Linda Gartrell Street
Creative visionary. Strategic consultant. Designing artist. Curator.
Dynamic Entrepreneurial Force.
Linda Street (she/her) has built her brand on bringing art to the people, combining skills from her decades-long career in corporate management with an artist’s imagination and love of cultural storytelling. Through her brainchild, Pink Dragon Artist Syndicate LLC, Street orchestrates mergers between art and community, artist and audience, and the public and private stakeholders so vital to ensuring that art has reach and permanence. A catalyst with a long history of sparking self-expression among individual artists and communities, Street’s work successfully bridges socioeconomic gaps and the divides of age and ethnicity.
As a coordinator and consultant, Street guides creative projects through every stage of development. She can refine concepts, suggest funding sources and locations, and help clients determine which artistic mediums will best convey their message and ideals. She connects entities seeking to commission public art with creators who are a good fit, while her background in marketing and promotions helps target the right audience. Street, a former executive at a Fortune 100 company, is also experienced at navigating the sometimes bureaucratic process of seeing a public art endeavor to fruition. But as an artist and designer herself, she never loses sight of the inspiration behind a project and how it can bring joy to others.
Nurturing the potential of women and girls has been central to Street’s mission, sparking her “dope chick” brand and female empowerment movement. She developed career guidance and event programming for Dress For Success, the leading global women’s organization. In 2016 and 2019, Street curated East Orange Is The Newest Black and it’s sequel, No Fear: Return of the Dope Art Chick, an art exhibition series highlighting multi-generational female artists, at historic Manufacturer’s Village in her hometown of East Orange, New Jersey.
For NJ Transit’s Adopt-A-Station program, Street organized creative placemaking events at Newark Broad Street and East Orange train stations, centering art as a way for residents to claim a space of transience as their own. Linda Street has directed public art installations for Verizon, Trust for Public Land, NJ Transit Arts and City of East Orange.
Among others, these projects included the work of renowned New Jersey-based artists Tom Nussbaum and Jerry Gant. As Gant’s long-time collaborator, Street has represented his expansive art and archive collection, since his untimely passing in 2018. She developed a collection management program to examine and catalogue the wide range of Gant’s media works and ephemera.
In 2020, she was engaged by the Arts Council of East Orange, as Project Manager for a landmark Black Lives Matter Community Mural installation at Manufacturers Village. Under her direction, sixteen artists were commissioned to create one of the country’s largest such permanent installations, receiving notable recognition across social, television and print media platforms. She is a Producer on the companion documentary film, It Takes A Village: Artivism In A Pandemic from award-winning cinematographer, Kiymora Smith.
In celebration of their 40th Anniversary in 2021, Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University Newark, dedicated a rare, solo exhibition to the life and work of Jerry Gant. Titled, Bulletproof Ambition: The Art of Jerry Gant, it was curated by Linda Street. A reimagining of the exhibition heads to the prestigious Kresge Gallery in the Berrie Center at Ramapo College, in Spring 2022.
Linda Street seeks to awaken all to the possibilities of art as a unifier, source of community celebration and a driver for individual and collective economic success. “Creative energy can be used to stimulate successful cities,” she believes. “It allows people to gather around self-expression and provides them with new ways of seeing themselves.’’
She serves as Board Advisor for the Arts Council of East Orange (ACEO), NJIT Hub for Creative Placemaking Senior Community Engagement Liaison and Community Advisory Board Member for The Newark Museum of Art.
Photo credit: Bryon Summers for Newark Museum of Art