Returning to your roots can lead to meaningful and creative discoveries within yourself and your surroundings. For Eliza Lamb, her roots in Hopewell, VA, revealed new opportunities to deepen connections and give back to the community through her foundation of the Lamb Center for Arts & Healing.

Read ahead for Eliza’s words:

CultureWorks: Who are you and what is your relationship to Lamb Arts?

Eliza Lamb: My name is Dr. Eliza Lamb and I am the Founder and Executive Director of Lamb Center for Arts and Healing in Hopewell, VA. My pronouns are She/Her.

CW: Tell me a little bit about Lamb Arts. What is it and how did it get started?

EL: Lamb Arts is a nonprofit arts and healing organization based in Hopewell, Virginia. It was founded in 2016. I grew up in the Tri-Cities. Hopewell was my downtown growing up, and I left to pursue a career in the arts. I went to art school down at SCAD in Savannah and then moved to New York City, where I established my professional career as a museum curator, consultant, and professor.

For about a decade my personal artwork was about Hopewell. I found myself coming home and photographing the downtown area and really doing a lot of reflecting and healing on my experience growing up there. As I was photographing, I would often run into people and be able to talk to the residents of the community. I got a real sense of a longing for a creative presence in the community and also a deep sense of community members feeling unseen.

My background is in clinical psychology, as well as nonprofit business management and art education, but I'm trained as a professional photographer and actress. I thought, here I am in New York City, and everybody's talking about how the arts can change all these things, but there's a community that I know really needs it. And, I think the arts can do nearly anything. I decided to really walk the walk, and put my money where my mouth was. So, five years ago, my husband, my teenage daughter, and I packed up and came back to the Tri-Cities to start Lamb Arts.

 

CW: Since you founded Lamb Arts, how do you feel its relationship with the community has grown? Have you seen the landscape of Hopewell's arts community change?

EL: It's been a long road. When I moved back in 2016, Downtown Hopewell was pretty much in the same state. There had been a big push for the arts in the renovation of The Beacon Theater. There certainly had been a number of beautification efforts downtown, and the whole Downtown Partnership was working really hard to try to invest in infrastructure. I think it just hadn't gotten to a tipping point yet.

If you look at the research, it is really clear that the arts are a cornerstone of community revitalization. I think that is definitely part of what we're trying to do, but it's not all of what we're trying to do. Downtown revitalization is really exciting, but it's a lot more exciting if it's inclusive of and considers the entire community, and that is what we're interested in. So, all of our programming has always been free. We serve 6000 people a year. It's been really exciting to see the changes in our community, our partners, the attendees, and the students that we work with.

A lot of the work that we did in the early years is what I call invisible work. That was building trust with the community, with our community partners, and really raising the bar and expectation for the level of professionalism in programming. To see our partner organizations starting to value the arts like do their own arts initiatives, or to see CultureWorks investing in the Tri-Cities, it's really exciting to see.

CW: Are there any exciting programming or projects that are going on right now with Lamb Arts that you'd like to share?

EL: We have so many things going on. One of the programs that’s been ongoing for a few years is our Creative Change Makers program. We work with Hopewell High School students who are nominated by a diverse group of community leaders. They go through an intensive training program with us, and then, move into a mentorship role on different initiatives that hold value to them throughout the community. They’re doing awesome things, even independent of us sometimes, which makes me really proud and excited because we cannot do it alone.

Something that we've pushed more during the last two years is public art initiatives, which I find really impactful. One of those is the Button Project. In partnership with Breez-In Convenience Stores, we bought retro gumball machines to place in their locations, and we work with local artists to create a button to feature them in it. It's really about letting people know that we have local artists doing amazing work here, and making the arts accessible. A lot of the images on the buttons are images of our community. So, people can become art collectors for fifty cents!

