Along the quiet side roads of rural Mississippi, hanging on fences and in trees, were charms of sorts. They were pieces of mirrors, broken glass, feathers and bones and they were mysterious to the child, who could only imagine the people behind such curious ornamentation; people, she says, she would only briefly encounter as a child — the black families that populated a world far separated from her own then.

“They (the objects) were kind of charms but I didn’t know it then,” she recalls. “They were curiosities. We didn’t think of any meaning, we were just curious.”

The meaning of those charms would come later in life. And the meaning, both the cultural tradition that gave birth to the charms, and the personal meaning for the artist and teacher would slowly begin to surface over the years.

Many times, for an artist, a body of work comes through the experience and contemplation that is connected to an occasion that led to years of unconscious musing. Picasso, for example, would stew over his relationships with women and as their pairing ended, he would depict his once beloved in twisted forms that were a culmination of his angst and discontentedness and would later become some his best known, abstracted portraits.

For Sterritt, a collection of work that would become a part of her masters of fine arts thesis started with those family outings, sparking a curiosity and an angst that would grow during the Civil Rights era, in an increasingly violent Mississippi.

On the walls at Red Rabbit Gallery are mixed-media images. They are monograph, cyanotype, transfers, lithographic and screen prints that are coupled with photographic images, drawings and painting that Sterritt would complete as a part of her degree work at Old Dominion University.

Although the images themselves are very contemporary depictions of something perhaps as old as the human psyche itself, they are also very Southern in nature. They speak of the College of the Albemarle art instructor’s life and musings over a people she says she lived along side, but never fully understood nor had the pleasure to know intimately.

Growing up in Mississippi, Sterritt says she knew the black people of her community as anyone might know a passing stranger — a product of her times. She was an outsider looking in and she recalls that there was a certain amount of shame, perhaps, and discomfort that she didn’t have an intimate understanding of the people that were her neighbors.

“There was a sense of loss because I didn’t know many of them,” she says.

As a young woman, she would marry and move to Philadelphia, Miss., the infamous town where three young civil rights activists had been murdered a year earlier. The intensity of the violence against black people, and how much hate a person was capable of, made a lasting impression on Sterritt.

“I began to realize how violent it was and what an insular life I was leading,” she says.

Eventually, Sterritt would move to various states, and gain a variety of life experiences. Along the way, while she maintained a love of art that began in high school, she would gain a number of degrees, including a masters degree in nursing that would lead her to teach in that field. But since her love of art never left her, she created images on canvas that would, beginning sometime in her 30s, land her in shows and galleries. From there she would begin to teach, which led her to a desire to earn her masters of fine arts degree.

It was going into the graduate degree program at ODU that led Sterritt to her current show, “Crossroads.” She knew she would need to focus on something that was meaningful to her if she was to develop a body of work that would help her complete her degree. So the memory of her childhood began to rise to the surface as an opportunity to process and interpret her feelings of those memories and the culture she believed she missed out on during her youth.

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