Amy Bagwell — poet, artist, educator — sits on the back patio at Snug Harbor on a steamy May evening, sipping from a beading can of Sierra Nevada and holding forth on the NBA Playoffs, a new documentary about the rock band The National and sundry other topics. In the background, the bar’s staff readies for the onslaught of Thursday night’s weekly Shiprocked party as strains of ’80s and ’90s rock filter out from inside the club.
Bagwell is here to talk about the Wall Poems of Charlotte, the public art project she co-founded with her former student at Central Piedmont Community College, painter Graham Carew. Like any artist worth her salt, Bagwell has a polymath’s enthusiasm for culture and the arts. But when the discussion turns to the local arts scene and how the wall poems have addressed Charlotte’s outdated status as a cultural wasteland peopled by banker-bots and arts-hating politicos, the youthful 43-year-old grows perceptibly more animated.
She may not exude the theatrical zealotry of the preacher or prophet, but her passion is no less palpable. She leans forward in the patio chair, her voice rising slightly and her hands gesturing as though to punctuate the thoughts elbowing for room in her sentences. The wall poems, Bagwell insists, aren’t meant to alter the city’s image so much as highlight the vibrant arts scene that already exists in the shadows of the skyscrapers and stadiums.
“I hate the term ‘creatives,'” she says. “It makes it seem like there are people who can be creative and people who can’t. That’s just bullshit — yes, there are people who have talent that other people don’t have, I believe that. But to make a divided culture creates this sense that it’s us versus them, and it’s not. There’s so much integration. And people will celebrate beauty, and they’ll celebrate something that transcends.”
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