Suzanne Davidson

Spa City director dabbles her way to lifetime of success

Suzanne Davidson, a member of the Hot Springs Board of Directors and the Arkansas Arts Council, is working to coordinate the repairs on the Mother Nature statue and fountain in a traffic island on Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs. Originally designed to be made of bronze, the 21-year-old statue was made from fiberglass, marble dust, steel and chicken wire by sculptor Xu Long Hua, a Hot Springs resident.
Suzanne Davidson, a member of the Hot Springs Board of Directors and the Arkansas Arts Council, is working to coordinate the repairs on the Mother Nature statue and fountain in a traffic island on Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs. Originally designed to be made of bronze, the 21-year-old statue was made from fiberglass, marble dust, steel and chicken wire by sculptor Xu Long Hua, a Hot Springs resident.

Suzanne Davidson calls herself a dabbler.

According to the dictionary, to dabble is to “do something in a casual or superficial way.” The word appears to carry the hint of someone who is unfocused and unable to see things to their conclusion. That is hardly the way the Hot Springs resident has spent her life.

“I never knew what I wanted to be when I grew up; there were too many possibilities,” she said, sitting in the lobby of the Arlington Resort Hotel and Spa. “When I was in high school in Nashville, Arkansas, I was always the one saying, ‘What do you mean, I can’t do that?’ Sometimes, I just went on and did it myself.”

Davidson’s career has seen many changes, but few people would call it dabbling. She is a member of the Hot Springs Board of Directors for District 1, which includes much of downtown Hot Springs. In that post, she is one of the major supporters of the recent efforts to revitalize the Spa City’s downtown and encourage its economic development. She has also just been appointed to a second four-year volunteer term on the Arkansas Arts Council by Gov. Mike Beebe.

In addition, she is a community activist as a member of the Park Avenue Community Association, the Gateway Community Association and the Whittington Valley Neighborhood Association. She is a working artist and is one of the founders of the Hot Springs Cultural Alliance, which organized a tour of artist studios in Hot Springs last year.

“I am also trying to establish myself as a technical writer and grant writer on a freelance basis,” Davidson said. “I also want to become more accomplished as an artist. I just need to work more.”

She started her career as an art teacher, and she has also been a successful small-business owner and headed an effort to organize the schools’ budgets in Dallas. Davidson has been a manager of numerous nonprofit arts and service organizations, a real estate house flipper, and a manufacturing manager of shotgun ammunition. She also took off three years to be a family caregiver.

What allowed her to do all those things? Like many people, Davidson points to her parents, who have shared their own perspective in life.

Her father was in the U.S. Air Force when Davidson was born. He was one of the Army Air Corps pilots who flew unpressurized cargo planes “over the hump” of the Himalayan Mountains from Burma to China during World War II. He remained in the service while the Air Force was organized, and the family lived in the Azores, in Texas, in Nebraska and elsewhere in her early years. From an Arkansas cattle- and dairy-farming family, Davidson’s father brought his family to Nashville, Arkansas, where he purchased land and cattle.

Her mother was something of a pioneer, taking on a career that had been the domain of men.

“She was the youngest, and first woman, to work as a court reporter in Texas,” Davidson said with pride. “She taught me her work ethic and a sense of style.”

Davidson said she thinks traveling around different parts of the world and the nation, and being raised by a career woman who has broken barriers in her vocation, have unlocked the possibilities available for Davidson.

“In high school, I wanted to volunteer at the hospital,” Davidson said. “In Lincoln, Nebraska, I had seen the candy stripers, and that is what I wanted to be. I had read the candy stripers were sponsored by the National Association of Junior Auxiliaries, so I went to the local J.A. members and told them that I wanted get a uniform and that it would draw attention and get more girls to volunteer.”

The local chapter decided to help and made sure the girls received the official candy-striped material for their uniforms and even bought the volunteers their name pins.

“We just talked to patients and brought them magazines,” Davidson said, “but we wanted to do something to help the community.”

Not surprisingly, she said she had not selected a major when she entered Henderson Teachers College (now Henderson State University) in Arkadelphia.

“I said I would like to be an architect, and I remember when I studied solid geometry in high school, I was in love,” Davidson said. “But I was told girls didn’t become architects and that I should look at elementary education or secretarial training.”

As for teaching elementary school, she said that because she has never liked baby-sitting, she needed to stay away from that kind of teaching. Since she enjoyed mathematics, she began training as a math teacher.

“Now, I had dabbled with drawing, but I figured everybody would do that, so I never thought about it much,” Davidson said. “But when I was in my art class and I learned about perspective, I thought, wow, and when then one day we mixed colors and I dipped my brush in red and then into the yellow, I was hooked.”

When her second year in college started, Davidson’s teachers convinced her to become an art education major. She also had a second major in English.

She married after graduation, and her husband was a biology teacher in Arkadelphia. When she asked about a job, she was told there was no art program in the city’s school system. The next year, her husband told the school system that if they wanted their biology teacher, they needed an art teacher, and Davidson joined the faculty at Arkadelphia High School.

“I had four classes of eighth-graders and one class of seniors,” she said. “I told them they would need a second teacher the next year.”

They gave me a student teacher in my first year. It was Farrell Ford, who is today the director of the Arkadelphia Arts Center and one of the founders of the Caddo River Art Guild. The next year, Ford was teaching at Arkadelphia alongside Davidson.

Among her students at Arkadelphia High was Jane Chu, who, in June, was selected by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the U.S. Senate to chair the National Endowment of the Arts.

“I wrote her a note after she was confirmed,” Davidson said. “She wrote back that she loved the art class and remembered she worked with me on the sets of the senior play.”

In 1982, after teaching art for 13 years, Davidson purchased a flower and gift shop in Arkadelphia and ran the company for four years. The company was successful, she said, but she got bored with the work.

For the next several years, she expanded her work experience in many different directions, including managing arts organizations. She handled the finances of the Dallas Independent School District and worked for a brokerage firm and its subsidiaries. She also worked in finance, then in manufacturing management.

“I seemed to always be hired to clean up a mess,” she said. “One person told me I loved learning a process and making it better. I guess I did.”

She moved to Hot Springs in 2010, but it wasn’t her first time in the Spa City.

“When my grandparents retired, they moved to Hot Springs,” Davidson said. “I had come here many times, and I had family nearby. As an artist, I remember being told that none of the art galleries closed, even during the years of the slow economy in 2008 and 2009, so I moved here.”

She moved to the Park Avenue neighborhood of “Doctors’ Row” and became active in the arts community and in the neighborhoods in downtown Hot Springs. In 2012, she was elected to the Hot Spring Board of Directors.

Davidson became interested in revitalizing the area and supporting its economic development. She said the mood of the area was changing. Then fire broke out at the Majestic Hotel one evening in February.

“I was working at the computer when I saw on Facebook that the Majestic was on fire,” Davidson said. “I drove over when there was just one firetruck on the scene.”

She said it was a major moment in the history of the city, but she doesn’t think her interest in development came only from the inferno.

“The fire at the Majestic Hotel was a catalyst. It got more people talking about downtown, but I think it would have happened anyway,” Davidson said. “People were already working on development downtown. Some friends were looking at old buildings for renovation. Many of the downtown neighborhoods were organized and coming up with projects.”

Davidson said there are rumors that major donors want to get involved in downtown development. She announced that a sculptor from Arizona has just purchased a Central Avenue gallery and will be bringing his art to the city.

“I’m really excited,” she said. “There is a lot of work to be done, and what comes next is hard to predict.”

No one will be dabbling.

Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.

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