Gail Lloyd: Sculpting Imagination Into Reality

“Art is indeed not the bread but the wine of life.” ~Jean Paul Richter

Well, I’ll drink to that! And I’ll share the bottle with this week’s Portrait, Gail Lloyd. An artist, filmmaker, actress and teacher, Lloyd has been in the independent film industry for more than 25 years and has exhibited her artwork in galleries throughout Northwest Philadelphia. Her sculptures have found homes in prestigious venues, including the permanent collection of The Colored Girls Museum. In 2024, she was selected for Woodmere Art Museum’s 82nd Juried Exhibition, “What Is Belonging?”

But I know Gail as a longtime friend and collaborator. The two of us worked on several films back in the day, including the seminal lesbian flick, “Watermelon Woman.” Yeah, that’s me, cast as “Black School Teacher on the Street.” I also worked as a camera person for Lloyd, shooting a documentary in Waco, Texas, arranged by her longtime partner, Professor Angela Gilham.

Recently, she’s shifted her focus to the fine arts and has wowed galleries with incredible, dramatic and moving clay figures. Her artistry will be on display at her show, “Texture of Presence” (with artist Abbey Stace), running March 7- April 25 at City Arts Salon, with a special opening reception on March 7.

Let’s start with an easy one, where do you hail from?
I was born in Washington, D.C., and lived there until I was about 12, and then we moved to just outside of D.C., to Silver Spring, Maryland. My teen years were spent there, and then in 1979, I came up to Philly to go to art school, and I’ve lived here ever since. So you might as well say I’m a Philadelphian, because I’ve lived here longer than I have any other place.

Do you have any siblings?
I have a brother. He still lives in that area — they call it the DMV.

Are you the only artistic one in the family?
No, my brother is really talented. He’s good with his hands. He’s an optician by profession, but he had a real strong interest in making jewelry, and he could draw. My dad could draw really well, too. My mom claimed she couldn’t even draw stick figures, but she used to sew and play piano.

So some artistic vibes in the DNA. What did they do for professions?
My dad worked for the Department of Labor. He was an accountant for one of the divisions there. And my mom worked in data processing. She was at the Labor Department, too, and I think for the police department.

So she was doing computer stuff before it was mainstream.
That’s the truth. She started when everything was kept on tape, and there was a whole room that was just for keeping records. It was a 24-hour operation, so I remember the phone would sometimes ring at two o’clock in the morning: “Mrs. Lloyd, we have a problem,” and she’d have to go in to troubleshoot. This was in the early ’70s. She knew cobalt and different computer languages.

Wow, she was a smart cookie, one of those hidden figures.
Yeah, I didn’t even think of that!

So what was little Gail like?
Little Gail was always making shit. Always making something, and if I wasn’t doing that, I was climbing a tree. I was a serious tomboy. I had a lot of energy, so much that my uncle nicknamed me Jack Rabbit. I had long legs and a short body, and I was always jumping and hopping around.

My mother’s sister was an artist, and I remember once, when I was really little — not even in school yet — I had crayons, and she was sitting on the floor with me, drawing on the coffee table. She drew a glass fishbowl and filled it with little fish and plants, and then she put in marbles at the bottom. And the way she drew it, I don’t even know how to explain it, but she made the marbles look like they were in 3D, in all these beautiful colors. They looked like they were going to pop off the page. They had volume, with the light from the room reflecting off the fucking top of the marble!

I knew right then I wanted to master that kind of magic, to be able to take a blank piece of paper and make something out of nothing. And I could draw pretty well as a kid, but I really liked making things with my hands.

Something I read about you that I didn’t know was that you originally were interested in architecture.
Yeah, I don’t think we had majors in high school, but at the school I went to, you could do a focus. So from ninth grade through 12th grade, I studied architecture and worked in engineering.

When I graduated from high school, I got a summer job working for a branch of Singer Sewing Machines that took government contracts. They made things like airplane simulators, and they got a lot of military jobs making oil refinery simulators for training people. They did a lot of work with Saudi Arabia, and I used to work on their schematics. I did electromechanical drawing.

Wow. When I think of Singer Sewing, I think of a ’50s commercial with a housewife in a little dress with pearls and kitten heels. You don’t think of oil refineries and flight simulators!
[Laughing] That’s true.

When did you shift over into film?
I guess, the late ’80s. I was dating the filmmaker, Cheryl Dunye, and I was helping Cheryl with her films. At the time we met, I was actually working for some architects and real estate developers. I was an office manager, but I also did drawings for them until the industry kind of went belly up.

I was thinking about going back to school, and Cheryl was like, “You should go back to school for film.” I enjoyed helping her with her films, so I thought, “OK, why not?” And that’s how I got involved with film.

You and I both worked on “Watermelon Woman” with Cheryl, and on a couple of other things. And then you went on to direct and work on your own in the industry. What was rewarding about it?
I mean, I’ve traveled around the world working on documentaries. I was in Australia with Nadine M. Patterson. I went to Hawaii a couple of times, working on a film. I’ve been to different places around the country. I’ve been to Iceland for a film. I loved that part of it until I got exhausted by it, because traveling with equipment and dealing with jet lag and stuff like that — it’s no joke. But I felt lucky to be able to do that for that time.

When did you start concentrating more on the fine arts?
It was in the early aughts, like 2003 maybe? I was teaching Intro to Video Production at Arcadia University. I was starting to get burned out because I had been working full-time at Penn for a few years at the Wharton School, so you can imagine what that was like.

And then Alan Powell, my professor at Temple, asked me if I wanted to teach. I wanted to have more time to focus on and do film work. At the same time, that opportunity with Angela’s colleague came up — that documentary that we did in Waco, Texas. So I was able to leave Penn and have more time to do things.

