THE LIVANO JOURNAL
PAGE 4
Keck Kick
PAGE 8 Do You Believe in Mermaids?
PAGE 12 Made with Love
PAGE 16
Livano Cats and Dogs
PAGE 20 Matters of the Heart
PAGE 25 Design Matters
PAGE 28 On Her Own Terms
PAGE 32 The Power of Seven
PAGE 36 Food for Thought
PHOTOGRAPHY
JAN VAN IJKEN | The Power of Seven
LOUIS FORT | Food for Thought
TAYLOR BANNER | Keck Kick
YANA LIPKAN | Livano Cats and Dogs
CASSIE PALI | Do You Believe in Mermaids?, Cover
WORDS
ROSALIND FOURNIER
Ke ck Kick, Do You Believe in Mermaids?, Made With Love, On Her Own Terms
CASSIE CONDREY
Matters of the Heart, Food for Thought
HANNAH KECK, A CHARLOTTE-BASED LIVANO RESIDENT, IS AMONG THE NATION’S TOP TAEKWONDO COMPETITORS
Growing up in Plano, Texas, Hannah Keck took ballet and poured into it the heart and passion she brings to just about everything she undertakes. Nonetheless, at the tender age of 11, she started to question whether ballet was the right fit for her. “If you see a picture of me, you’d know I never fit into the ballet dancer’s body image,” Keck says. “I wasn’t overweight, but I was a bigger kid and I got bullied a lot for it.”
The bullying eventually drove her to consider a new pursuit, and she found it, as it happened, right across the street from her ballet school — in a taekwondo studio.
“My mom saw it and said, ‘Martial arts. That should help her,’” Keck laughs.
Trying taekwondo — the traditional Korean art of self-defense — turned out to be an auspicious move for Keck, who is now a 21-year-old Olympic contender, regularly competing around the globe at the highest level of the sport.
Even as a child, Keck took to taekwondo like a natural. The flexibility she brought from ballet served her well; only now she was better able to channel her strength and size into a sport for which it seemed she was born. “I had done karate when I was a lot younger and really liked that,” Keck says. “So taekwondo clicked.”
She started with a focus on poomsae, which is usually associated with the study of forms and techniques — the performance aspect of taekwondo. But a few years later, she was ready to get in the ring.
“All of a sudden, I got really lucky in a match and decided to start fighting,” she says. Her taekwondo school connected her with a new coach, Tony Cabrera, to help her transition to competitive sparring. By high school, she was training twice a day, with the second session often lasting until 10 p.m. Many weekends, she left home on Friday evenings to travel to competitions, returning home on Sunday just in time to get ready for school again on Monday. “It was crazy, especially for a 17-year-old,” she says.
Cabrera, her coach, saw in Keck a young woman with rare talent and momentum.
“She progressed very fast,” he remembers. “Hannah is very, very talented, focused, and stubborn, if you will. She hones in, she wants it, and that’s it.”
TAEKWONDO 101
For the uninitiated, taekwondo — which became an official medal sport at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia — can be difficult to understand. Taekwondo
THE POINT SYSTEM
1. One point for a punch.
2. Two points for a regular bodyshot, such as a sidekick or roundhouse kick.
3. Three points for a regular headshot.
4. Four points for a spinning bodyshot.
5. Five points for a spinning headshot.
Penalties incurred also give one’s opponent points, and five penalties automatically result in losing the round.
Keck says she’s long past needing to remember the scoring system; she enters the ring on autopilot. She’s a skilled puncher, and one of her best moves is delivering a punch followed by swinging her leg around for a hit to the head — a four-point shot.
“I like being in the ring, the energy it gives me,” she says. “I like the adrenaline rush. I also like fighting as an art form just as much as I do as a sport, so I still go into training every day with the attitude that I’m trying to make art.”
