by Janet Hurley / portrait by Anthony Bellemare

Picture this: it’s 2003. You’re in a large airplane hangar in Texas. But instead of planes, there are big lights, big cameras, people scurrying about with clip boards, a couple goats and three women in robes and curlers who are ready to bare their souls—and their bodies—on the cover of Entertainment Weekly. They are the Dixie Chicks, the universally adored country/pop crossover superstars. At least, they had been adored—until lead singer Natalie Maines publicly voiced her frustration with then-President George Bush about the invasion of Iraq. "We’re ashamed the president of the United States is from Texas," Maines told a London concert crowd. Afterwards, the band was pilloried by the media, their albums sales plummeted and they received death threats.

At this particular photo shoot, the stakes are high, since it’s intended to both address the Chicks’ critics and, in some ways, salvage their careers. Just being on the scene at such an event might overwhelm a person with tension. But it didn’t seem to faze Tara Meadows, fashion and theater body-paint artist extraordinaire, former Green party candidate for the New York State Assembly and fierce opponent of the war. She’d been up all night, helping to choose the slurs—"traitors," for example, or "Saddam’s Angels"—and praises that had dogged the Chicks. Then, her job was to airbrush them onto the women’s bodies. The next day, after little sleep, she managed to stroll calmly through the set, strumming a guitar and telling the Chicks how proud she was of them. It was Meadows’ idea to bring in goats, to represent how the band has been scapegoated, though the animals didn’t end up in the final shot.

If you asked Meadows, she might tell you that her participation in this photo shoot, a perfect intersection of her body-painting craft and political passions, was a "your chocolate is in my peanut butter moment." The resulting magazine cover became one of the most emailed and talked-about images of 2003, which fueled Meadows’ conviction that images are so powerful they can truly help to change the world.

For Meadows, now 43, changing the world once meant escaping the poverty and feelings of shame she experienced growing up just outside of Gatlinburg, Tennessee. Now, she says that learning to make do with whatever you’re given is what inspires creativity. But then, she mainly wanted to escape from Gatlinburg. She headed west, at age 20, to Boulder, Colorado, where she explored textiles and fiber arts, eventually opening a gallery for women textile artists just off the Pearl Street mall. "I had no formal training," Meadows says, "but I come from a long line of Appalachian artists, musicians, loafers, inventors, entrepreneurs and dreamers who would do damn near anything but nine to five."  

On a trip back home, Meadows met T-shirt artist Mickey Harris, who happened to be the founder of Airbrush Magazine. She became fascinated with the possibilities of using airbrush on silk. She says he basically "triple-dawg-dared her" to fill in for him "slinging T-shirts," she says, on the streets of downtown Gatlinburg. Always up for a dare, Meadows says that by the end of the season, she could paint just about anything—including leather jackets and Harleys. "I’d been warned that there are things an artist should never mess with—like the Hell’s Angel logo and Mickey Mouse," Meadows says. But she did just that, got paid handsomely and a week later arrived in Daytona Beach, Florida, to paint more motorcycles. She says the phrase "job-related stress" took on new meaning when she applied her wet paintbrush to the bike of "a weapon-toting, grizzly-bearded outlaw who loved his bike more than his firstborn son." But Meadows thrived under the pressure. She moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, to open a shop painting Harleys and her custom leather jackets.

Meadows says her motto of "have paint, will paint" was the legacy—both blessing and curse—of her biological father. He’d abandoned her family in the hills of Appalachia to pursue his art when Tara was two. Determined to meet the man who seemed to be running her life, she set off for New York City to find him. It was not a happy reunion, and he died shortly after they met. But at the same time, she fell in love with a United States attorney who investigated the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. The relationship didn’t last, but it did give Meadows a behind-the-scenes political education. She started painting Harleys for a different sort of clientele—the business elite. One client hired her to paint the bodies of his entire team of stock traders as Halloween ghouls. "I saw body paint and makeup as just another medium," Meadows says of her change in direction.

At first, she painted dancers and actors looking for images for their portfolios. When her own portfolio grew large enough, she says she went door to door to find an agent for herself. Meadows says the process was brutal, but she was convinced that having a good agent would free her up to concentrate on her art. "Whenever someone asks you anything about money, time, place, dates, billing, conflicts, receipts, scheduling—you just smile and say ‘speak with my agent,’" Meadows laughs. "It’s like having a golden hall pass." She signed with Garren New York Artistic Division, which represents the top hair and makeup talent in the world. Through Garren, and then The Artist Loft, she landed work on advertising campaigns for the likes of Nike, The Olympics, Samsung, Evian Water and Puma. She painted fashion models for shoots in Mademoiselle, Vogue and Glamour and did special visual effects—creating bruises, for example, or the impression of an injury—for stories in The New Yorker, W, Maxim and Newsweek. She even painted some of the star characters in the Broadway hit The Lion King. Portrait and celebrity photographer Karen Fuchs, who hired Meadows for a number of jobs, including painting the body of Jamaican running phenom Usain Bolt for a Puma ad before the 2004 Olympics in Athens, says she was blown away by Meadows’ work. "There are a lot of great make-up artists in New York, but very few great body painters," Fuchs says. "It’s completely different, and Tara has a unique talent. It’s hard to be around her and not be inspired."

