Every day at the Ella West Gallery in downtown Durham, Linda Shropshire sits by a large photograph of her mother: the Ella “West” Wynn Shropshire Douthit.

Gazing over the desk in Linda’s office, a young Ella flashes a megawatt smile with the free spirit of a woman in her early 20s. In the portrait, made in the 1960s, Ella sports a new short haircut and blowout. She tilts her head as if catching a breeze and the punchline of an inside joke. Linda says the photo was taken impromptu by James Peeler, a notable Black photographer who documented his community in Charlotte. Ella was queued up in line with dozens of other young Black women for a pageant when Peeler snapped her portrait.

Ella “West” Wynn Shropshire Douthit in her early 20s. photograph by Art by Court Winter

This image of Ella — a dedication to the gallery’s namesake — embodies a sense of stewardship, one Linda describes as an innate appreciation for beauty in all its forms. It’s a trait she says she inherited from her mother, along with “a great eye” for finding art, the ability to beautify a space no matter the resources, and the mission to live and build each day from a place of love.

“My mother is happy, always laughing. She’s a charmer,” Linda says. “And she sees all the beautiful parts in people.”

In much the same way, this is how Linda describes her quest to tell stories through the artwork hanging on the gallery walls. For each piece, the medium may vary: surrealist portraiture photography, mixed media jumping off the canvas in three-dimensional texture, abstract brushstrokes in neutral tones, pop art in bright colors. Together, the art provides a living history of Black, brown, and women artists — many of them young — and their experiences at home in the South and beyond.

Linda Shropshire (right) inherited an eye for beauty from her mother, Ella Wynn Douthit. photograph by Art by Court Winter

“And I get to share the narratives,” Linda says. “Because it’s not enough for someone to come in and just look at it. I get to share the narrative and what it means, and I get to do it sitting as a Black woman. I’m at the intersection of the fabric of a culture that I can explain from a lived experience.”

Sometimes when she talks about her mother, Linda blinks back tears. But it’s not because she’s sad. Her tears convey awe, appreciation, and love. They frame the way her eyes widen and marvel at all her mother has done — and continues to do.

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Sitting by a window at home in north Durham, Ella gazes out at the sky. A Bible lies open on her lap, where she rests one hand over the other. She counts the cars that drive past and smooths back her white-gray hair, pulled tight into a low ponytail.

Linda offers her tea and promises that dinner will be ready soon. Ella checks her watch, reminding Linda every few minutes that it’s almost 5 — and that she wants warm rolls with her meal. These days, she forgets that her daughter runs a gallery named after her. For the past couple of years, she has lived with dementia. She spends her days at home, with her daughter often by her side — Linda is essentially both a full-time caretaker and a full-time gallery owner.

Ella spends her days at home, but Linda commissioned a candle that fills the gallery with scents that remind her of her mom: blackberries, which Ella baked into cobblers, and notes of the Oscar de la Renta perfume she used to wear. photograph by Art by Court Winter

“Mentally, she is great,” Linda says of her mother. “She’s in mental decline, but she’s not depressed. She wakes up happy, laughing. I think she is doing as well as she can be because she’s got consistent love and care and stimulation.”

Ella was born on a farm in Monroe in 1941. One of the youngest of eight children, she was a preemie and consequently treated like everyone’s baby sister — with extra sweetness and care. She’d later name Linda after her own younger sister.

Linda says her mother lived and created a “simple, generous life.” Ella always kept her home meticulously clean. She canned tomatoes. Her nieces would call her up to design their homes, and she always found deals on decor, art, and furniture that reflected and elevated their living spaces. For most of Linda’s childhood, Ella owned and operated a hair salon. She often wore red lipstick and later, in the 1980s and ’90s, a baby pink hue. It complemented the big hair she sported, which billowed like feathers and drew comparisons to the superstar Tina Turner.

After her two children were grown and long gone from the home, Ella began fostering a young teen mother, Shana Jones. Ella eventually supported her through nursing school; Jones, now a grandmother in Virginia, visits Ella often and helps out with care if Linda needs it.

Linda passed along an eye for beauty to her own daughters, Sydney and Taylor Grissom — portrayed by North Carolina artist Clarence Heyward. painting by Clarence Heyward

At the gallery, Linda speaks with people all day — she listens, she interprets, she absorbs. She does the same at home with her mother. Ella spins tales that aren’t often linear, but they are big exclamations of truth and her lived experiences. Linda listens patiently.

With dementia, memory can be elusive — or it can be very specific. Time and space collapse. The present moment is what you get. This is where both Linda and Ella live — they experience the present differently, but they experience it together. The irony of dementia, despite the neurological effects that can harp on the act of remembering the past, is that it forces people to live exactly what’s in front of them.

For Linda, a mantra she picked up from a book by Deborah Barr grounds her: “Cherish what remains.” Today, that’s Ella and her graceful show of love: “God is taking care of you,” she says. “Heaven is everywhere.”

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At the core of Ella West’s world — both the gallery and the person — there’s an almost-cyclical nature of coincidence, of a “meant to be”-type fate. The gallery inhabits an alcove at 104 West Parrish Street, part of Durham’s historic Black Wall Street. Around the 1920s, that same block housed the printing press for The Durham Reformer, one of the city’s first Black newspapers, as well as the company news publication for NC Mutual, once known as the oldest and largest African American life insurance company in the United States, established in 1898.

Today, you enter the front door to find rare lithographs by Durham’s own Ernie Barnes. One of his quotes takes over the left wall: “An artist paints his own reality.”

Linda bought her first painting — Mother and Child by Floyd Gordon — in her 20s. photograph by Art by Court Winter

Linda first heard of Barnes through her junior high school art teacher, Mr. Winston Fletcher, who was a friend and contemporary of Barnes. His work was her entrée into the world of art. She was in her 20s when she purchased her first piece — a portrait of a faceless woman carrying a child on her back. The painting — Mother and Child by Floyd Gordon — struck Linda, who was married but not yet a mother when she saw it. It took her nine months to pay it off.

Now, the piece hangs as the focal point of her bedroom. Her daughters, Taylor and Sydney Grissom, recall this same painting as a core memory of their own childhood.

Linda worked the corporate grind for several years. In 2020, she went back to school for an MBA at UNC Chapel Hill’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. And there, an idea for a gallery kept bouncing around in her brain. She wrote a business plan and pushed for her dream: to “take back Black Wall Street” with art. This gallery gracing a prominent corner of downtown Durham, is an evolution of the city’s Black history, offering a space for reflection and community.

Linda’s interest in the art world was piqued by one of her teachers in junior high. Through him, she met Durham artist Ernie Barnes, to whom her gallery is now dedicated. photograph by Art by Court Winter

Artists, Linda says, “operate from a heart place that we often can’t tap into.” In this same vein, she speaks of Ella’s life, led with an open heart that finds the beauty in everyone. Decades after she first saw it, Linda views the maternal portrait as a representation of “the strength and the nature of my legacy, with a mom who basically could carry anything on her back. And she carried many people on her back.”

Motherhood, she says, “is a humbling experience that teaches you a new level of love.”

Ella West Gallery
104 West Parrish Street
Durham, NC 27701
(919) 485-9602
ellawestgallery.com