Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i1slG8jmqE8&list=PLOQvdw7d0cd9RZZkd2lZy2hmrnJv-cfLI&index=60
Evan Snow: So we are back here on the Choose 954 podcast, episode 41, with local legend, muralist, painter, motivator, and empowerer, Laura Chronicle, here from her very beautiful studio in Art Serve. If you didn’t know about Choose 954, we started a social movement to cultivate culture and community here in Broward County in an effort to keep people in the know with all the great things that are going on and make this a better place to live—not just a better place to vacation. The point of the podcast is to connect you with amazing people like her doing incredible things in the community. So without much further ado, why don’t you tell the folks that aren’t familiar with you, Laurie Pratico, a little bit about yourself at a high level?
Lori Pratico: Well, thank you! And I think today was the first time on your Instagram that I saw you called me a legend, and I was like, wow, I’ve put in the work, and it’s been quite a journey, honestly. And it’s really just been the more that I believe in myself and the more that I believe I can do, the more I do—which is, you know, pretty amazing. And it also makes me see how anyone else can do the same thing, and that’s the message that I try to get out there. So when we talk next Friday at Creative Zen, that’s one of the things I want to talk about. It’s about coming out, and you know, I hope you leave that conversation thinking you could do anything.
Evan Snow: Yeah, and so part of why we wanted to have Laurie on now is because Laurie will be our next speaker at AAF Creative Zen, which is a monthly breakfast lecture series. It’s a mini TED Talk that we hold for free for the creative community. Everybody’s welcome, everybody’s creative. We bring in a local artist, thought leader, entrepreneur, yoga or Zen master, whoever it may be, to share a thought-provoking, inspiring story. That’s where I got my aha moment when Alexa Carlin, the founder of the Women Empower Expo, shared her story, and you know, over three and a half years later, I pay it back and pay it forward by hosting. It’s awesome. So that’ll be next Friday morning, July 12th. Doors open at 8:30, talk starts at 9:00, and you’re out of there by 10:00. The next one, we always do it at a different cool venue around Greater Fort Lauderdale to introduce people to new places they’ve never been before. It’ll be at Arts and Crafts Social Club, which is in the Hive section of MASS District where you can find some of her work, which we’ll get into in a minute, and you could look it up under Creative Zen, but we’ll get back to that. So, you’ve amassed quite a well-established career. How did you get into art in the beginning?
Lori Pratico: I always knew from the time I was a little kid. I tell the story that when I was five years old and in kindergarten, they threw a smock over my head and let me finger-paint and said it was okay to get it on myself, and that was it. That was the end. I was like, I want to be an artist. It just was. I was a messy kid; I’m a messy adult, and it’s where you’re allowed to be a mess and it’s actually celebrated.
Evan Snow: Yeah.
Lori Pratico: And I love that. That the act of being creative is what fuels me. The fact that my creativity has also led me into being able to have a voice and being able to use my creativity as a tool to communicate to other people is like a bonus. I didn’t know that that’s where I would end up, but when it happened, it was like, wow, this is really amazing. I couldn’t ask for more than changing people’s lives, giving people’s stories voices, and empowering those that you didn’t know that you never knew you would have known.
Evan Snow: So for those that are familiar, why don’t you tell us a little bit about Girl Noticed?
Lori Pratico: Sure. So, Girl Noticed really came out of me. I had been showing my artwork. I always did portraits for years and years. I was painting portraits, and my portraits really were about you looking at the person in the painting and seeing them differently. So I was painting women with pink hair and tattoos, and they really owned it, they stood in who they were. And I was living vicariously through them because I wanted the pink hair, and at the time, I had no tattoos. I wanted tattoos, but I was too afraid. I was afraid to stand out, you know. I wasn’t self-confident enough to say if someone looked at me that they weren’t looking at me and saying, what’s wrong with her? You know, or she doesn’t look right. So, that fitting in and standing out—it was like a tug of war my whole life. And here I was painting these girls and living vicariously through them and just thinking they were amazing women. And I was really seeing how they were so much more than the pink hair and the tattoos. They were amazing women. And when other people started seeing that through my artwork, I thought, wow, I really have a voice with my artwork. I can communicate with it. What do I want to say? What is the message I want to get out there?
And it was really important to me that every single girl, every female, knew that just the way they were, exactly without comparing themselves with someone else, without trying to be anything else, had value. And if they could find the value in themselves in that very present moment, exactly who they are, then they could be anything.
Evan Snow: Amen.
Lori Pratico: Despite their situations, their circumstances, their story. And I know if you—not a spoiler alert—but if you’d like to hear a little bit more about Laurie’s story, she shared it during Fort Lauderdale Art and Design Week on a collaboration talk that we did with Business for the Arts of Broward, our Arts Means Business series, where she shared her story. And in the replay, we included the clip of the video of a lot of the women whose lives you’ve touched through the project.
Evan Snow: Yes.
Lori Pratico: And if that doesn’t make you cry, I don’t know what will. So, that—I’ll link that in the comments, or if you just type in "Art Florida" on YouTube and "Laurie Pratico," the talk will come up. But it was really powerful to see how many lives you’ve changed, not just here locally, but I mean, where has art taken you?
Lori Pratico: Yeah, so Girl Noticed, I created a mural project called Girl Noticed, and the idea behind the project from the get-go was I wanted to go get to all 50 states, recognize at least 50 women, and do 50 murals. And how that was going to happen is women—girls and women—were going to be nominated from each state by their community to be noticed. So the nominations come in, and then I choose one to four women, I draw them huge on the wall in charcoal, and I decided to do them in charcoal because I thought they should fade off the wall. I wanted that temporary message to be there. I wanted people—what message is permanent, right? But I wanted that temporary nature to the project, that there was an urgency to witness it, to see it. Sending that same message that there’s an urgency to notice in a girl or female what she should value in herself, you know? Because if we don’t see those things—sometimes we can’t see those things. We’re in a situation where we’re growing up in a situation where we don’t have time to even look at ourselves with value. It’s impossible to see ourselves that way because of our surroundings, because of what we’re dealing with. And it might take the teacher or the neighbor or that aunt or someone else in the community to be the one to take that time to notice. And that’s what I wanted to do for these young women. And they started noticing each other through the nominations, and that in itself was empowering. Then to be gigantic on a wall and celebrated by your community, that was what really became powerful. I now offer workshops, and so I’ve made it to 14 of the states.
Evan Snow: Yes.
Lori Pratico: And I’ve been to places. Last year I was in Alaska, doing it in Anchorage, which was amazing. Like, I would have never in a million years—you know, I’m a Philly girl that went to the Jersey Shore every summer, that was it. But, you know, travel wasn’t really part of my story growing up. And, you know, sometimes when you grow up a certain way, you become fearful of doing things. So traveling was a little bit—I was a little bit afraid of the unknown, you know, and what I didn’t know. And I wanted to overcome that. One of the reasons why I said I wanted to get to all 50 states was so that I could see the United States and that I could, you know, experience that. Little did I know what that would open up for me. You know, that I would go into these communities, a lot of underserved communities even, and how they would embrace me and embrace the project and see it as such a beautiful, moving thing. It was more powerful than I could have ever dreamed it would be.
Evan Snow: And as an empowered man who was empowered by a woman that started the Women Empower Expo, it’s truly—if you look at the murals, you watch the video, you speak with Laurie or people touched by the project—it’s very powerful.
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