Kingsport master artists pass on their skills through state program
This story courtesy the Kingsport Times-News by Calvin Sneed/Newspaper Community Contributor, through the Sons and Daughters of Douglass website
Dr. Bradley Hanson is describing a relatively new state program that promotes the passing on of traditional crafts and abilities from older generations to young people. He’s the director of Folk Life at the Tennessee Arts Commission.
“The Traditional Arts Apprenticeship program allows arts, crafts and skills passed down for hundreds of years to be taught to interested young people in an effort to keep those traditions alive,” he says. “In the five-year history of the program so far, we’ve had 53 teams of master artists and their apprentices.”
For the first time, two teams of a master artist and apprentice are coming from Upper East Tennessee, passing down the skills they have learned over the years to others eager to keep a legacy tradition alive.
Kingsport’s LaVonda Harris-Price was taught hairstyling born from an older generation. Years ago, Jerry Machen, also from the Model City, invented a new form of artwork, the results of which are now considered heirlooms. Today, they and their apprentices are keeping their inspirational traditions alive.
OLD-SCHOOL STYLIST MAKES HAIR A WORK OF ART
Harris-Price has always had an interest in styling the hair of African-American women. It started when she was 5 years old.
“Our neighbor on Dunbar Street, Mrs. Tillie Trammell, ran a hair salon across the street. She was very good at hairdressing, always had lots of customers. On a personal level, ‘Miss Tillie’ as she was known in the Riverview neighborhood, said she’d keep me weekday afternoons until my mother got home from work. I could have been upstairs playing dolls with her daughter, but I would sit on the steps leading into Miss Tillie’s hair salon with my chin in my hands, watching how she’d style the waves and curls on the ladies that would come through. I was totally fascinated with it.”
Miss Tillie had been noticing the little girl watching her handiwork and knew she was picking it up.
“All of a sudden one day, she asked me if I wanted to try it,” Harris-Price says, “so she started showing me how to braid hair, how to plait it, and how to press and style it. And of course I just soaked it up. I would practice on my little doll heads and just loved it.”
Harris-Price says when she was older, Miss Tillie told her that she herself had been taught the art of braiding and styling African-American hair many years ago.
“That rang a bell with me that if I learned the method, one day I could pass it on, too,” she says.
After graduating from cosmetology school in Columbus, Ohio, in 1983, Harris-Price began doing hair professionally.
Lavonda Harris-Price styles the hair of Shelia Pinkston at her All About You Salon on Lynn Garden drive recently
Years passed by at one successful salon in Kingsport, and today she’s located at the All About You Salon on Lynn Garden Drive, still designing hairstyles for African-American women.
She calls herself an old-school stylist, proud of the heritage of styling African-American hair into works of art.
Harris-Price is on a mission to pass her ability on to the next generation.
Her apprentice is 15 year-old Zaniah Greene, a student at Dobyns-Bennett and a member of Kingsport’s New Vision Youth.
“Zaniah has told me different things that she’s doing with braiding that I’ve taught her, and she’s loving it,” Harris-Price says. “It’s a joy to take what I’ve learned from Miss Tillie and share that with someone younger who’s just as excited as I was at that age.”
“It’s important that we share traditions, histories and legacies,” she says.
“In the end, who else but us?”
KINGSPORT MAN MAKES ARTWORK FROM CARPET SCRAPS
Machen began his career installing carpet in 1962 at a Johnson City furniture store.
“That one vision inspired me to make custom-made rug designs using scraps that probably would have been taken to the landfill,” he says. “Meanwhile, a person could just pick something out in their minds or what they’ve seen in a favorite picture, and I can design it and sew it together from these scraps. It’s carpet, so of course it can be cleaned like carpet.”
Eventually, Machen’s custom-made rugs moved from the floors to the walls. One of them was displayed as a calming influence in a familiar Kingsport establishment noted for trying to calm people’s nerves.
That description was perfect for what the Arts Apprenticeship administrators
were looking for.
“Jerry even speaks of himself as an artist,” notes Hansen.
“Pal Barger called me up one day,” Machen remembers. “He’d heard about what I could do with carpet scraps, so he invited me to meet with him in his office. He said, ‘I’d like you to build me a rug with a Big Pal in the seat of a chair. On the back of the chair, I want a bag of Frenchie Fries. I know if anybody could do that, you can.’ ”
“He said it was the most incredible thing he’d ever seen.”
When contacted by the folklife administrators at the Tennessee Arts Commission, Machen was surprised at first, as he admits most artists are.
“I took some convincing when they contacted me,” he admits. “Mine was not a talent that had been passed down to me, so I didn’t see how I would fit the legacy category.”
“Jerry’s talent does indeed fit a different pattern in the Arts Apprenticeship program,” says Hansen. “He didn’t learn to do his craft from an ancestor or anybody who’d done it prior to him. But the apprenticeship program also fits people who are self-taught in a particular area. In Jerry’s case, he takes old scraps of carpet bound for the trash heap and makes beautiful pieces of artwork with them. It’s easy to see how that would fit in the art world. ... That’s how it would fit into folk life, too. That type of talent can indeed be passed down to future generations.”
“He likes to ask people what they’d like to see in a rug display, and I’ve been teaching him how to pick the right kinds of carpet for the tapestry and how to blend colors. Any color you can see in a picture, you’ll find in a carpet somewhere. The magic is when you size up what you need from the scraps, blend the colors into scenery or an object, trace the outlines and do the cutting. That’s the fun of it. Even if you make a mistake, you don’t throw away the mistake. What’s left might work in another design.”
Machen’s business, Agape Carpet and Rugs, is located on East Sullivan Street in Kingsport.
“WE HAVE TO KEEP THE CYCLE GOING”
The Tennessee Arts Commission’s Folk Life Apprenticeship program provides incentives for participants as encouragement to follow through with the six-month program. Master artists receive an award of $2,000 and apprentices themselves receive $500. They also receive supplies and mileage. Administrators are always on the lookout for noteworthy occupations and pastimes that came from our ancestors that people are doing and need to be passed on.
(It turns out that Bud Ellis’ handiwork is displayed at the Kingsport Carousel and at Coolidge Park in Chattanooga).
“We didn’t have one last year because of COVID-19,” says Hansen, “but we are hoping to bring all of these talented people to the state capitol this year to celebrate their crafts. Part of the program is getting the word out about what they do in a public display. It also helps us to discover new legacies that have been quietly passed down.
“In the short term, the master artists and the apprentices get money, but the program is more than just that,” he says. “Long term, we want to select people that we think will have staying power and hopefully the legacies will live on forever.
“We have to keep the cycle going,” he says. “It’s important to Tennessee, it’s important to the master artists who are passing down what they themselves learned, and it’s extremely valuable to the apprentices continuing the legacy.”
In Kingsport and Upper East Tennessee, the passing of the torch continues.
“The program is pretty incredible,” Machen says. “It’s a great honor to even be considered a master artist with a talent to pass on.”
Harris-Price agrees. She’s proud to get the word out about both her and Jerry’s crafts during Black History Month. “Ours are two African-American legacies that have to be taken up by the next generation,” she says.
“It’s what makes us unique as people.”
