Many of us picked up a message in our formative years: You’re not creative.
Whether it was because we were chided for coloring outside the lines or given bad grades on artwork, words like those can be hard to unstick from our psyche. Glass artist Michelle Hair wants to change that narrative, and she hopes an art crawl through her neighborhood will help.
The second Neighborhood Arts and Crafts Crawl will showcase a dozen artists in eight locations in the Mid Shooks Run and Divine Redeemer neighborhoods. The free event is 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Saturday, and a full map of studios and creative spaces can be found online at facebook.com/artsandcraftscrawl. Passports with locations also are available at any of the eight stops.
“People confuse being creative with having talent,” said Hair, who teaches classes out of her studio. “We are all creative, if people are given a chance to not be judged and get a little bit more guidance.”
Saturday’s crawl will feature a number of mediums, including ceramics and sculptures by Sandy Friedman, watercolors by Gayle Berardi, Morse Code jewelry by Victoria Amato Kennedy, journals made from vintage books by Kyndra Wilson, up-cycled circuit boards by Drew Johnson and street poetry by Tiffany Gunter, who will create on-the-spot, personalized poems for attendees.
“It’s about creating community and seeing who your neighbors are,” Hair said. “It’s Arts Month, and this is a way to explore at least one new cultural event for the month.”
Hair started the crawl in 2019, after feeling the urge to hold an open studio. Inspired by the number of artists in her neighborhood, she put together the daylong chance for the public to peer into the work space of creatives. The crawl was canceled last year because of the pandemic.
Becoming a full-time artist was an unexpected career turn for Hair, who had previously worked as a dental hygienist. But in 2013, she saw an artist making glass beads with a torch during the Salida Art Walk. Intrigued, she came home and started taking classes with a few local artists. She now creates fused glass by cutting sheets of cold glass into patterns and designs and firing them in a kiln, and beads through a lampwork process of melting glass with a torch.
“Art wasn’t my thing,” said Hair, founder of New Earth Beads. “I enjoyed art stuff, but I had never had the talent for it. For some reason I had a knack for glass art, maybe because being a hygienist I learned to be more ambidextrous.”
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