ANCO Update - 2025:Q2

ANCO Artistry kept the ball rolling through Quarter 2 of 2025, with the pace picking up to light speed towards the end of the quarter. This included extremely time-sensitive tasks and a few personal crises, which delayed the publication of our Q2 Update. But we are very excited to share what has been going on! So, without further ado…..

MURAL RESEARCH

We will start with research directions. After much difficulty and indecision about the research question in her master’s course in Spring 2025 (briefly mentioned in the 2025:Q1 update), our co-founder, Anna Currence O’Neal, dedicated her research work to the organization and administration of public space, highlighting the community benefits yielded from a properly executed mural initiative. For more information on this research project, see the ANCO Blog Post: A Pathway to Opportunities for Practicing Muralists. The community benefits discussed include economic, marketing, health, and engagement. Anna also developed a survey to be sent to public officials that would serve to gauge a community leader’s power to support mural initiatives financially, their track record of support for similar projects, their awareness of the community benefits, their willingness to support mural initiatives, and current mural opportunities in their domain.

VENDORSHIP

ANCO Artistry participated in our very first event as a solo vendor in June! Dr. Joyce White, Director of Georgia Southern University’s Gullah Geechee Heritage Center on the Armstrong Campus in Savannah, organized Georgia Southern’s Savannah Juneteenth Jubilee last month. While meeting on unrelated business, Dr. White mentioned that she was looking for vendors and face painters for the Jubilee. Through that conversation, she discovered that our co-founder Anna Currence O’Neal is a painter and art vendor. Anna arrived with paint and merchandise to set up the ANCO Artistry booth and mingle with other vendors before patrons started arriving. We are incredibly grateful for the opportunity and the wonderful people involved in making that event a success! 

PHOTOJOURNALISM

Anna also had the opportunity to accompany CBSS Anthropologists and their students on a research trip in April. We traveled to Sapelo Island on the Georgia Coast and were taken out on a shrimp boat organized through the University of Georgia’s Marine Institute (UGAMI). Stay tuned to the ANCO blog for more information about this research! We will highlight two students involved in this trip and the larger research project exploring the culture of Georgia’s shrimpers. The industry is declining due to a lack of support. The research aim is to highlight the importance of these communities, explore what resources they need, and advocate for support from local government. It was such a privilege to be included in this trip! They are a great group of educators and students, and the UGAMI staff were absolutely outstanding!

PROFESSIONAL PAINTING

Through personal turned professional connections, Anna has also been engaged to paint a nearly 3x3-foot entrance piece for a soon-to-be-completed Airbnb in Buckhead (Atlanta, GA). Aesthetic Function, an interior design firm out of Rhode Island owned and operated by the incredible AJ Edwards, is managing the project. This initial professional engagement has bloomed into a brand consultancy for ANCO Artistry with Aesthetic Function as one of our first clients (keep an eye on the ANCO blog for developments and updates!). Anna created two digital sketches for this piece (shared below) and is excited to start work on the painting this week! The yellow version was completely off the color palette (according to Anna, “the yellow ran away with me!”). The often disputed necessity of sketching (cue flashback to art school) allowed Anna to work out some issues with the line work and determine how to address the skin in the final painting. The skin coloration in the first sketch and the hair/background in the second sketch are what will inform the final painting, and we can’t wait to see it placed in its new home in Buckhead! 

WEBSITE AND MARKETING

We continued building up our website by adding more photos of artwork, blog posts, and a webpage dedicated to Mural Art. The last of which was sparked by Anna’s return to mural benefits research in her master’s coursework. The past few months have recentered Anna on her desire to create large works in public spaces to spread joy and promote community health and engagement. Currently, the page highlights Anna’s professional mural created in 2017. 

While working with the CBSS Anthropologists on the Sapelo Island research trip, it was mentioned that their campus lab was looking a little sad, and they would love a mural painted in the space. After an enthusiastic discussion on that trip and a few emails, Anna is creating a new logo for the Lab of Applied Anthropology on Georgia Southern’s Statesboro campus to be painted in the space. This sparked Anna’s idea for an alternative elective on murals that would count toward her master’s degree.

COURSEWORK AND LIFE CHANGE

The re-centering on murals and public art achieved in Anna’s spring research prompted her to reach out to her advisor about options for an alternative elective on murals through the Betty Foy Sanders Department of Art at Georgia Southern. Thanks to her advisor's incredible guidance and prior connections gained while achieving her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, Anna was able to design a course that will benefit herself, the Art Department, the Communications Department, and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (her current employer). This was Anna’s first foray into designing her own course, but it is something she has fantasized about for a very long time due to her “unconventional” career path not fitting into traditional academic silos. She designed a course that would allow her to further dive into the proven community benefits of mural initiatives and opened an opportunity to paint a mural as part of her coursework. When meeting with her professor (Anna’s BFA painting professor and now Chair of the Art Department), Anna learned that they are moving toward murals as an option in their curriculum! What a wonderful lining up of fate! As part of Anna’s independent study mural course, she will also be assisting the Art faculty in their undergraduate murals course. The independent study course was approved by her professor and advisor in late June, just before she took a week-long vacation at the beach. 

Arriving at the beach, incredibly excited about her new coursework direction, she shared this progress with her family. Little did she know, her mother and *stepfather had a life-changing proposal for her that would fit perfectly with the work she had already done to set herself up for the next semester. To her extreme shock, they offered to fund Anna through the end of the year if she left her full-time job at Georgia Southern to enroll as a full-time student in her last semester of grad school. After much consideration, Anna has decided to accept their generous offer! While there is absolutely some trepidation in uprooting her current steady job and throwing her previous plan out the window, this opportunity was far too good to pass up!

After she decided to accept, came the work of finalizing the alternative elective paperwork and designing a second project for her final grad course. Both courses are essentially self-directed with the help of a mentor in that area. While at the beach, she began designing the second project on AI in Brand Promotion, which was approved on July 9! We will dive more into the specifics of each project in our next ANCO Update, but suffice to say, we are ECSTATIC about these developments! Anna is thrilled to be in a position to truly go after her passions and create her own career path!! We will be sharing more throughout Q3 about our progress and the beginning of the transition out of full-time work for Georgia Southern.

CONCLUSION

This quarterly update is a testament to the powers of authentic networking and being open to chance opportunities! Because of an initial conversation about performing a minor mural and space improvement project in Anna’s current role, an entire life change has blossomed beautifully before her eyes (with tons of support, organization, and planning to make it happen). So many exciting opportunities have sparked over the last few weeks, and we can't wait to get started! We are incredibly grateful to Anna’s mom, Cynthia E. Currence, and her fiancé, Ken Bernhardt! Their generosity and support cannot be overstated. Thanks to them, she is now able to fully devote herself to her career and passions for her final semester of graduate school! This is something that seemed to be a pipe dream just weeks ago. 

Our sincerest thanks to our family, friends, readers, supporters, casual viewers, and everyone else who engages with our work in large and small forms. We appreciate you and can’t wait to share our developments in Q3 and Q4!

Have an outstanding day!

“One must work and dare if one really wants to live.” -Vincent van Gogh