culture
CREATIVE CONVERSATIONS
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Have a special artistic talent? Step into LOCAL Life’s and the Hilton Head Island Office of Cultural Affairs’ monthly Creative Conversations spotlight. Go to culturehhi.org/portfolio/artist-of-the-month/ to apply or scan this QR code.
Back in the 1990s, four-year-old Sonya Grant would wander from table to table, cadging quarters from diners at Abe’s Native Shrimp House, her grandfather’s restaurant on William Hilton Parkway.
Sonya Grant: Designer/entrepreneur, Gullah T’s N’ Tings BY CAROLYN MALES PHOTOGRAPHY BY MIKE RITTERBECK Then she’d insert the coins in the jukebox, climb up onto a table near the bar and belt out the Drifters’ “Save the Last Dance for Me.” Sonya Grant is not shy. In middle school, at an age when conformity reigns, she dared to dress differently. She’d gotten her first sewing machine in eighth grade and voilà, a fashion designer was born. What’s more, she never read the operating instructions. Propelled by bold imagination, she worked on pure instinct. She’d grab a pair of jeans, take them apart and refashion them into a skirt or a purse with a belt strap. Or she’d dress in a psychedelic creation: a wildly patterned paisley skirt coordinated with a hot-pink button-down. Then she’d wrap her head with a matching bandana. “What the heck do you have on?” kids would ask. The answer? Designs she’d developed and sketched in a spiral notebook. Twenty years later, she’s ditched the hallucinogenic paisley, but a notebook is still part of her creative tool bag. However, this time around, she’s toting one with a bold stacked Gullah graphic on its cover that she created for her company, Gullah T’s N’ Tings. She takes it with her whether she’s at her day job managing the Lancôme counter in Belk’s, at pop-up shops where she sells her latest collection, or at the beach when she’s chilling out. Along the way, her “manifest” as she calls it, has become dog-eared and coffee-stained, but it serves as an ongoing repository for business plans for her expanding clothing and sundries line.
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LocalLifeSC.com + JUNE 2021