Coming up here in the next two weeks, we have a brand-new program we have launched called, The Hopewell Mother of the Year award. We are partnering with the James House, Hopewell-Prince George Healthy Families, and Women of Endurance, as well as the public to identify mothers who are doing extraordinary work in the community and for their families. We'll be celebrating them over Mother's Day weekend at an awesome event downtown. I am a mom, and I think they are the unsung heroes of our community, so I am really honored to be celebrating them.

CW: Why is collaboration important, and have you had any meaningful collaborations recently?

EL: I think collaboration is crucial to Lamb Arts. In fact, 100% of our programming is done in collaboration with other organizations and local artists. It is how we operate. I don't believe in competition among mission-based organizations. I think all of our missions are to uplift our community, and partnering to do that makes a lot of sense.

We have a really strong relationship with the Hopewell City Public Schools. That is very important to me because, in Hopewell, there's one high school for the city. If we can partner with the schools, we can access all of the kids in the city. I strongly believe in the power of education to change communities and lives. We work with the schools in a variety of ways such as, we provide free teacher training. We do an exhibition of Hopewell City public schools' student work through our workshops at our Arts Fest that we host downtown every year. We bring the VMFA, different arts organizations from Hopewell, the Tri-Cities, and the Richmond region to the downtown to really provide access. Everything's free.

CW: Has there been a moment or experience that has made you feel like all the hard work was worth it?

EL: I have a lot of those. I think when you're doing this kind of work, hopefully, you have a lot of those. I think that's how you know that you're making an impact and what motivates and propels you to keep going, creating new projects, and showing up in deep and meaningful ways.

Prior to COVID, and now launching back up again, we work with the local nursing homes, so we work across the lifespan. We don't just work with kids, we work with everybody in the community. A lot of the participants are older, and they've had really rich lives already. So, it's interesting to work with individuals at that stage of their life, because as a society, a lot of time we think that people are wrapping things up, and I just don't hold that belief. I think as long as we're here, we're here to be learning and growing.

To be able to work with the residents there to help them create something that they're really excited by, but more importantly, something that they've lived their whole life believing they couldn't do or wasn't for them; and then, to see this spark light up when they realize actually it is for them and they can do it- that's pretty valuable.


CW: As an artist yourself, where do you look for inspiration, and how do you stay inspired?

EL: I would argue every person, but definitely, a person who loves the arts and self-identifies as an artist, believes making work is just part of who we are. It's part of how we understand the world, it's part of how we process things. So, I think it's a reminder that work is crucial, it's not an option or a luxury, but it's actually a necessity.

Moving back to Virginia from New York has also been inspiring for me in the sense that I've really allowed myself to explore new mediums. I think just having physical space allows for that, but also the emotional and energetic space allows for that. I find myself working on projects and exploring mediums that I never would have imagined; whether that's writing poetry or illustrating watercolor. To see avenues open up, to present themselves that I didn't know or ever see before; for me, each one of those is like a little miracle. 

CW: What do arts and culture mean to you and why does it matter?

EL: It's kind of in all my answers right now. I think the arts are core to our human experience. I think they are the language of the soul. Often times people don't even realize all of us are consumers, appreciators, and makers of the arts. How that gets categorized in this silo of artists or non-artists is totally irrelevant, and constructed by egos and society. I don't think there's a person I know that hasn't been driving in their car, heard a song, and been moved to tears. Like, that is art. That is a reaction to art that is hitting our souls. Whether your creative practice is through food and making delicious meals; gardening and creating in the earth; or painting, sculpting, and making something that's more traditionally considered artist work; to me, it's all of the same. It is vital to the meaning of why we're here. It connects us to something bigger than ourselves, and it connects us to our communities. And life would be really terrible without it.

To learn more about Lamb Arts and programming: https://www.lambarts.org/
To donate to the Hopewell Mother of the Year Award: https://www.facebook.com/donate/3101374553513557/
To submit to the Call for Artists for The Button Project: https://www.lambarts.org/buttons