Stephen Curd and Ryan Whittington
By Ben Jennings
Ben Jennings is a member of the A! Magazine for the Arts committee and a retired professor.
After their first date in November 2020, Stephen Curd called his mother to tell her, “This is the last first date that I will ever go on.” He was sure that Ryan Whittington was to be his future husband.
Whittington remembers, “We met on a dating app called Hinge. I was living in Winston-Salem at the time, and Stephen was visiting in Marshall, North Carolina. That brought him near enough to fall within my geographic filter. If Stephen hadn’t taken that trip, we never would have met on that app. A week later we went on our first date in Winston-Salem. This was at the peak of the COVID shutdown, so all we could do was get coffee to go and walk around the Old Salem graveyard.”
Whittington recalls that it took him a little longer to come around to a certainty to a life commitment with Stephen, but not by much. “It was clear very early on that we had a kind of compatibility that we hadn’t found in anyone else.”
Curd, a native of St. Louis, has been living in Washington County for nearly 11 years, working as a clothing designer and operating a company, Lavelle Designs, where he built a brand around custom clothing and accessories. Since the couple moved to Damascus this fall, Curd has transitioned to making custom pieces for clients and making more accessories from leather goods (belts, wallets, and purses), custom jackets and jeans, as well as necklaces and rings. He now has an in-home studio and an outdoor studio for the summer. He says, “People shop differently these days and downsizing what I do has helped bring the creativity back into what I love.”
Since 2011 he has had one or two fashion shows a year at various venues: New York, Asheville and Knoxville as well as locally at the Bristol Train Station, the Barns at Chip Ridge, and William King Museum of Art. He describes his distinctive style: “I have a very western ready-to-wear vibe about my clothing. It has a vintage inspiration, with textiles bought on travels and small remnants from thrift store finds. I try to re-purpose and re-use all the materials I have. I also create and print my own fabrics.”
After several years of teaching as an adjunct professor at Emory & Henry University and King University, Whittington last fall was hired as an assistant professor of music at Virginia Highlands Community College.
He thinks that VHCC can be central to music education in the Tri-Cities. “We live in an area in Southwest Virginia rich in musical heritage: the Bristol Sessions, the Johnson City Sessions, and many historic events for folk music in the area. It’s timely,” Whittington notes, “that VHCC started offering a music major last fall. Students can now get an Associate of Arts in music that will transfer to four-year institutions, allowing them to pursue careers in music education, music therapy, musicology, music theory, composition, performance, conducting or arts administration.”
Whittington will also oversee the Arts Array program at VHCC, where he hopes to expand the series beyond the arts and humanities into other disciplines. He feels that the arts are inherently inter-disciplinary. He envisions future programs such as “a workshop on the physics of the piano mechanism that might appeal to musicians as well as engineering or physics students.”
Curd recalls that clothing design and construction began at an early age. “My grandmother taught all of us boys to sew. It was our time to be creative and dream together. I remember the first time that I went to a fabric story with her as a kid to pick out fabric for summer clothes, shorts and tops. It blew my mind that I could pick out exactly what I wanted, and she could make it for me. I was hooked.
“From an early age I loved shoes and clothing. My mother was a fashionista, and I loved going shopping with her. Watching her get dressed was my first experience with style. She had great style. We thrifted a lot growing up too, so I have always had a love for vintage and pre-loved clothing.” Curd has a B.A. in Fashion Design from Lindenwood University, studying menswear and womenswear, with a concentration in men’s suiting,
Whittington’s interest in music began with an elementary teacher in his hometown of Pilot Mountain, North Carolina. “I would watch her fingers dance over the keys, completely entranced and determined to do that myself. I took piano lessons but didn’t start formal piano lessons until I was at Wake Forest University. Even after I declared as a music major, I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do with a music degree until I had the chance to study abroad in Vienna, where I discovered musicology.” That led him eventually to an M.A. and a Ph.D. in musicology at Florida State University.
Whittington says, “I’ve always been interested in what music means to people who experience it, past and present, and how we can study that academically, which is really just another way of experiencing what so enraptured my younger self.”
How do these two artists inspire each other, and has there ever been any collaboration? They both love music and playing music. Whittington is a pianist and organist, and Curd plays guitar and they both sing. They sang last year in the Emory & Henry Community Choir, and they are currently making music in the Virginia Highlands Community College Choir. They collaborated on a piece for Curd’s 2021 collection. They both embroidered a tarot card on a vest that Stephen made. Whittington says, “The card was the Ace of Cups which symbolizes love and new relationships.”
They both believe that the arts feed communities and vice versa. Whittington says, “It is this beautiful feedback loop that drives what we do together and separately. The fact that we are both artists provides common ground for understanding each other and what each other values. It also helps that we are both different artists in different disciplines. This brings a kind of variety to our relationships and gives us lots of opportunities to celebrate and encourage each other.”
