Dorothy Gillespie was born in Roanoke in 1920. Though she left the Star City for art school and work in Maryland and New York, she kept a connection to Roanoke and her colorful creations are all around the city— inside the courthouse, Center in the Square, Jefferson Center and even a 50-foot-tall mural painted on the side of a downtown building.
Some have likened her painted aluminum sculptures to fireworks— three-dimensional explosions of color.
"It’s joyful. It’s cheerful. It’s uplifting. It’s colorful," says Gary Gillespie Israel. "She used over 150 different colors of paint."
Israel is one of Dorothy Gillespie's children and president of the foundation that carries her name. He's also a co-producer of a new documentary about her life and impact on the modern American art scene.
"Early on, she realized that women had to work together and it also was her way of doing public art. Because this was an opportunity for women to show their art outside the museums and the galleries and not be beholden to curators and museum directors," Israel says.
That accessibility was always important to Gillespie, Israel believes, even if that meant missing out on the notoriety that greeted some of her contemporaries like Georgie O'Keeffe and Lee Krasner.
"What my mother always wanted was to have her art available, open to the public. And in the documentary, there is a person from Roanoke, an artist, who talks about her experience as a child seeing that mural and how it inspired her to become the artist she is today."
The film, called Dorothy Gillespie: Courage, Independence and Color, has its Virginia premier at Roanoke’s Grandin Theatre Wednesday night followed by a Q&A with the filmmakers and Gillespie’s family.
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