AT 21, A SERIOUS CONTENDER
Now training with the elite USATKD National Academy at the United States Performance Center in Charlotte, N.C., Keck has already won gold medals at international tournaments, including the French, Canadian, and Korean Opens, and many more medals and honors from major competitions globally and domestically. Keck has been named an All-American Taekwondo Athlete at both the junior and senior levels. She also recently had the honor of making the National Team for the World Taekwondo Championships for the second time. The tournament was held in Baku, Azerbaijan at the end of May.
Along with the coaches in Charlotte, Keck has also continued to work remotely with her home coach, Cabrera, who helps her develop strategies for upcoming competitions. He also provides moral support on the rare occasion her spirit flags.
“What Hannah is doing is demanding from the athlete perspective and from a life perspective, too,” Cabrera says. “A lot of times, you have to put your dream ahead of family gatherings and other events that are important in order to travel to events that are important for your athletic career. But she is an amazing athlete, very talented, and one who has a very high level of grit and perseverance. She is very, very focused on what she wants and continues to amaze me every time.”
Keck says that when others express that kind of faith in her, it helps her to push through the hard days. “I’ve been very lucky that the general population of USA Taekwondo has been very kind to me,” she says, adding that the support meant even more to her last year, when she didn’t make the National Team. “The whole community rallied around me, and I think that’s the biggest honor.” She wrote more emotionally about the support she’s received in an Instagram post after she learned she was headed back to the World Championships: “I just want to give a huge thank you to everyone who has supported me over the past year. …That kid just wanted to be seen, but she’s gained so much more than that. That kid got her fight back.”
LOOKING AHEAD
Keck feels great going into the 2023 World Taekwondo Championships. This is her second time to compete in the event (she was only 17 the first time) and considers it both an honor and a thrill. “It’s an exhilarating atmosphere,” she says. “They send you out with music, the lights are on, and there are people yelling and shouting. I think that’s the addiction that keeps me coming back into the ring.”
Her confidence level is high. “I’m honestly banking for a medal at this World Championships,” Keck says. Having hit the prime age for taekwondo competitors, she also feels good about her chances of making the team for the Paris 2024 Olympics. There, anything could happen.
Still, Keck says it’s never too early to start thinking about life beyond competition. Though her training schedule is demanding, she makes time when she can to visit a local farmer’s market, and she finds peace reading and spending time with her cat. She is also currently a part-time remote college student and plans to eventually go to medical school and study infectious diseases.
“Realistically, taekwondo athletes don’t compete past their early 30s,” she says. “It’s a sport where you have to be really flexible but also swing your legs in such a violent manner that people get injured like crazy. So I’m very lucky that this isn’t my end game. Now, I’m in this chapter of my life and enjoying every second of it, but when I decide to retire, I know there are things beyond it. I’m excited for that too, because I live for science. That’s another thing I can see myself waking up and being equally excited and passionate about.”
When she was a child, Catherine Williams’ parents took her to see the Mermaids of Weeki Wachee, women who had been mesmerizing visitors for generations with their performances of underwater ballet in the famous Weeki Wachee Springs.
“They were extremely glamorous,” says Williams, today an art conservator in Austin. “I remember they smiled the whole time while underwater. After seeing them, I would try and try to teach myself to do that.”
Visitors have been cherishing memories like this for decades, ever since a man named Newton Perry had the idea for a new kind of show — synchronized swimming (think Ethel Merman in “Neptune’s Daughter”) that would be performed entirely underwater.
Perry, an accomplished swimmer and coach who had trained Navy Frogmen to swim underwater in World War II, established the park in 1947 and opened it to the public as a tourist attraction. Located just north of Tampa on U.S. 19 — only four miles from Livano Nature Coast — the park boasts one of the deepest-known underwater cave systems in the country, with springs fed by 117 million gallons of clear, fresh water bubbling up from the limestone of the Florida aquifer system every day.
Perry believed the underwater performers (always known as mermaids, though the original swimmers did not wear tails) would be a perfect fit for the already breathtaking beauty of the site. He invented a special breathing apparatus that the mermaids still use to this day. He built a subaqueous theater for audiences to watch the mermaids through a giant glass window, and the show has been drawing visitors to the park ever since.
