FOUNDER & GALLERIST

“When women support women, magical shit happens.”

Sylvia holds a BFA in Theatre Directing from Ohio University and has spent the last decade in creative strategy and copywriting. She is a ceramic sculptor and founder of The Crone House, a women-led gallery and art consulting practice based in Richmond, VA, launched in October 2024. She curates group and solo exhibitions, offers art buying services, and works directly with collectors and artists. She co-hosts [Untitled] Crone House Podcast with Paulette Beete and is building toward a permanent physical space by 2027.

MULTIDISCIPLINARY ARTIST, WRITER, & CURATOR

Paulette Beete is a Resident Artist at the Crone House and co-host of [Untitled]: A Crone House Podcast. She also creates social media content for the gallery, bugs Sylvia to take her along for artist studio visits, and is excited to curate (and help curate) future shows. Recently retired from the National Endowment for the Arts, Paulette’s creative passions include writing poetry, conducting artist interviews, and creating mixed media visual artworks. Her byline has appeared in Colossal, Provincetown Arts, Callaloo, and Rhino, among many other publications. Her mixed media piece “I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions” was also featured in Deep Rest:  What We Find in the Stillness, the 2025 Crone House Winter Solstice show. She creates messes and curates chaos in her long-time home base Silver Spring, Maryland.

PAINTING & MIXED MEDIA

Hannah Anderson is a self-taught abstract artist born in 1953. She began painting in 1990 and has worked intensively with Michele Cassou and Bob Burridge. Her full artistic practice emerged in 2024 after decades of active development.

Her work engages the full spectrum of luminous color and explores light and dark through abstract shape and representation. Drawing from nature, pattern, and archetypal symbols rooted in Christian and shamanic traditions, she creates work that invites viewers into deeper worlds. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia, and exhibits at Crossroads Art Center Crone House, and her studio.

PAINTING & MIXED MEDIA

Melissa Casanova is a Dominican-American painter based in Richmond, Virginia. Her work explores heritage, memory, and imagination through layered abstraction and realism, using vibrant color and expressive brushwork to capture the invisible threads connecting us to our origins and inner landscapes.

Her collections, including Heritage Dreams and Awakening evolve through generational intuitive mark-making and reflection. Her latest collection Becoming was featured at Black Iris Social Club.

CERAMICS

Mel Titus has been in clay or mud since childhood, beginning with slipware alongside her mother in the 1960s. In the early 1970s, she apprenticed at the Hand Workshop, now the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, where her foundation in ceramic craft deepened. She later worked as a studio assistant at Freimarck Pottery in the 1980s and Camden Clayworks from 2012–2013.

At age 60, Mel opened her own pottery studio, Mel’s Pottery, originally in Ashland and now located in Richmond’s Bryan Park area.

Guided by her belief that “Nature inspires my work. Nature inspires my life,” her pieces reflect a lifelong conversation with the earth itself.

CERAMICS & PAINTING

Maggie is an artist and a high school art teacher living in Richmond, VA. She works across multiple mediums—oils, acrylics, clay, and textiles—creating work designed to be used and appreciated in everyday life. Since graduating from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in 2024, she has founded and became the co-owner of Rainy Daze Cafe and Clay, a pottery teaching business, as well as having her work shown in exhibitions at The Crone House.

Her practice centers on death, rebirth, and the life cycle, using mushrooms as symbols of renewal from decay. She explores feminism through the lens of witchcraft, reclaiming a term historically used to villainize women and transforming it into a statement about power. Her work addresses nature's cycles, the modern witch, and how reframing death—not as fearful, but as a natural and beautiful progression—shifts how we value life itself.