Age: 85
Hometown: Rochester
Residence: Pittsford
Occupation: Artist, educator, gallerist
Artist and educator Luvon Sheppard is an early bird.
Most mornings he’s at his studio in Joy Gallery at 498 West Main St., where he shows up by 6 a.m. to put pigment to paper while his wife Frances, a nurse and his partner of 57 years, receives dialysis treatment.
Luvon and Frances own the gallery together, and for more than 20 years they’ve shown work by area artists, from his students at Rochester Institute of Technology — where he has been an art professor since 1972 — to seasoned creatives, regional artists and those who haven’t yet broken out.
“In the beginning, when we were on Genesee Street, we had a group of people from all walks — there were Catholics, Protestants, white, Black, Puerto Rican,” said Luvon.
The gallery’s current location is still a place to find myriad artistic voices.
“He’s a force in the Rochester art community going back generations,” said Yaqub Shabazz, a Chicago transplant who is a painter and printmaker, MFA candidate at RIT and the founder-director of the 9th Floor Artist Collective on South Washington Street.
“And Joy Gallery is a watering hole,” Shabazz said. “Every Saturday morning he’s there, holding court, painting, making, instructing and guiding. He has a relationship with so many individual artists, I’ve scarcely met someone who hasn’t felt that impact.”
At the rear of the gallery is Sheppard’s studio, a lofted, sunlit space where he has a few projects going at once, pinned to the wall amid his massive, well-known massive watercolors.
Those are bright works of layered imagery of the sacred and the mundane, often depicting snapshots of Rochester street scenes from eras identifiable by the pedestrian fashions and signs of the businesses active when the painting was made. Juxtaposed above those vistas are spectral visions of the Four Horsemen, with crashing waves and snippets of Biblical scripture.
“I paint what is around me, what I’m seeing, and what’s going on inside,” he said.
Though Sheppard’s work contains religious symbolism and psalms, he doesn’t proselytize. He considers each person’s spiritual journey a private pursuit, and he’s much more interested in that pursuit than actually grasping the mystery behind it all.
“I’ll take students outside to look at a tree, and I aim for them to enjoy the expression and the activity of trying to paint the tree,” Sheppard said. “Then we sit and talk about the attempt.”
He speaks eagerly of giving himself over to the creative process. A grasp on technical skills is important, but shouldn’t be hampered by too much control. His practice involves relinquishing the outcome to intuitively doing the work, following the pull of current experiences and meditations and learning from reflections on it all, sometimes much later on.
Everything is elusive, and in perpetual flux, he said, and he’s intrigued by that.
“I let the changes influence me.”
Sheppard gets that from his mother, who moved him and his two younger brothers from Sanford, Florida, to Rochester when he was in the second grade, finding her way from the migrant camps in Sodus to working as a beautician and taking night classes to leading a nursery unit at Genesee Hospital. Eventually, she founded her own church, Joy Ministries — from which Sheppard’s gallery takes its name.
His own deep roots as a community mentor began while attending RIT, when he worked as the playground director at Brown Square, serving neighborhood kids from Black, Italian, and Latino families. In the ’70s, Sheppard was hired at Memorial Art Gallery as coordinator of neighborhood services, where he built programs geared toward minorities and brought art from the white walls to barber shops and beauty salons.
“It was not so much about teaching art, as introducing art to an indigenous community,” he said.
Sheppard founded various exposure-oriented arts groups, including Aesthetics in Black, which had collaborations with Garth Fagan Dance for presentations at the former War Memorial and the now-razed Midtown Plaza. He was also forerunner of expanding arts presence in what became the Neighborhood of the Arts, where he founded All of Us, an arts workshop series with instructors from area universities and the Visual Studies Workshop, housed in Writers & Books’ current location on University Avenue.
Then, Sheppard was primarily a printmaker. (He got into watercolor because no one else wanted to teach it.) With Joy Gallery, he’s influenced a new, expanding arts quadrant. The space’s foothold on West Main paved the way for other neighborhood art spots like 540WMain, Sew Green and the 9th Floor Artist Collective. In a bit of a full-circle magic, Visual Studies Workshop has recently joined the lineup with its new location on King Street.
Sheppard is currently finishing a set of waterscape paintings for a September show at the Village Gallery at Stony Point Arts Studio in Fairport, which will celebrate both the bicentennial of the Erie Canal as well as his position as a creative leader in the region. The in-progress works showcase the terrain and infrastructure surrounding the storied waterway along with Sheppard’s chops as a plein-air painter.
Joy Gallery has also partnered with local arts supporter Richard A. Glaser to create the $5,000 Luvon Sheppard Award for Creative Excellence, which will be awarded to a regional artist during the Memorial Art Gallery’s M&T Bank Clothesline Art Festival, September 6-7.
luvonsheppardart.com
Rebecca Rafferty is a contributor to CITY.
This article appears in Dec 1-31, 2024.