“We have people from all over the world descend on Hernando County to see this unique and charming attraction,” says John Athanason, tourism marketing specialist for Florida’s Adventure Coast Visitors Bureau. The most famous visitor, he adds, was Elvis Presley, who in 1961 paused production on a film he was making nearby to come see the mermaids perform.
Athanason’s personal history with Weeki Wachee — today a Florida State Park — dates back to childhood. A native Floridian, he remembers coming to see the show as a kid. In 2001 (prior to his current position), he became the marketing and public relations manager for Weeki Wachee Springs and says returning to the park brought memories flooding back.
“When I started working at the park in 2001, it was like stepping back in history and reliving my childhood,” he says. “That’s what makes the park special, because it provides that for people.”
BEFORE THERE WAS DISNEY WORLD
Part of that nostalgia, Athanason notes, comes from the fact that Weeki Wachee predates by far today’s bigger-name Florida attractions, like Walt Disney World and Universal Studios. “A lot of the major parks now have rides that are 3D or virtual reality,” he says. “And they’re great — don’t get me wrong. But there’s something special about the Weeki Wachee Mermaids, because you’re 16 feet below the surface of this pristine spring, and it’s the only theater of its kind in the entire world. It doesn’t need any special effects. Regardless of your age or gender, to see these beautiful people perform underwater ballet is magical.”
Charles Buchanan, a writer and visual artist in Birmingham, Ala., had heard about the park for years but never had a chance to visit as a kid. A few years ago, he got his chance when he took his family to Sanibel Island for vacation; on the way home, they decided to take a detour to Weeki Wachee. “Our daughter at that time was four, very much into mermaids, and still straddling that line between what’s real and fictional,” Buchanan remembers. “But we could tell she was going to lean on the side of, ‘These are totally mermaids.’”
For Buchanan, the sense of history was tangible. “It’s a quirky, interesting, authentic old-Florida tradition, and I love the idea that generations of people have driven that way to watch these performers.”
A SORORITY OF SIRENS
Athanason says over the years he’s gotten to know many of the underwater performers, who engage in four to six months of intense training before officially joining the elite group known as the Sorority of Sirens. Many are simultaneously attending college or graduate school or training for a career as an EMT or firefighter and have earned the privilege of performing as a mermaid to put themselves through school. Athanason says he sees how hard it is for
“They showed off all their tricks, like the one who could drink a Coca-Cola underwater, and they were giggling and had such a youthful spirit.”
them to relinquish the title of Weeki Wachee Mermaid once they decide to move on to the next phase of their lives, but he’s also had the pleasure of watching them maintain lifetime friendships and later bring their own children to experience the magic of the show.
Many in fact return in earnest, years later, to volunteer as instructors at Sirens of the Deep Mermaid Camp — a weekend-long experience in which women ages 30 and up come to Weeki Wachee for a crash course in underwater ballet, transforming themselves into mermaids, at least for a couple of days.
Erin Street, who is based in Birmingham, Alabama and works in human relations for a tech company, participated a few years ago and describes it as an unforgettable opportunity. “I grew up in Clearwater, Fla., going to see the mermaids,” she says. “When I heard about the camp, I messaged a friend from high school, and we jumped on it.”
She says her instructors that weekend ranged in age from their 50s to an 84-year-old woman she describes as “amazing.”
“For a weekend, you learn how to swim underwater and do certain skills and tricks, including a lot of breath control. You want to be graceful and lovely, so they teach you how to open your eyes, smile, and blow kisses while you’re doing flips and various formations. They make it look effortless, but it’s much more physically demanding than you think. The highlight is being able to swim in the underwater theater and see from a vantage point that very few people get to see.”
Street adds that the instructors also told them about the history of the park, the springs, and the amazing wildlife. They told the campers about the Native Americans who once lived on the land and gave the springs the name “Weeki Wachee,” which means “little spring” or “winding river.”
