G.G.G (Greenwood Girls' Garage): Evolution of a Painting
In 2019, I spent a day with Yolande Van Herdeen, an expat South African whose path serendipitously led her to Greenwood, Mississippi.
Incidentally, this isn’t all that unusual. For all the criticism Mississippi—and the Delta in particular—has received over the years, people often visit and then decide to stay. A short trip turns into a permanent move. Maybe it’s the sense that here they can make an impact, live more creatively, or take risks they wouldn’t elsewhere. Or maybe it’s simply the pull of the stories, the people, the music, and the food.
In Yolande’s case, her path to Mississippi ran through Los Angeles. In California, she befriended Martha Hall Foose—a Delta native, chef, and celebrated writer—and tagged along to Mississippi when Martha moved back east. What began as visits filled with good times gradually became something more lasting, until Yolande chose to make the Delta her home. After settling there, she met her husband, Scott Barretta, a blues writer and researcher, and the host of the Highway 61 Blues radio
Saw blade pattern underpainting beneath G.G.G. (Greenwood Girls’ Garage). You can also see a little of the initial drawing and the first hints at a window.
When I met her in 2019, Yolande was serving as the artist-in-residence at ArtPlace Mississippi, a community art center in downtown Greenwood offering classes and programs for all ages. What stayed with me from that visit wasn’t just the art itself, but the way Yolande explained the unique role ArtPlace plays in Greenwood.
Greenwood has 15 schools- public, private, religious. For a town of 13,600 people, that’s a lot. Each school has its own community with its own activities, sports and events. Add that to the dozens of churches in town, the many neighborhoods and private clubs, and it becomes clear why it can be such a real challenge to cross paths with people outside your own school, church, club, or neighborhood.
And so ArtPlace functions as a kind of bridge where youth from all schools, regardless of their art experience, can come and hang out and maybe get to know each other in the creative environment as well as teens in the teen art club (and the Grown Folks Art Club if you’re adult). In a town where cultures often run in parallel without ever crossing, places like this are rare. And they matter, deeply.
When I visited in 2019, Yolande walked me through the main teaching studios at ArtPlace, though we lingered longest in two—the woodshop and the quilt room. For me, they were a visual goldmine, overflowing with sparks for my paintings. But what really struck me was the programming she described taking place there: inventive, joyful, and the kind of hands-on learning I would have loved to experience back in middle school.
In 2019, ArtPlace Mississippi had a happening woodshop on the second floor of their downtown facility. If you’ve not spent much time in a woodshop, this one checked all the boxes: electrical saws and drills, a large wooden worktable, clamps, hand tools, spare lumber all covered with the fine mist of wood chips. Woodshops smell amazing, like fresh possibility and the forest.
In 2018 and 2019, this particular woodshop was outfitted at ArtPlace for Girls’ Garage workshops, which were held several times a year to teach women over 16 years basic building skills with power tools. Usually, 8 to 12 women would sign up and learn to build lamps or Christmas trees made from recycled wood or other inspired projects. As they put it: "Greenwood’s Girls’ Garage is for ladies—both young and a little less young—to learn the basics of power tools, construction, and the confidence to take on projects of their own."
The Greenwood program was modeled after the original Girls’ Garage, founded in California in 2013 by an architect who set out to build confidence in young women and help close the gender gap in construction fields. Since then, more than 1,000 young women in California have taken part, completing 207 projects—including several that served their communities. The impact has been striking: nearly 96 percent of participants report a boost in confidence, a crucial shift during such a formative stage of life.
P.S. Enjoy poring over the creative process? Check out the rest of the Evolution of a Painting series.