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PHOTO CREDIT COURTESY OF THERESA DAVIS
Mother’s Day is Sunday, and we thought it would be fun to invite in a mother and daughter who both work in the arts for a conversation.
We fell immediately upon Alice Lovelace and Theresa Davis. Lovelace is a writer and activist who moved to Atlanta in the 1970s and helped found a number of organizations, including the Arts Exchange. Davis, her daughter, is a teacher, poet and organizer who can be found hosting poetry slams around the city.
“Was it your intention to raise an artist?” producer Myke Johns asks Lovelace.
“It was my intention to raise adults,” she replies. “Thinking adults. When I teach, I tell [my students] I don’t come to poetry to make children poets. It’s to allow them to access their emotions and thoughts and then to be able to express them in a way that gives them relief. We wanted kids who could speak for themselves. Artists are excellent at speaking for themselves.”
“I learned a lot of things by trial and error as an adult,” Davis says. “But I always had those moments that I could look back on and see how, if I had approached it differently in this way that my parents had done things, that it may not have been as jacked-up as I was making it.”
“And I think that is when I truly got to a place where we could sit down and have these long, crazy conversations,” Davis admits, “and I would get all of the meat out of the conversation.”
“I think that as she’s gotten older, what she realizes is that she’s really a whole lot like me,” Lovelace says, “and we have a great deal in common.”
