Local artist stands out at Africa House gallery
(First in a two-part series for Black History Month).
Despite her northern European complexion, accent and last name, Ann van de Graaf is very much African-American.
“I grew up in Tanzania,” she said recently, “and I didn’t see another white child besides my brother until I was four. Whites were very much a minority there, and because it was a protectorate and not a colony, they weren’t allowed to own land. I became accustomed to being the only white person at a lot of gatherings.”
It was a perspective that van de Graaf brought to Lynchburg in the late 1950s, only to collide head-on with the peculiar institution of segregation.
“That was new and strange to me,”…
