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Lawrence Magazine
spring 2014
of colorful non-horse” tones, as well as some gold, she says. “I want the colors dripping like candle wax,” she says. When one large retail store closed in Lawrence, a fleet of plastic feet forms were destined for the trash. Minor claimed one of the sock modelers to create Foot Fetish, with a beaded jester stripe and colorful polka dots. She applies the beads in sections, smoothing and patting out small spheres, pushing them together one small section at a time until each of the tiny onesixteenth-inch beads lies flat. “The circles are tedious,” she says. It doesn’t bother Minor when children and adults surrender to their urge to touch her works of art. “‘Go ahead and touch it,’ I tell kids and adults. We all need to touch it. I get that,” she says. “And besides, it’s all really securely puttogether with $1 worth of nontoxic tacky glue.” Finding the right eyes for a new piece of art is the first step Minor takes with a new seed bead project. Her Brown-Eyed Girl is named for the brown glass eyes she found for sale online. An heirloom bracelet cut in half provides perfectly shaped lips for the copper and black diva. Her
works sell for anywhere from $35 to $800, Minor says. “My daughter tells me I need to charge more for my art, but it kills me. People enjoy seeing my work, and I love talking to the people about it. It’s the most fun I have.” For Minor, art is also closely connected to her life in Lawrence. She is a board member of the Lawrence Public Library and is president of the local chapter of the NAACP. Her mother and father were raised in Lawrence, and much of her extended family has called Lawrence home since the early 1900s. “The only way to make a community better is to work to make it better. Even when my kids were little, I would drag them to help with whatever I was doing. We painted the Drop-In Center. We served at LINK.” She regularly brings in beads and craft projects at elementary schools and donates as many of her pieces as she can to auctions to raise money for nonprofits. “I am in this community,” she says. “This is where I live. It may sound hokey, but kids are our future. You never know what will happen if I can inspire a child with an art project.”
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