked actors

spontaneously began speaking as themselves, unscripted. And “the au-dience started talking back to them,” Pettiford-Wates says.

In 2004, Pettiford-Wates accepted a position teaching the-ater at Virginia Common-wealth University. To her surprise, the Conciliation Project actors followed her. In Richmond, she says, “the work has trans-formed.” She has found inspiration in partner-ships with organizations such as Housing Opportu-nities Made Equal and the Healing Place, a drug re-hab program for homeless men. In a two-year proj-ect with the Daily Planet,

Pettiford-Wates helped homeless clients create a theater company of their own.

Pettiford-Wates and he Concilia-tion Project are now seeking to create a relationship with the Black History Museum and Cultural Center of Vir-ginia, set to open later this year. They hope to place actors within the muse-um to do living history, she says, and also launch monthly performances about historic Richmonders to create a community dialogue.

It’s a fallacy to say, “history hap-pened then,” she says. “It’s happen-ing now. And because we’re living now, in it, what can we do about it?”

jacquie o’connor

Managing Director, Henley Street Theatre and

Richmond Shakespeare

“

Tawnya Pettiford-

WatesProfessor,

founder and artistic

director of the

Conciliation Project

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In 1997, Frankie Slaughter’s hus-band got a job in Hong Kong with an international shipping company. Slaughter moved with him and their

then-young children, and the family stayed there for almost nine years.

During her travels, Slaughter found herself collecting beautifully em-broidered pieces of cloth from places such as Rajasthan in India, Hanoi in Vietnam, and Chi-ang Mai in Thailand. She began thinking of ways to bring them to life, and so she designed jackets with modern silhouettes that in-corporated these treasured fabrics. A team of Hong Kong tailors turned her designs into wearable art.

Upon returning to Richmond, Slaughter created a small collec-tion of jackets to sell. Clients wanted more, and more, until Slaughter stood poised between two doors: remaining an artist, or entering the fashion in-dustry. “This is my creative journey,” she realized. She chose art over fash-ion, incorporating the jackets into her body of work.

Slaughter returned to making art: assemblage, collage, abstract ceramic

installations and paintings. In 2013, she exhibited “Unravel” at Glave Kocen Gallery. Co-director B.J. Ko-cen calls it one of the most ambitious shows the gallery has ever mounted, with video, works on paper — including paper jackets — and sculpture. A single installation included some 1,800 piec-es that climbed to the ceiling. “She is

just a spring of inspiration and creativity,” Kocen says, “and you can’t help but get caught up in that.”

A friend pointed out to Slaughter that “the paint-ings were my jackets, un-

raveled.” It was true. Slaughter’s approach to art mirrors that of de-signing apparel: “I think it’s all about marrying materials and creating rich layers and colors,” she says. She has begun using gouache, watercolor and Japanese inks in her work, as well as experimenting with digital printing on rice papers she found in China. She continues to design jackets and jewelry, most recently for the Virgin-ia Museum of Fine Arts in conjunc-tion with the “Forbidden” exhibit. Now, she says, “it feels a little more fun.”

On a recent Friday, Marcia Thalhimer and her husband Harry caught the end of the “Forbidden” exhibit at the

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and saw an opening at the Reynolds Gal-lery. The next day, they went to the symphony.

This is what brings Thalhimer joy: seeing, hearing and supporting the arts, all over town. “I cannot imagine not having art as part of my life,” she says.

Raised a small-town girl in Illinois, Thalhimer al-ways loved music but had few opportunities to experi-ence it beyond the choir and her high school band. When she married Harry Thalhimer, scion of the department-store Thalhimers, and moved to Richmond in 1979, she delighted in all the cultural offerings the city had to offer. “I had never been to a live symphony performance before I came to Richmond,” Thalhimer says.

She became involved with both the symphony and the Hand Workshop, now the Visual Arts Center of Rich-mond. She continues to support both organizations to this day, serving on the boards of the Richmond Symphony and its foundation as well as the Visual

Arts Center’s advisory council.Thalhimer has seen Richmond’s art

community flourish in the years since she arrived. One of the biggest changes, she says, is that city leaders — both in gov-ernment and business — have embraced the arts. “That’s what makes great cit-ies,” she says. Richmond residents, in turn, are more interested in cultural offerings, and arts organizations have begun collaborating in earnest.

