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Artists within the community gathered at the 5&Dime April 21 to check out the work of featured artist Aaron Sanders Head.

Fellow artist A.C. Reeves invited Head, a Greensboro native, to showcase his work, paint an exterior window pane of the building and write a love letter to Selma on a clear pane.

“I’m saving these and I’m giving all 25 to the Chamber of Commerce so they can put them all over town because artists see things differently than other people,” Reeves said.

“These love letters – this is No. 9 – are pretty powerful.”

Head said he was glad to participate in the project.

“I really love the community that A.C. builds through art like in a really visible public way here in the 5&Dime space,” he said.

“I’m always have to be involved in anything that kind of elevates the arts and gets people involved with the visual arts in different ways.”

He added Selma’s art scene offers plenty of variety.

“What’s interesting about Selma is you can really find people working in pretty much every media, I feel like,” he said.

“You have people who work in pottery, you have woodworkers, you have folk artists like Charlie Lucas, and you have people who do cyanotypes like A.C. It’s such a diverse, creative community here. I think Selma’s lucky to have it.”

A textile artist, Head makes his artwork from different pieces of fabric.

“The biggest medium I use is natural dyes,” he said. “So I grow things like indigo, marigold and cosmos, and forage things like goldenrod and black walnut to make dye from those plant materials.”

For Head, art serves as a way to view the world through another person’s perspective.

“You really get a sneak peek into somebody’s mind through the work that make and see how they see the world through the work that they create,” he said.

Reeves said the ongoing art installation at the 5&Dime opens the third Thursday of each month. By the end of the two-year project, 25 artists will have been featured at the location.

“Our idea is let’s see what happens when you focus so much love on one corner in Selma, Alabama, for two years” she said. “These events tend to be a lot of fun. It’s always just kind of a weird mixture of people, but people are coming from all over the Black Belt as well as all over the state.”

Reeves said envisions the space will be turned into a restaurant after the two-year art installation has concluded.