In her compositions, multimedia artist Alejandra Spruill of Orange, MA, focuses on contrast. “I look for things that don’t go together, but create a whole,” she says. For example, Spruill says, “I took a painting palette and sliced it up. Then, I combined it with a silver gelatin portrait of a friend of mine.” Her friend, Natalie Cheevers, has appeared in a number of her artworks. They’ve been friends since Spruill was 14 years old, which is when she got her first job in the arts. She worked Saturdays in the photography studio of Artists for Humanity in Boston. She was born to a family of artists and grew up in the city’s Roxbury neighborhood. Spruill now serves on the Board of Advisors for the same organization. “A lot of people who are there now, were there when I was 14. So it’s cool to talk to them as an adult,” she comments. She also serves on the Board of In-Sight Photography Project, a nonprofit in Brattleboro, VT, which provides after-school arts programs for youth aged 11-18. At last year’s Small Stones Festival of the Arts in Grafton, MA, Spruill exhibited Natalie Collage 2024, a black-and-white portrait of her friend broken into strips and interspersed and woven with cut-out strips from a blue and green painting palette and cyanotype scraps. It’s a technique of woven media and collage art which she studied and worked on during her artist residency a year ago at the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans, LA. And this past April, Spruill held a solo exhibit titled Darkroom Prints and Mixed Media Collage at the Gale Free Library in Holden, MA.
For this cover of Motif’s Summer Reading issue, Spruill placed at the center of her literary-themed work a cameo of a young woman, meant to evoke 19th century regency period authors like Jane Austen. “There are also magazine aspects mixed in with analog darkroom photos,” she adds. Spruill’s favorite novel is A Farewell to Arms by 20th-century author Ernest Hemingway. “It portrays the chaos of war. And part of it is a love story at the heart of that war,” she says, referring to WWI. Another of her favorites is Frederick Forsyth’s thriller The Odessa File, which was published 50 years ago. “Part of the novel takes place during WWII. It’s also a coming-of-age story in many ways,” she says. One of her prized possessions is The Collected Works of Oscar Wilde over which she frequently muses. She also attends performances of Shakespeare in the Park whenever she can. Her favorite piece that she’s created is Almost Every Inch, a mixed media collage taken from magazine pictures and copy that she calls “a maximalist joy and delight.” Spruill was first exposed to cyanotype when she saw fellow artists working in this medium at InSight. The technique uses a solution of iron salts that react with ultraviolet light to create a cyanblue print. These distinctive Prussian blue images are used in the making of blueprints, as well as in creating art. “I’ve been putting my own spin on this relatively new-to-me medium,” she says.
Last year, she participated in the Submerged exhibition at Small Format, a queer cooperatively run café, gallery, and exhibit space on Wickenden Street in PVD. She exhibited alongside cyanotype artist Kim Arthurs, who created the cover for Motif’s Outdoor issue last May. Spruill was no stranger to Small Format. She first walked into the eclectic café in 2021, when she was living off Wickenden St. while attending UMass Law in Dartmouth. After receiving her BA in Visual Media Arts Production from Emerson College in Boston in 2019, Spruill decided to go to law school. “I asked myself: How can I copyright and protect my work, and the work of other artists, too,” she relates. She’s also a real-estate attorney, as well as a real-estate broker, in Massachusetts and New Hampshire, with ambition to grow her practice to Vermont, Washington, D.C., and beyond. “For me, it’s a means of making money in order to not only create my art, but also have complete ownership and control over it,” she explains. What Spruill likes most about the artistic and legal paths she walks is that no two days are the same. “I don’t think I have a typical day,” she concludes. “I like it that way.”