She’s particularly thrilled about the 2016 opening of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Institute for Contemporary Art. She be-lieves the institute will pro-pel both Richmond and the university to increased rec-

ognition in the international art world. And she’s helping to make it happen: Thalhimer serves on the institute’s cam-paign committee, which, as of this writ-ing, was just $2 million away from its goal of $35 million.

The only sad note, she says, is that gallery owner and force majeure Bev Reynolds, who passed away late last year, wouldn’t get to see the opening of the center she championed. For years, Thalhimer says, Reynolds “kept that egg of an idea alive” — and now it’s about to hatch.

Frankie SlaughterArtist

frankie slaughter

Artist

Marcia thalhimerPhilanthropist and

arts supporter

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Frankie SlaughterArtist

With dizzying speed, Heide Trepanier achieved the kind of success most art-ists never see. A large

grant. Representation by a New York gallery. A piece hanging in the Vir-ginia Museum of Fine Arts.

Naturally, Trepanier turned around and took her work in an en-tirely different direction.

She became well known for large-scale paintings created by intentionally splattering paint on a can-vas and outlining the re-sults in black ink. John Ravenal, who was until re-cently the museum’s mod-ern art curator, described how her outlines animate the paint spatters “and they start to take on these personas or identities, and they start to look like substances that you can kind of recognize.” Beverly Reynolds, the owner of the Reynolds Gallery who passed away in 2014, praised Trepanier’s “ex-traordinarily fresh and unique ap-proach to her studio practice.”

Trepanier is now using a new method, floating colored inks in pools of milk and carrageenan. The

effect is similar to her paintings, except instead of using ink outlines to characterize the ribbons of color, she uses photography to capture the work before it dissipates.

It’s a tedious, tricky process, she says. In six days in the studio, she says, she may get one good piece. “If you mess it up two hours into it,

you have to just pitch it. There’s no going back.”

Trepanier focuses her prodigious creative en-ergy outward as well. She has spent years as an ad-junct professor at Virginia Commonwealth Universi-ty and now the University of Richmond, although

she’s planning to take a break to fo-cus on her art.

In 2013 she and collaborators Lily Lamberta and Julie Elkins opened Lovebomb, a bohemian studio space and artists’ community on 21st Street in Manchester. Richmond officials have been “giving us a lot of grief” about code enforcement, Trepanier says, but she’s not giving up. “It might be chaotic for a little bit, and it might hurt for a little bit,” but she’s optimis-tic Lovebomb will continue to evolve.

For years, whenever Katie and Ted Ukrop dined at Comfort they would look longingly at the empty Italian Renais-

sance department store across Broad Street — which, fortu-itously, was owned by Ted’s family. In 2006, they began imagining it as an art-focused boutique hotel.

“I don’t know that Rich-mond was really ready then,” Katie Ukrop says. “I think we’re really ready now.” The Quirk Hotel is under construction and set to open in August.

It’s going to be much more than a place to sleep. The project will anchor a crucial corner and bring new life to downtown Broad. Uk-rop envisions a hotel filled with art that will also have an artist-in-res-idence. “Richmond needs a hotel that speaks to Richmond artists and what Richmond is,” she says.

She knows whereof she speaks. Ukrop is a fine art collector, buy-ing the works of Richmond artists such as Andras Bality and Cindy Neuschwander, and a gallery own-er. Ten years ago this September,

Ukrop and longtime Richmond art booster Kathy Emerson opened Quirk Gallery at 311 W. Broad Street. It was something different: a bright and lighthearted boutique

and art gallery. Emerson’s in-tention was to make art acces-sible to people, Ukrop says, to make them comfortable and not self-conscious.

There were already some established galleries in the area back then, and the First Fridays Art Walks had begun

to draw people downtown. Yet “it was very quiet on Broad Street for a while,” Ukrop says. “It was a little lonely at times.”

Now, she sees “a little hustle and bustle” on Broad, and she’s plan-ning to move the Quirk Gallery next door to the hotel. Ukrop is also the vice president of the Downtown Business Association, which is get-ting new members and new life. The association had its first meeting in a while late last year. “That was exciting, to have enough people to fill a room,” Ukrop says.

Maybe next year, they’ll need two.

Heide TrepanierArtist, professor

and founder of Lovebomb

katie UkropDirector,

Quirk Gallery

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