Pam Avery doesn’t often listen to music when she paints her vibrant and dynamic abstract acrylic canvases in her studio in Boulevard Park. As one of 18 resident artists sharing four studios at The Art Studios, a co-working space and showroom between Bambini Restaurant and The Tattoo Shop on 17th and I streets in Sacramento, she says she doesn’t need the distraction.

Pam Avery poses for a photo in a costume she made during her belly dancing days in San Francisco in the late 1970s. (Photo courtesy of Pam Avery)

“Some music I can’t paint around. Some people I can’t paint around,” she says. “Abstract is different. You have to really focus to get into the zone. And once it takes over, you can’t have interference.”

In addition to abstract, Avery practices figure painting and ceramics, which she throws at home on her patio. The Sacramento native tries to work at The Art Studios for short stints a few times a week, where she can come and go as she pleases, and she co-hosts the studio’s Second Saturdays.

An El Camino High School graduate, Avery holds a bachelor’s degree in studio art from UC Berkeley and a master’s in art education from Sac State. She says she gravitated early to abstract painting because of one of its huge elements: color.

“Color is my thing,” she says, full stop.

And yet, as an artist and a person, Avery is actually many things — or has been, at least. “It’s been a long journey, traveling through schools and marriage and divorce and having a child, being a single mom, and now I have a grandson,” she reflects. “The road was kind of windy.” 

While she was an art student at Cal in the 1970s, Avery fell into San Francisco’s colorful belly dance scene, among the strip clubs, neon signs and seedy elements that defined Broadway’s North Beach at the time. She danced professionally, sometimes seven nights a week, in clubs like Casbah and The Bagdad, which were just two doors down from each other.

Pam Avery stands in her workspace in The Art Studios between her abstract acrylics and ceramic works in November 2024. (Photo by Helen Harlan)

“A close friend of mine encouraged me to join his [belly-dancing] troupe. At the same time, I was going to Berkeley and taking dance classes on the weekends and nights, as well as belly dancing, which turned into a career,” she says. 

In 1986, Avery’s time in the Bay Area came to a halt when she decided to get practical and move herself and her son back to Sacramento. Inspired by her belly dance community in San Francisco, she started looking for art schools to earn her teaching credential. 

“Several of my belly dance friends were also teachers. They were dancing at night and teaching during the day, or maybe dancing on the weekends and teaching during the week,” she says. “I said, ‘That’s what I can do. I’ve already got a B.A. in art. I can do that, and I can teach art. I can dance at the same time.’”

After 21 years as an art teacher in the Twin Rivers Unified School District in North Sacramento, Avery retired in 2015. But she never stopped dancing. These days, Avery’s windy road finds her performing locally at various Haflas, the traditional Arabic word for “party.”

Avery says she always knew she was both a studio artist and dancer in one and that she “figured out” how to do both while raising her son. When she looks back on her childhood, one in which she was encouraged to walk the steady path, Avery does so with the wisdom of a person who has been many things.

“My childhood upbringing was always, ‘What are you gonna do? What are you going to do?’ Dance wasn’t enough. Art wasn’t enough, you know? That kind of Puritan background — don’t be too risky,” she says. “And yet, I was risky.”

This story was funded by the City of Sacramento’s Arts and Creative Economy Journalism Grant to Solving Sacramento. Following our journalism code of ethics and protocols, the city had no editorial influence over this story and no city official reviewed this story before it was published. Our partners include California Groundbreakers, Capital Public Radio, Outword, Russian America Media, Sacramento Business Journal, Sacramento News & Review, Sacramento Observer and Univision 19. Sign up for our “Sac Art Pulse” newsletter here.

By Helen Harlan

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