These artists turn on ‘The Light of Truth’ in exhibit marking Women’s History Month

The art on the walls, the African sculptures, the colorful rug, all evoke a certain ambience at the Moody Jones Gallery in Glenside.

As one enters the space, a peace descends, transporting visitors far from the traffic just outside the gallery doors on Easton Road. Inside, a small tree-shaped lamp has miniature lights glowing like tiny candles.

There’s a sense of having just walked inside a museum devoted to Black culture and empowerment.

“People talk about how cozy it feels to them,” said Adrian Moody, who, together with his wife, Robyn R. Jones, owns the Moody Jones Gallery.

Yet the art on the walls doesn’t neglect the social problems beyond those walls.

Moody and Jones on Sunday were taking down art from the previous show, “We Three Kings,” that exhibited works of Philadelphia artists, James Atkins, R. L. Washington, and Richard Watson.

They then began installing pieces for a Women’s History Month show, “The Light of Truth,” that will feature the works of three female artists: Antoinette Ellis-Williams, Martryce Roach and Lydia Boddie-Rice.

The exhibit opens March 13. A reception will be held at the gallery at 107b Easton Road, in Glenside, from 4 to 8 p.m. on Saturday, March 16.

The title for the show was taken from a quote by Ida B. Wells-Barnett: “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.” Wells-Barnett, a pioneering Black journalist, investigated the lynchings of Black men and women in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The three artists featured in the show bring with them years of experience in other professional fields.

Martryce Roach, 40, grew up in New Brunswick, N.J. With a bachelor’s degree in public health and a master’s in social work, she once worked for the New Jersey child protection agency.

In graduate school, Roach worked with high school students in a cognitive behavioral therapy program. However, she discovered the students responded better to art therapy, .

That led Roach to begin painting on her own to cope with the stress of working with children who had been abused or neglected.

Soon, other artists persuaded her she was more talented than working in art as a hobby. In September 2022, she resigned her full-time job to devote herself to art.

Last year, she was an Artist-in-Residence at ArtCrawl Harlem, on Governor’s Island, N.Y. One of her pieces, Solo Traveler, was purchased for the permanent collection of The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia.

She recently returned to a social work job and will continue her art career.

“So now, I am juggling two full-time careers at the same time,” she said. One of her pieces at Moody Jones, Balancing Act, shows a woman balancing different parts of her life on both hands and one foot.

Antoinette Ellis-Williams, 60, of Newark, N.J., is a professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at New Jersey City University in Jersey City. She also is a poet, playwright, and minister and holds a doctorate in public policy and urban planning from Cornell University. She only began painting after turning 50. She turned to art in 2015 to express her rage after 270 girls were kidnapped in 2014 in Nigeria by Boko Haram.

“I changed at that point,” she said. “Something inside me cracked open. I found myself drawing these little dresses, each one for me representing one of the girls. I started to think about these girls as my daughters.”

She had already been writing poems and essays. After the kidnappings, she wrote a play, Scarf Diaries, which told stories about women from around the world. She began to create collages.

Born in Jamaica and 6 when she came to the U.S., Ellis-Williams creates art “as a way of unpacking rage, pain, contradictions, beauty, agency and joy, constantly trying to understand the complex history and narrative of blackness in the United States and the Black diaspora.”

Lydia Boddie-Rice, 69, from Rochester, N.Y., has formal training in art. She received a bachelor’s degree in art from Brown University and simultaneously, during her senior year at Brown, completed a K-12 certificate in art education the Rhode Island School of Design.

Boddie-Rice has had a career as a corporate communications specialist, for a media company and for a Rochester utility company. She also was an elected member of the Rochester Board of Education.

Four years ago already retired from corporate and nonprofit careers, she returned to art. Boddie-Rice describes herself as an “emerging artist. I consider myself to still be very new at it,” she told The Inquirer.

She creates collages, using photographs, commercially designed fabrics and her own digitally designed fabrics. She composes a design on her computer and then will have a company print the design on fabric, which she then paints.

Boddie-Rice recently began creating large kites, using fabrics designed with a collage of photos and other images. Two of her kites were recently featured in the Burchfield Penney Art Center’s Art in Craft Media 2023 juried show. One of the kites, Triumph has the painting of a friend, a dancer, who had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Her father was a doctor and her mother was a nurse, but Boddie-Rice said it is coincidental that she thinks of art as having healing powers.

“I want to tap into the emotional place that we protect, sometimes to our detriment and allow ourselves to be vulnerable, so we can heal.”

Moody, 67, is a semiretired lawyer who works in a law office three days a week. Jones, 68, is a retired physician active in volunteer work. The couple, who live in Wyncote, opened the gallery in December 2016.

They began collecting art about 36 years ago after they married when they were 32. Moody, grew up in North Philadelphia. Jones is from New York.

Jones said they began a personal collection after her uncle, Robert R. Jones, traveled to South Africa in the 1980s and brought back all kinds of artworks, paintings, textiles and stone sculptures. He would sell them in people’s homes.

They began going to art shows and meeting artists and building their own collection.

“We lived in this house for a while with no furniture, but lots of art,” Jones said.

A few years ago, an accountant advised them to start downsizing their collection. One day, Moody was sitting in a pub on the block. He looked across the street and saw a “for rent” sign on the building that would become the Moody Jones Gallery.

In addition to art shows, the space offers “artist talks,” and other workshops for people who want to learn how to collect art. Sometimes there is live music or poetry readings.

They expect to soon expand the gallery to the vacant store next door, Moody said.

“We just have a passion for art,” Moody said.