Black women artrepreneurs are their own bosses

Kylie Marsh

September 30, 2024

Nail decor made a lot of noise in style headlines this summer, mainly thanks to American athletes showing their patriotism on their digits during the Paris Olympic games. Nail artistry isn’t new. It’s a cultural touchstone worldwide.  

To make a living from their creativity, artists can’t just have the talent; they have to be business savvy, too. That includes knowing legalese about taxes, finance and accounting. 

Ebony Woodard combines artistry and technical skill to make a full-fledged business from her art. Woodard began nail art to regain control of the service. While in the chair, she’d see other customers at salons get preferential treatment.

“I wanted to get my nails done without feeling like I'm a hassle,” Woodard said. Even for things as simple as a clean French tip, Woodard felt undervalued as a customer. “I would feel like they were kind of rushing through it, or they would just try to get me in and out and they wouldn't give me their best work, when I just saw Sharon, and Sharon's nails were nice.” 

Like a lot of others who do their nails at home, Woodard also began the craft because it’s cheaper. She didn’t consider herself an artist in the sense of drawing or painting growing up. 

“Unfortunately, I was not born as a person that can draw naturally,” she said. “But I can create other things on nails, like crystal arrangements, 3D flowers, and I can do my art in other ways.” 

Woodard is originally from El Paso, Texas, but moved to Durham in 2012. She got licensed in 2019. After doing her own nails, she expanded to friends before taking clients full-time.

“I fell in love with putting smiles on other people's faces, and that brought joy as well,” she said. 

However, it wasn’t always Woodard’s plan to be her own boss. She was originally pursuing a degree to become an athletic trainer, but nails became her source of income when circumstances changed. 

Woodard calls herself a perfectionist. She likes to approach her craft step by step, she says, opting for unity in composition when translating a vision in her head to tiny canvases on the tips of clients’ fingers.

“Sometimes, you can have a vision in your head, but because it’s such a small canvas, it doesn't necessarily translate well,” she explained. “So you have to figure out either, can you shrink it down or can you take portions of it and put it on other nails to make it come together as one?”

Woodard began doing house calls in 2019 and continued for two years. After that, she moved to Tips & Needles, a Black-owned tattoo and nail salon in Durham. Now, she has a private suite at Robyn Mitch Studio in Durham, which is also Black-owned. 

But Woodard said she’s aspiring to have her own salon – a “beauty bar,” with lash technicians, nail technicians and hairstylists. 

“I like growth. I don’t like being stagnant,” she said.

Woodard said the mentality that nails aren’t really art is “outdated.”

“The beauty industry has grown so much,” she said. “It’s still edging its way into becoming its own force like hair. People still question and try to fight on prices when nails last three to four weeks. Hairstyles and lashes don’t.”

Zada Mitchell, a Durham native studying visual communications at North Carolina Central University, aspires to open her own digital animation studio one day. 

Mitchell comes from a family of artisans. Her mother is a hairstylist. Though her father went to school for computer arts, he’s currently an electrical engineer. Her maternal grandfather was an upholsterer, and her paternal grandfather used to do personal portraits. Her grandmother also drew, so it’s no surprise that her family was supportive of her being an artist since she was young.

“My family is kind of the ones where it's like, nobody was ever in a position to be higher than where they already were, so they encourage everybody in the family, whatever it is you love to do, you can't go any lower, so just keep doing it.”

Mitchell’s characters exude a confident and rebellious yet inviting attitude. They’re often muscular, in contrast to the often rail-thin forms in video games, cartoons, anime, and manga that she’s inspired by. Even when depicting Hatsune Miku or Princess Peach, they’re in her own signature style. Right now, she’s inspired by female rappers and current fashion trends. 

Mitchell says her painting classes at Central have taught her how to depict more motion and emotion in her works. She gets inspiration from her mom’s process in doing hair, going to live shows and the theatre, which she incorporates into her work. Best of all, she says that the work is an extension of herself. 

“The best way I can describe it is kind of like, paper dolls, or those games you used to play on Cool Math or Girls Go Games,” she said. “It’s a different version of myself with anything I can imagine. I can imagine myself as someone else if I wanted to.”

In the digital arts scene, especially on social media, there has been debate about artists who refuse to depict diverse subjects. Mitchell always thought she drew “everyone,” she said, but it wasn’t until her grandfather questioned her art that she started to reflect. 

“Do you draw Black people?” he asked. “Yeah, I draw Black people,” was her response, but she noticed that none of her characters seemed to have the 4c, tight curls and the various hairstyles made possible with it. 

“I had to kind of deconstruct that in my head. Like, okay, what do I look like first? Because I always thought that I put myself in my art. But then it's like, OK, so I have to do some unpacking there,” she said. “I very much feel like you really have to dissect in yourself, why haven’t I or why can’t I? And what are the problems that arise from that? You need to go through that first before you start drawing any person, aside from yourself, because those biases can really affect what they look like.” 

The animation industry is exhausting, Mitchell says, and to make things worse, she’s having difficulty finding jobs. 

“It’s kind of become overrun, because you have to send applications to the same five to eight companies that everybody’s like, ‘I want to go to those,’” she said. But people aren’t looking at independent studios and companies, Mitchell said. 

Mitchell says she hopes to open a gallery right in Downtown Durham that incorporates technology in its exhibitions and installations as a space for digital art. It would incorporate things like 3-d printing and projections of characters or mock-ups of the fantasy worlds in the space. 

“I kind of want to help make a place where you’re seeing more indie projects and you’re willing to take risks on these indie projects.”