At the time, Meadows says she was economically as far away from her poor life in the mountains as she could get. But she was still a long way from accepting herself. That process got its start through an unexpected relationship with a homeless poet, William David Massey, whom she calls David. He was a chronic alcoholic and mentally ill when she saw him sleeping in front of a Banana Republic store on Bleecker Street in the West Village around 1991. Meadows thought he was brilliant. "He became the father I never had," Meadows says. David lived with her on and off in her New York apartment for 12 years. Through him, she saw firsthand what it meant to live in the middle of wealthy New York with nothing.

Infuriated by this disparity, Meadows began collecting the poetry of New York City’s homeless and performing spoken word poetry at the Nuyorican Poets Café on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She helped establish a regular performance night at the Nuyorican, where the homeless shared their stories. Her goal was to confront audiences with the reality of poverty in the city. "During this process, I was finding my own voice, finding my Appalachian roots as a singer and storyteller," Meadows says, and then adds wryly: "But trust me, I wasn’t giving up my day job."

She continued to style and body-paint New York’s top models, and then she accompanied them to fashion shows and lavishly catered after-parties. "There was so much waste and excess at these events," she says. She’d load the trunk of a rented chauffeured limo with extra food, drop off "the pretty people," pick up Massey and other homeless folk and then ride through the city with windows rolled down and the stereo cranked. "We must have looked like pirates," Meadows says now. "It was surreal, so New York."

"Tara is incredibly generous—and fearless," says Ray Dowd, a New York copyright attorney and Meadows’ longtime friend and roommate at the time. "A lot of people in the fashion industry wouldn’t want to be seen with a homeless person. But Tara was never into her own image—and never intimidated by anyone."

It was Dowd who helped Meadows get involved with the Green Party. In 2002, she ran for New York State Assembly in the 64^th District of the Lower East Side as a Green Party candidate with a campaign rallying cry of: "Vote Green, Stop the War Machine." "Speaking out against the war in a heartbroken city was no picnic," Meadows says. She didn’t expect to win State Assembly (and didn’t, though she did reach her target goal of six percent of the overall vote, which kept the Green Party on the ballot) but believes the campaign opened an important dialogue that got people thinking about what they wanted their community and country to look like.  

It’s a dialogue she has pursued ever since—even more fervently after David Massey was beaten and robbed in 2003. He died in California after being refused medical treatment because he didn’t have his Medicaid card (Meadows says it had been stolen). Since then, she’s been devoted to telling the stories of people whose struggles have left them "unseen" and neglected by society. To do this, she’s gotten behind the camera to produce a series of images that will culminate in a gallery show and an art book called Sight Unseen, inspired by William David Massey’s life. She’ll be organizing several fundraising initiatives for the project, which will raise awareness about the struggles of the homeless as well as the 46 million Americans living below the poverty line. "We’ve been willfully blind, not just to what’s happening to people—but to our environment," Meadows says.

Meadows says she fully embraced her Appalachian heritage after being prompted by her grandmother "to pack up my paints and come on home" in 2004. Before her grandmother died, Meadows promised to preserve the family’s 200-year-old log cabin on Douglas Lake in Sevierville, Tennessee, no matter the cost. Easier said than done. Meadows spent three years renovating the homestead and named it after The Pioneer Trading Post where, for years, her family sold the handicrafts of 64 mountain families. To maintain the cabin, she rents it out as a bed and breakfast and hopes to attract Appalachian artists and musicians who want to use the space to teach classes on Appalachian craft. "My hands are all over every square inch of the cabin," Meadows says of the renovation. "The Pioneer is my best artwork yet."  

Meadows now lives full time in Asheville with her fiancé Dr. David deHoll, whom she met at Bele Chere in 2006, and his three teenage sons. Would she ever mount another bid for political office? She’s convinced she’ll have a much greater impact through her art and is eager to collaborate with Asheville-area artists and social activists. Harking back to the impact of the Dixie Chicks photo on the public conscience, Meadows says, "I want to create images that counter the myths—that help us regain sight of our mountains and our neighbors."

For more information about Tara Meadows’ work, or to make a contribution to the Sight Unseen project, go to tarameadows.com