Text and photography by George Cassidy Payne
The first time I heard the name Blanche Calloway, I was researching the overlooked musical history of Rochester’s Swillburg neighborhood, tracing the legacy of two siblings who helped shape American jazz from very different vantage points: Blanche and Cab Calloway.
Most people know Cab. Far fewer know Blanche.
Before her younger brother became one of the defining voices of American jazz, Blanche Calloway had already broken barriers as a bandleader and performer in a world that left little room for women or Black artists. She was bold and determined in a way that makes her absence from the historical record feel all the more striking.
That research eventually led me to metal sculptor and welder Stacey Mrva.
At the time, Stacey had already spent years working in Rochester’s Swillburg neighborhood through the Southwest Neighborhood Association when she first encountered Blanche’s story.
“She was a trailblazer,” Stacey told me. “Being a woman in a male-dominated industry, you have to work a little bit harder. I can’t imagine what she had to go through.”
Something in that history stayed with her.
“I Googled her and realized how amazing she was,” she said. “I wanted to find a way to honor her and capture that energy.”
That impulse became a public art project.
“I found this one photo,” Stacey said. “She’s leaning back, holding a baton. It had this sense of movement in it. I knew right away that was the one.”
Today, I reconnected with Stacey in a very different setting—deep in the rural landscape of the Little Finger Lakes region, where rolling hills, farmland, and quiet roads stretch between small towns that often hide their creative lives in plain sight. Her studio sits in Springwater, where the built and natural worlds meet at the edge of forest and field.
As a community ambassador with the Little Finger Lakes Center in Hemlock, I’ve been traveling across the region meeting artists, farmers, and small business owners shaping a quieter but persistent cultural identity here. Stacey’s studio felt like part workshop, part archive, and part experiment in what rural creative life can become when space and time are allowed to stretch.
Inside her renovated barn studio, Ironwood Studios Inc. does not resemble a conventional workspace. It moves between function and memory. Downstairs, steel is cut, bent, and welded. Workbenches hold stencils, torches, and masks worn smooth by use. Along the walls are fragments of past projects and photographs of women who have come through the space—many encountering welding and fabrication for the first time, and leaving with a new sense of what their hands can do.
The Blanche Calloway piece now stands in Swillburg, close to the history that first inspired it.
It is a life-sized steel interpretation of that photograph. Blanche is captured mid-performance, leaning back with her baton raised as if conducting not just a band, but the air itself. The sculpture does not settle into stillness. It holds motion. Light traces its welded seams differently depending on where you stand, giving the figure a sense of continuity rather than completion, like a performance paused mid-phrase.
Stacey works with a kind of subtle certainty about what material can become.
Where others might see a steel rod, she sees direction and movement already forming. A curve becoming a gesture. A line becoming structure. The material is never just material.
In conversation, it becomes clear that sculpture for Stacey is not only fabrication, but translation.
Her work often draws from organic forms. Roots, vines, branching structures appear again and again.
“I do these vine forms,” she told me in that first interview. “Roots growing upward into the air. That’s how I see community history and energy. Grounded, but still reaching.”
Upstairs in the barn, the atmosphere shifts. The second floor has been transformed into a warm gathering space with natural light pouring through wide windows. It functions as a place for meetings, workshops, and small events, but also as a kind of pause between acts—a space where conversation can slow down enough for ideas to take shape. It feels lived in rather than staged, shaped by use rather than design.
We also discovered an unexpected Syracuse connection.
Stacey studied art at Syracuse University. I mentioned growing up a Syracuse basketball fan, shaped by winters marked as much by snowfall as by game-day noise that seemed to organize the region’s rhythm.
She laughed.
“I hated when the games were going on,” she said. “Too much commotion.”
The contrast made sense in hindsight. While parts of campus pulsed with spectacle, she was learning to attend to form and structure in ways that would later define her practice in metal.
That sensibility carries through her work today. Whether honoring Blanche Calloway or figures like Susan B. Anthony, Stacey approaches metal as something that holds memory as much as it holds shape.
Our conversation eventually moved beyond art into the broader landscape of the Finger Lakes itself.
We spoke about the fragility of rural creative economies, and the way opportunity often depends on whether people are exposed to making at an early age. Too often, young people are never introduced to trades like welding in any meaningful way, leaving entire forms of intelligence and expression unexplored.
For Stacey, college is not the only path forward. It is not always the most direct one.
Welding, fabrication, and sculpture offer another route—one where skill becomes identity, and imagination is not separated from labor but expressed through it.
Across the Finger Lakes, this shift is becoming visible in quiet ways: barns turned into studios, workshops doubling as classrooms, rural spaces becoming sites of production and reinvention.
In Stacey’s hands, steel is not hardened into distance.
It is shaped into story.
And in Swillburg, the figure of Blanche Calloway stands not as a monument sealed off from life, but as something still in motion, still conducting, still reaching outward into the space around her.