She says many of these mermaid veterans have become strong advocates for preserving the natural integrity of the area and teaching others to treat it respectfully. After her weekend there, Street says she understands why.
“It’s a very peaceful, beautiful place,” she says. “People tend to forget that Florida has these amazing, natural spaces like this and go right for the kitsch, but this is really a beautiful thing. Even now, if I’m having a bad day, I’ll think about what it felt like, floating on the surface and looking underneath … knowing that I was able to make this dream come true and that I actually became a mermaid. It makes my inner child very happy.”
Tara Cox, a writer and editor in New York City who has also attended the camp, echoes that sentiment. “I remember thinking, this is how it would feel to be onstage at Madison Square Garden if you were a musician,” she says.
“The people who work there have a ton of talent to perform those shows. They look beautiful, but they’re also magical and special and different.”
Cox adds that meeting the retired mermaids only enhanced her childhood belief that they hold superpowers.
“They did a show for us during that weekend, and it was just gorgeous. They showed off all their tricks, like the one who could drink a Coca-Cola underwater, and they were giggling and had such a youthful spirit. It was beautiful. My instructor would also tell stories from back in the day. Not only was she a mermaid, but her daughter was, too.”
Cox says that even though she was exhausted, she still wasn’t ready to leave when it was over. “None of us wanted to leave. We said, ‘This is only two days? I could do this for a week!’ It holds a special place in the heart. Until I die, I’m probably going to go there as my happy place.”
With the sell-out success of her product launches, big-name artistic collaborations, and a huge following on social media, The Coy Collection founder Sequoyah Johnson — “Coy” to her friends and fans — is having the time of her life. From her iconic Smile Mugs to her signature Cowgirl Vases, Johnson’s designs are a little about whimsy, a lot about playful inspiration and, at their heart, a kind of joyful rebellion.
The rebellion part may be a hidden component, but Johnson revels in it. It comes from her doubts in the beginning that people would accept “happy” designs as true art and her willingness to follow her instincts anyway.
“I knew even with all my training,” she says, “I was making work my teacher would not have approved of at all. Typical ceramics work is more earthy and less vibrant. I don’t think that’s bad. But at the same time, it was a healing moment for me to be able to share simplified iconography that still feels meaningful.”
She also hopes her small, clean designs leave something to the imagination. “For the icons to be so simple, they leave room for you to create how you feel and what resonates with you,” Johnson says, “whether that be joy or maybe something that was hard, and you’re thinking about how you went through it, and now you’re okay,” she says. “My perspective stems from that. Even the happy faces are all hand-drawn, so even though they look similar, they’re not the same. It’s really just calling us to be as different as we want to be and enjoy the journey.”
A WINDING PATH TO CERAMICS
Johnson first discovered her love for ceramics through a class she took during high school. When she started college at the University of North Texas, however, she thought photography would pave an easier path to a future career. That changed when a middling midterm review suggested that her true talents might lie elsewhere. It was a disappointment that quickly turned into a stroke of serendipity — Johnson’s career is full of serendipity — when her advisor pointed out that Johnson had already earned enough credits to graduate with a degree in ceramics.
“I think ceramics were always my underlying passion,” Johnson says. “I just had to figure out how to make that work.”
She started out teaching art in school and launched The Coy Collection on the side. She loved teaching, but during that time she suffered a life-threatening car accident, and then COVID-19 hit. Between those two major events, life seemed to be nudging, maybe shoving, Johnson to decide what she really wanted. Art won. “At that point, I’d had a taste of being able to work for myself and being able to create my own environment,” she says, “and I was ready.”
Originally a native of California, Johnson was living in Austin, a hotbed of creativity and independent thinking. It was perfect for an artist committed to following her own instincts. The pandemic, meanwhile, was driving people all over the world to delve into artistic pursuits, which helped her plug into a community of mutual support. “It was the perfect storm of the events of 2020,” she says.
