For 40 years, the huge mural at Second Street and Church Avenue in Roanoke faded and faded, its vibrant colors waning toward gray.
Declared “the grand dame of Roanoke murals” by the city arts commission’s official Instagram account, the mural, called “Accentuated Forms in Space,” was the brainchild of an artist who could easily be dubbed “the grande dame of Roanoke arts.”
Although Dorothy Gillespie’s career spanned decades and earned national plaudits, she never lost touch with the city where she was born. Of more than 70 pieces of public art produced during her lifetime that still stand 12 years after her death, at least nine are in Roanoke — among them her only surviving mural, painted in 1979 on the side of One City Plaza, an eye-catching Star City landmark from that point on.
In May 2023, at long last, Gillespie’s mural was restored to its original vibrancy — an event that figures prominently in the new documentary, “Dorothy Gillespie: Courage, Independence, and Color,” which will have its Roanoke premiere at the Grandin Theatre at 7 p.m. Wednesday.
The movie “talks about the mural,” said Gary Israel, 72, president of the Dorothy M. Gillespie Foundation and one of the artist’s two sons. “There’s some beautiful drone footage of it being painted with the painter who restored it.” It meant a lot to him, he said, to see the mural featured prominently in the finished film. “A couple of the people that were interviewed talk about what it was like, as a child, seeing that mural. And then now, so many years later, having it restored.”
This documentary about Gillespie’s life features interviews with a number of prominent figures in the Roanoke Valley art scene, including LinDor Arts gallery owner Dorsey Taylor, Artemis Magazine founder Jeri Rogers, and former Roanoke Arts and Culture Coordinator Susan Jennings. It also explores far beyond the valley,
“Not only was Dorothy a cutting-edge artist, but she was also an integral member of the feminist art movement,” said documentarian Crystal White, co-founder with Jay Scala of New York-based White Ladder Productions. White and Scala knew Gillespie would make a fascinating subject the first time they visited the late artist’s studio in the tiny New York hamlet of Narrowsburg.
“Dorothy co-founded a class called ‘Functioning in the Art World’ with Alice Baber and Ruth Van Doren, which taught women how to operate as professionals within a complex, male-dominated art world,” White said.
“Hundreds of women attended her classes and workshops and went on to inspire thousands more to be artists and gallerists and educators. She did all this while running trendy nightclubs in Miami and New York City with her husband, Bernard ‘Bunny’ Israel, and rearing three children,” White said. “With all of the challenges that women continue to face in the world today, we felt that this was a timely story we had to tell.”
After his mother’s death in 2012 at age 92, Gary Israel began a cross-country journey to find, preserve and catalog her art, and to learn more about who she was. Dorothy Gillespie did not make this quest an easy one to pursue, as while she was alive, despite achieving remarkable success, she gave little thought to preserving a legacy for posterity.
Certainly, she did not want for recognition. “The artist’s exuberant sculptures of colorful aluminum strips have earned her an international reputation,” wrote a New York Times art critic in 1986. “In Miss Gillespie’s hands, this most-resistant material takes on the appearance of lively spontaneity.”
“My mother never spent any time talking about her past,” Israel said. Even patrons who purchased her work turned out to have never learned much about her, because she didn’t share personal details. Israel believed his mother’s story could inspire new generations. “Even though there’s a book on her, there’s a lot of articles written about her, I thought, why not do a documentary?”
Born in Roanoke in 1920, a graduate of Jefferson High School (now Jefferson Center), Gillespie chose to defy her parents’ wishes and go to art school, setting out on a path that would intersect with the likes of Jackson Pollock and Georgia O’Keeffe and see her at age 83 creating an installation of 185 sculptures to illuminate Rockefeller Plaza.
Israel has made it his mission to find new, highly visible homes for his mother’s many artworks. “I’m placing her art all around the country, in public locations,” where “you don’t have to go into a museum to see her art” — playgrounds, parks, hospitals. “My goal is, when I’m finished with this, years from now, that more people will have seen her art in the public than any female artist in American history.”
“Dorothy Gillespie: Courage, Independence, and Color” had its world premiere last month in the Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts in Wilmington, North Carolina, where a 42-foot tall sculpture by the late artist is on permanent display.
The Roanoke premiere will feature a question-and-answer session afterward with filmmakers Scala and White, as well as Gary Israel and both of his siblings, sister Dorien Bietz and brother Richard Israel. Before they attend the screening, they will visit the restored mural in downtown Roanoke.
“My brother has not seen it,” Gary Israel said. “It’s going to be exciting.”