I’ve always had an interest in clay, since I was making mud pies as a kid. I just liked that process — to get my hands in dirt and mud was always fun for me. Randomly, I got an email from someone who said, “I’m teaching clay classes in the evening at Center in the Park.” And it was free, so I signed up.

Nice!
I was like, “This is unreal.” I would go in there and want to pinch myself because I couldn’t believe that I had access to clay, glazes, wheels, rollers and all kinds of stuff for free.

So that was what really got me into clay, but unfortunately, they only had limited hours on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and it just wasn’t enough. So a few of us rented a small studio so we wouldn’t have any time restrictions and did our thing. And I’ve been in there ever since.

And your work is amazing! Can you describe your process and what people will see at your exhibit?
I started doing figures. I like working with a human figure, so you’ll see busts that I’ve created. They’re not portraits of anybody who exists; they’re people from my imagination.

I’m looking at your stuff online right now. I have seen them before, and I really love your work. What inspires you to create the characters that you come up with? I imagine that, similar to the way a writer brings a character to life on the page, you’re doing something that flows from your imagination through your hands into a form.
Wow, I think that’s a really good way to put it. I mean, I might start out thinking that I want to make, I don’t know, someone whose eyes are kind of set far apart, or something. So I might start there, but then it will morph into something different.

Or sometimes I think I’m going to do a woman, and it turns out to be a man, or I’ll mean to do an adult, and it ends up being a child, or vice versa. I often don’t know who I’ll get. I don’t want to sound crazy, but I feel like sometimes it’s coming through me. It’s not even something that I’m doing.

A lot of artists I know say that. A friend of mine, who is a well-known painter from Spain, would say the same thing to me. She’d say, “It’s almost like a trance, and when I’m finished, I look at it like, ‘Oh, wow, who did this?’”
And it’s interesting with clay. It has a liveness to it, if you will. You can make the head form and then the neck, and if you move a certain way, the clay stretches almost like skin.

Sometimes, if I see something that’s happening, I have to learn to leave it alone. I just back off and let it go, just let it be. Same thing with faces. Sometimes you can push the clay in a certain way, and it seems like this person has thoughts.

One of the comments that I read about your work was, “Gail Lloyd is in touch with the ancestors.”
I love that.

So I guess we’ve both been out for a long time; we’re two of the OGs. But what was your big coming-out moment?
I think I always knew that I was different. I remember having crushes as a teenager. I would sometimes see a woman, and it would strike me a certain way that I couldn’t — wouldn’t — be able to explain right then and there, but it kind of scared me. Not scared me, but it would throw me off, I guess.

When did you tell your family? Because for most of us, once that’s over, you don’t care about anybody else.
Yeah, that’s true. I think I first came out to my parents because Cheryl and I invited our parents and some friends for a big Thanksgiving. So I invited them up, and they said, “Yes.” And then I said, “But there’s something you should know, Cheryl is more than my friend.” There was silence, and my mother said, “Well, this comes as a surprise.” My father simply said, “We’ll be there.” And they came, and that was that. I mean, my parents were open and very receptive.

But when my father died, I hadn’t come out to my extended family. Actually, let me back up: When my brother came up to visit, he found a love letter I’d written to Cheryl that she stuck in a mirror. He saw it, and then, I can’t remember what he said, but he grabbed me and gave me the biggest hug. It was so sweet.

So anyway, back to the cousins: when my father died, I’d been dating Angela. I had never come out to them, but when they saw her by my side, they got it. And I knew that they accepted her and they loved her because they were teasing her mercilessly. And they were like, “This is going to be a hard time for Gail. Angie, take care of her.”

Beautiful. All right, some totally random questions here. What’s the most nostalgic item you have at home?
Probably my old 45 records.

Which is the song that you’d sing in the mirror with a hairbrush for a mic?
Something from The Jackson 5! Gotta love vintage Michael Jackson!

What’s something fun — other than your clay pieces — that you’ve been enjoying lately? TV shows, hobbies, etc?
I do enjoy watching television, but I’ve been sewing lately. I decided that I wanted to sew a jacket, and I went online to YouTube University, watched videos on how to make a pattern from your favorite item, and learned how to do it.

Bravo. Do you have any superstitions?
Not a superstition per se, but I have a thing for the number 13. I love it. I’ll look for it, like when I’m pumping gas, if it stops at 13, I’m like, “Cool.”

Well, guess what? Next Friday is the 13th.
All right, there we go. And my mother was born on the 13th of June. It’s just a good number. I don’t know why people are so afraid of it. It’s weird.

A smell that makes you nostalgic?
Christmas was always fun — the smells of home cooking, decorating the house. One year, my dad repainted the house, and I remember the combination of the smell of the oil paint he was using mingling with the cooking. It was just a beautiful smell. I know it sounds weird, but every now and then, I smell something like that and it really brings me back.

Last question: A favorite quote or motto.
One time, I came home, and I was upset because my friends and I were at a beach in Jersey, and we were the only brown people out there. It was really uncomfortable, the way people were responding to us, staring and talking. It was clear that they were not happy that we were there. I told my mom about it, and she said, “Girl, don’t let them steal your joy.” So I try to remember that when I’m feeling sad about anything, or just off because of how I’m responding to another person. I just think of her words, “Don’t let them steal your joy,” and try not to let it get to me.

Gail Lloyd’s artistry will be on display at “Texture of Presence,” March 7-April 25, with a special opening reception 2-6 p.m. on March 7 and a closing reception 2-6 p.m. on April 25 at City Arts Salon, 5838 Germantown Ave. For more information, visit cityartssalon.com.