Cultivating Creativity

Creativity may be something you’re rarely a solo pursuit. For some, the door to opportunity opens with formal education and hands-on skill development. Others take a circuitous route, discovering or reigniting long-abandoned talents after a lifetime of other pursuits.

One tenet is universal: Creativity blooms in the presence of mentors, and the role of influencers and encouragers has a way of coming full circle for Tallahassee’s working artists who are paying it forward as they continue to grow their own endeavors.

Photo by Grace Roselli

Student Becomes the Master

Zoë Charlton’s roots run deep in Tallahassee, so when she was invited for her first solo exhibit, Akimbo, which showed from August 2025 to March 2026 at Florida State University’s Museum of Fine Arts, it felt like a homecoming. Charlton attended Florida State (FSU) from 1991 to 1994 to pursue a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, but Tallahassee is her parents’ hometown, and her grandmother was a pioneer in real estate and social development of the area as well.

“I’m in Tallahassee frequently,” says Charlton, who describes herself first as a full-time working artist and second as a full-time art professor at George Mason University in Virginia (as well as director of its School of Art). “It’s home.”

At the center of Akimbo was Paul Russell Road, an inverted half-scale re-creation of Charlton’s grandmother’s actual Tallahassee home.

“The piece is meant to evoke a body, my grandmother’s body,” she says, explaining that much of her work depicts the theme of a human torso that springs forth a landscape. “The interior evokes the layered understanding of Black suburbia and what it meant for her, a Black woman at that time, to purchase property and build a homestead that became a kind of meeting house and social space.”

Photo Courtesy of Zoë Charlton

In that space, Charlton and her community were nurtured, not unlike what she has experienced both as an art student and as a professor.

“People forget that mentorship takes a lot of different forms,” she says, reflecting on guidance she received at FSU from Ed Love, Phyllis Straus, Mark Messersmith, Ray Burggraf, and Trevor Bell. Her family, too, played an important role in her journey.

“Mentorship is a way to reflect and affirm where people are, what they’re thinking, and to guide in a way that doesn’t interrupt development.” Charlton believes that anyone who teaches automatically enters the realm of mentorship.

“A really great mentor finds those spaces and helps you move through different stages of your thinking and being,” she says. “My hope is that I am serving as a useful impact for people who are emerging in their careers and in their thinking.”

Photo by Ned Stacey

Not a Copycat

When asked about the importance of mentorship for an aspiring artist, Ned Stacey hesitates. He was an artsy kid—his film-enthusiast father gave him a set of oil paints at 9, a 35 mm camera at 11, and an invitation to follow his dreams. What he didn’t want to be was a “mini-me or poser,” he says.

Stacey enrolled—and quickly dropped out of—art school, discouraged that gen-ed requirements would keep him from holding a camera or paint brush for years. Instead, he opened a shop selling records and comic books in his hometown of Charlottesville, Virginia before moving the business, Cosmic Cat, to Tallahassee in the late 1980s. Starting out on Gaines Street, he moved in 2006 to Railroad Square Art District, where he got more serious about his art. He opened not just the Cosmic Cat but also Renditions, An Art Space. In the gallery and workspace, he painted “quirky portraits” and produced fine art photography, some of which has been part of PhotoFest, an annual exhibition put on by the Council on Culture & Arts.

He also met fellow artists, including former Florida A&M University professor Ron Yrabedra. “He was very low-key, mentoring in a way that you didn’t realize you were being mentored,” he says, recalling hours spent talking about their work, how to price a piece, and teaching local kids how to draw.

The 2024 tornado put an end to Stacey’s time in Railroad Square, but he continues to create and seek inspiration from his home studio. A social media connection with photographer Nolan Streitberger resulted in an unexpected friendship and collaboration. For a project that will be on display with Thomasville Arts’ “200 for 200: The Collective Exhibition” from June 4 to August 8, he created a quilt featuring painted portraits of individuals who help tell the town’s complicated history. He had a handle on the painting, but turned to church friends to teach him sewing and quilting techniques.

Young artists interested in sci-fi, fantasy, and comic book illustration often seek Stacey’s advice on breaking into the business, which he has decades of experience with. It’s a role he manages cautiously. “They need to find their own way,” he says.

Photo by Ned Stacey

Pedal to the Metal

Before Mark Dickson discovered his passion, he was in California, working long hours in a job he didn’t love.

“I was miserable,” Dickson says. When a friend recommended a sculpting and metal fabrication night class almost an hour’s drive away, he decided to give it a chance. “It basically changed my life.”

Circumstances brought Dickson to Tallahassee, his wife’s hometown, where he chased his newfound passion. Not that art was a foreign subject to him—he grew up with it, thanks to his art-collecting grandmother.

Dickson now operates Dickson Studios in the Railroad Arts District. He credits three mentors whose influence helped launch his 25-year career as an artist, sculptor, and metalsmith. Long-time professor of sculpture at Florida State University, Charles Hook, allowed Dickson to audit a class. Steve Ross ran a local metal fabrication company and offered Dickson a part-time job. Ornamental iron master blacksmith Jerry Grice took Dickson on as an apprentice.

“My pursuit was to aggressively immerse myself in anything metal,” says Dickson, who not only learned at the university, but eventually took on a guiding role—first as the Saturday night lab monitor at FSU, then as a teacher for seven years at North Florida Community College, and now as a studio artist designer and metal fabricator for FSU’s Master Craftsman Studio.

The goal was never to be a path maker for others.

“I came to the academic aspects of my career on the backside of my journey,” Dickson says. His drive was to create, and his pieces have landed in collections across the Southeast from galleries, private owners, and public installations, including Storyteller, a recent addition to LeMoyne Art & Sculpture Gardens. That piece, like many of his creations, was crafted from new and reclaimed materials and represents connections and paths of those who came before him. “There’s a story in all the work,” he says. “I know where every piece of metal came from; sometimes others can see it, and sometimes you can’t.”

That, he says, is part of the beauty of the mentorship role for a developing artist. “You might find yourself teaching at a college when you never went to college,” Dickson says. “I say you find information in any way you can.”