THE SMILE THAT CHANGED HER WORLD
Johnson’s smile designs are a natural outgrowth of her time as a teacher when she tested her modest theory that no one is too old to appreciate a symbol of encouragement. “I gave my kids stickers all the time in elementary school, and then I started doing it in middle school, too,” she explains. “It still sparked the same joy, even though you think middle-school children are older and don’t want stickers or simple things. I really wanted to challenge that with adults, because everything is already complex enough. Being a Black person is very complex. Being a woman is very complex. Being an adult, living, moving, breathing; it’s always so complex, so I really like the idea of breaking things down.”
She adds, “I think that’s what resonates — how life can be as complex as it is but still have these simple elements.”
The Smile Mug became Johnson’s first product launch under The Coy Collection. At the same time, she tagged her business as Black-owned on Instagram posts, which Johnson believes also caught people’s attention. “It was an overwhelming overnight success,” Johnson says. “I went from zero orders to 300-plus in hours.”
She had to shut down the website while she buckled down in her studio to meet the new orders.
The demand for that first batch became the norm; subsequent launches — which now include smile designs in various incarnations as well as cow-print mugs (the “Moo Cups”), ranch-dressing and hot-sauce-bottle vases, and other playful pieces — have created a similar frenzy. The record time for a complete sell-out is 10 minutes.
This has created a supply-demand ratio that, in the counterintuitive way Johnson’s life seems to operate, has worked to her advantage. The Coy Collection is currently a one-woman operation, and it takes weeks to produce about 50 pieces. As it turns out, customers are happy to wait for up to two months for a made-to-order piece.
“I think it creates a more meaningful bond with the pieces you’re getting,” Johnson says, “which is my whole thing.”
Along the way, several major brands have sought Johnson out for mutually beneficial collaborations. She has been featured by Microsoft as an example of a small business owner using Microsoft Teams in her operations. The clothing brand DONNI created a limited-edition Valentine’s box set pairing a sherpa shirt jacket with a Coy mug (the design was a tiny heart — smiling, of course).
Most prominently, the restaurant chain Qdoba filmed a commercial as part of their #FriendsWithFlavor campaign in Johnson’s studio, with Johnson as the star. In the video, she talks about the similarities between preparing food and making ceramics (“It’s like a huge experiment”), and Qdoba’s offerings are displayed on dishes Johnson created exclusively for the project.
Johnson says the collaborations came about organically, as word about her brand and the bright personality behind it spread on social media. “I think it’s really been all about showing up and having an authentic story to tell,” she says, “but also being in a vein that’s not so traditional. I think it’s also exciting to see people of color, and people in general, taking the medium to different heights.” Johnson adds that her dream collaboration would be to design all the ceramics — from dinnerware to décor — for an entire restaurant.
THE FUTURE OF COY
On the subject of Johnson’s future plans for The Coy Collection, she says at the moment, she is simply embracing the unknown. She’s doing what she’s always done, which is to follow her heart. Johnson recently moved to Los Angeles for a change of scenery, so in some ways, she’s finding her footing again. “I’m kind of in this flexible state, letting things come and go as they please,” she says. “It’s interesting, because I’m the only one running the business right now, so I’m having to honor not knowing.” One thing she is fairly sure of is that it will continue to be a small-scale shop. In Austin, she had two employees, which seemed about right. She’s also certain that her art will never lose its infusion of Texas spirit, which shines through in the Cowgirl Vases. Unlike her other pieces, they’re pure white and feature more complex detail and texture, designed to look well worn, as any self-respecting cowgirl boots should. Livano has commissioned several of these to feature in its Texas properties — a perfect fit to combine a Southwestern mindset, a free-spirited artist who is all about community, and the way of living Livano represents.
Johnson describes her Texan bona fides like this. “When I first lived in Texas, I would say, ‘Yeah, I’m from California,’” she says. “And now, moving back here, I’m like ‘Whoa — I am Texas through and through. I got a Texas tattoo the day I left. We’ll forever have a Texas connection. I’ve been thinking about my new collection, and I think it’s going to say, ‘Yee-haw from L.A.!’”
