Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
‘The need to make the hard thing beautiful’
ERICA Vital-Lazare grew up in the projects in Hampton, Virginia, with her mother and two older sisters. Their front yard was little more than a 15-square-foot sandbox.
Every day, Vital-Lazare’s mother would have her go outside with a rake and beautify the little plot of land.
“For me, that encompasses the need to make the hard thing beautiful,” Vital-Lazare says.
The 52-year-old artist and writer came to Las Vegas in 1994 after earning her master of fine art degree from Virginia Commonwealth University. Today she teaches creative writing at the College of Southern Nevada.
Earlier this year, she collaborated with artist Lance L. Smith to write a poem and create visual art for an exhibition on grief through Nevada Humanities.
“For me, what that exhibit did was highlight the diversity of the arts community here in Las Vegas,” the artist says. “There was a shared humanity. I think that’s what art is meant to do.”
Vital-Lazare’s writing is rooted in Southern imagery, like the places where she grew up. She writes about memory and family and the question of history and how that history continues to shape us.
“As a black woman, I’m informed by a past that is rooted in enslavement and brutality,” she says. “To be black is to be aware that there is not only beauty in surviving, but also in surviving so beautifully.”
She says developing a sensibility for what blackness has done for the country is to offer all artists a springboard to be their authentic selves, no matter what skin they are in.
“The fact that, after hundreds of years of repression, of dehumanization, that we can stand as we stand, and paint as Lance paints and take haunting pictures like Brent Holmes, and do all of these things centuries later that our forebears did, it frees and empowers all artists.”