Whether as a visual artist working in printmaking, painting and public art, or his work as a creative facilitator at Studio Two Three, O’Keefe’s creative vision is rooted in the history of Richmond, where he was born.
“There is this great Arthur Ashe quote,” he says. “’Start where you are. Use what you have. Do what you can.’ I think it’s really powerful to bloom where you are planted, to dig into what is around you.”
The flower analogy is apt. O’Keefe, also an adjunct arts professor at VCUArts, is working to establish and commemorate a community garden at Gilpin Court. “It was the dream of the late Lillie Estes, who was a Gilpin resident and a leading voice in the nation on public housing,” he says. He recently secured a $30,000 public art commission from the City of Richmond to design and build a 12-foot by 12-foot cast iron gateway arch for the garden, incorporating imagery that pays tribute to Estes as well as Charles Gilpin, a Richmond-born stage and film actor. “The design kind of riffs on the vocabulary of Richmond’s cast iron porch architecture. With a little bit of care, it should last a couple of centuries.”
The artist’s work has been showcased in dozens of installations over the past decade, including multiple pieces in 1708 Gallery’s annual InLight show and a mural for the Mending Walls Project. He specializes in paying tribute to Richmond’s unsung heroes, particularly its African American trailblazers. A decade ago, to help raise funds for the reclamation of East End and Evergreen cemeteries, he crafted a series of woodcut portraits of notable African Americans buried there, such as John Mitchell Jr. and Maggie L. Walker. He has since made 11 more portraits, a commission from the JXN Project, an initiative to document Jackson Ward’s history. “ These “Unveiling the Vanguard” images were used as banners on 15 Richmond streets that were named for the honorees.
O’Keefe graduated from The College of William and Mary with a bachelor’s in English and Russian/post-Soviet Studies and learned printmaking at Ohio State. By day, he works at Studio Two Three, where he creates the class calendar, welcomes new members and helps to work on the Manchester studio’s climate resilience plan. He lives near Maymont with his wife Diana, a seamstress and fiber artist, and children Cyrus, 8, and Fern, 5. In his spare time, O’Keefe does more gardening, in a community plot he started near his Maymont-area home. “I’m a terrible gardener,” he laughs. “But that doesn’t stop me.”
