This East Pierce County city is highlighting artists of color. Here’s where to see their work
Words are explicit — at least for LeShawn Gamble. Through words, people draw a transitive line that allows others to follow a story. Visual art, on the other hand, carries a different weight. Art allows people to have different interpretations, he said.
“Visual storytelling is my passion,” Gamble said.
Gamble is an Aboriginal American artist. He is a graduate student at Saint Martin’s University and is participating in the school’s Master of Arts in Counseling Program. He graduated from the University of Washington Tacoma in 2019.
Some of Gamble’s artwork is part of a collection that is on display at the Bonney Lake Justice & Municipal Center until the end of December. The city’s Arts Commission rebooted its rotating art gallery, which was on hiatus last year due to the pandemic.
The gallery rotates on a quarterly basis and came into existence in 2019, Glory Cancro, chair of the Arts Commission, said. The art gallery is featuring five artists of color, including Gamble.
“I was just going through my own personal examination as a white woman and (thought) about how I could use my influence in the city to reflect the values of the city, which is inclusion,” Cancro said.
Gamble’s pieces are portraits of Misty Copeland, who is an American ballet dancer. Copeland is known for being the first African American woman to become a principal dancer with the American Ballet Theatre in 2015.
“(I paint) the underrepresented melanated women,” Gamble said. “I paint people who don’t get the representation that some of these Caucasian figures get.”
Also in 2015, Gamble started a youth program called Project L.O.V.E., which stands for leadership, observation, vocalization and exploration. The program is focused on inspiring young children to transcend trauma through art, he said.
Through the program, he held art workshops for children at places such as the Boys and Girls Club Lakewood Branch and Washington Middle School in Seattle, Gamble said.
Some of the children Gamble worked with have experienced situations where they were called racial expletives or were told they would “never amount to anything,” he said. Some have no parental figures and have to figure out where to get food or where to stay, he said.
“The program came about from challenging narratives, understanding why those narratives were so pervasive, and then providing children with opportunities to heal from their trauma,” Gamble said.
In addition to Gamble, the other four artists featured in the art gallery are Trenise Williams, Charles Conner, Charde Brown and Jonarra Swanson. All five are local and are members of a collective that garners like-minded artists.
“They’re vastly different from each other, but they all kind of generally show together and work together,” Cancro said.
Visitors can find the art gallery on the second and third floors of the Bonney Lake Justice & Municipal Center, which is open 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. There is no admission fee.
This story was originally published November 13, 2021 at 5:00 AM.
