The first time I heard the name Blanche Calloway, I was deep in research on the overlooked musical history of Rochester’s Swillburg neighborhood, tracing the legacy of two extraordinary siblings who emerged from its streets: Blanche and Cab Calloway.
Most people know Cab. Far fewer know Blanche.
Before her younger brother became one of the defining voices of American jazz, Blanche Calloway had already broken barriers as a bandleader, composer, and performer in a world that left little room for women or Black artists. She was bold, theatrical, and determined in a way that made her story feel urgently unfinished in the historical record.
That research unexpectedly led me to metal sculptor and welder Stacey Mrva.
At the time, Stacey had already spent years working in Rochester’s Swillburg neighborhood through the Southwest Neighborhood Association when she first encountered Blanche’s story.
“She was a trailblazer,” Stacey told me in that interview. “Being a woman in a male-dominated industry, you have to work a little bit harder. I can’t imagine what she had to go through.”
Something in that history stayed with her.
“I Googled her and realized how amazing she was,” she said. “I wanted to find a way to honor her and capture that energy.”
That impulse became a public art project.
“I found this one photo,” Stacey said. “She’s leaning back, holding a baton. It had this sense of movement in it. I knew right away that was the one.”
Today, a year later, I reconnected with Stacey in a very different place. Her studio sits in rural Springwater, surrounded by trees and open land, where welded steel and salvaged material sit alongside the serene geography of the Little Finger Lakes region.
As a community ambassador with the Little Finger Lakes Center in Hemlock, I’ve been traveling across the region meeting artists, farmers, and small business owners who are shaping a quieter but persistent cultural identity here. Stacey’s studio felt like part workshop, part archive, and part living experiment in what rural creative life can look like.
Inside her renovated barn studio, Ironwood Studios Inc. is not arranged like a traditional workspace. It shifts between function and memory. Downstairs is the working floor, where steel is cut, bent, and welded. The space is lined with workbenches, stencils, tools, and welding masks. Along the walls are pieces of memorabilia and photographs of women who have spent time in the barn, many of them drawn into hands-on work for the first time and changed by the experience.
The Blanche Calloway piece now lives in Swillburg, close to the history that first inspired it.
It is a life-sized steel interpretation of the photograph Stacey first encountered. Blanche is captured mid-performance, leaning back with her baton raised as if she is conducting not just a band but the space around her. The metal form carries a sense of motion rather than stillness. Light runs along welded seams in a way that shifts as you move past it, giving the figure a living quality, as if the performance has been paused rather than finished.
Stacey is a visionary. She sees what things can become before they exist in any practical sense.
Where someone else might see a steel rod and imagine a railing or support beam, she sees movement already forming inside it. A butterfly unfolding. A staircase curling through space. The material is never just material.
What became clear talking with her is that sculpture, for Stacey, is not only fabrication but translation.
Her practice often pulls from organic forms. Roots, vines, branching structures appear repeatedly in her work.
“I do these vine forms,” she said. “Roots growing upward into the air. That’s how I see community history and energy. Grounded, but still reaching.”
Upstairs in the barn, the atmosphere shifts. The second floor has been transformed into a warm, open gathering space with seating, tables, and natural light pouring in from wide windows. It is used for small events, meetings, and gatherings, but it also functions as a place to step away from the intensity of the workshop below. It feels lived in rather than staged. A place where conversation stretches, where food is shared, where ideas can sit long enough to take shape.
We also discovered an unexpected Syracuse connection.
Stacey studied art at Syracuse University. I told her I grew up a Syracuse basketball fan, shaped by the noise and rhythm of game days that, in upstate New York, often feel like a second calendar.
She laughed.
“I hated when the games were going on,” she said. “Too much commotion.”
The contrast made sense in hindsight. While one part of campus was defined by crowds and spectacle, she was learning how to see form, composition, and material, in ways that would eventually lead her into metalwork.
That approach carries through her career. Whether working on the Blanche Calloway sculpture or honoring figures like Susan B. Anthony, Stacey treats metal as something that holds memory rather than resists it.
Our conversation eventually moved beyond art itself.
We spoke about the future of the Finger Lakes region, about the fragility of small-town creative economies, and about how many young people are never introduced to hands-on trades in any meaningful way.
Press enter or click to view image in full sizeFor Stacey, college is not the only path forward. It is not even always the most direct one.
Welding, fabrication, and sculpture offer something else entirely. They offer proof that skill can become identity, and that imagination does not need to be separated from labor to be valid.
In many ways, Stacey’s work is part of a broader shift happening quietly across the region. Barns becoming studios. Rural spaces turning into sites of production and learning. Communities rethinking what it means to build a future rooted in making.
In Stacey’s hands, steel is not hardened into distance.
It is shaped into story.
And in Swillburg, the figure of Blanche Calloway stands not as a monument sealed off from life, but as something still caught in motion, still conducting, still reaching outward into the space around her.
George Cassidy Payne is a Rochester-based nonprofit leader, educator, and advocate for sustainable economic development. With a philosophy and social work background, George has spent over two decades addressing issues of equity, public policy, and crisis intervention. His community development and environmental sustainability expertise informs his commitment to strengthening Rochester’s regional economy.