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Melody Short and her daughter, Nia, in their Ginter Park home. On wall: “Quintessential Funk LP,” an acrylic painting by local artist S. Ross Browne, was for sale in ARTisan Café and now hangs in Short’s living room. “It’s one of my favorite pieces,” she says. Lower left: Local designer Stephonia K. Owolabi gave Short’s daughter, Nia, an array of vibrant handmade pillows as a gift. Owolabi has sold her wares at ARTisan Café.
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“This is one of my favorite finds from my trip to Johannesburg,” says Short, who traveled to Africa last October to celebrate her 37th birthday.
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Senegalese Wolof basket: Every year, Short and her daughter attend the DanceAfrica Festival in Brooklyn. During one of their visits, Short purchased the handmade mint-green and white basket.
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Wooden owl mask: Another year when Short was attending DanceAfrica, she purchased a beautiful wooden mask that was made in Cameroon.
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Shekere gourd with cowrie shells: “This was purchased during our annual mommy-daughter visit to the DanceAfrica Festival in Brooklyn,” says Short of the West African instrument.
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A table that belonged to Short’s great-grandparents sits in her entryway and is used to display some of her favorite decorative pieces.
Melody Short’s Ginter Park bungalow is filled with memories — past memories of celebrating Kwanzaa with her family as a little girl and recent memories with her 9-year-old daughter, Nia, in the same house where her cousin’s grandparents once lived.
The interior of her home is vibrant, its décor rich with stories from her travels to Africa, Cuba, Brooklyn, and of course from Richmond, where she was born and raised.
Short, who is the small-business director at the nonprofit UnBoundRVA, works side by side with people from low-income backgrounds to help them launch their businesses by sharing her marketing knowledge. “There are people who don’t have access to those resources in their network,” she says.
Along with her full-time job at UnBoundRVA, she and friend Adrienne Johnson co-founded The ARTisan Café six years ago, a roving artist market that got its start as a brick-and-mortar spot at Stony Point Fashion Park. ARTisan Café represents artists from Atlanta to Boston and sets up shop at venues such as Richmond’s Afrikana Independent Film Festival and Philadelphia’s BlackStar Film Festival.
Short grew up in Richmond’s West End and graduated from John Marshall High School. She studied marketing at Morgan State University in Baltimore and began working for Sony Music in marketing while she was still in college. She eventually became the Dallas-based urban marketing manager for Sony’s southwest territories, working with mom-and-pop record stores and discovered a love for mentoring small-business owners. “I [saw] how these businesses impact the greater community,” she says. “They were doing more than selling records — they were giving people jobs.”
When Sony closed its offices in the South, Short returned to New York as an innkeeper at Akwaaba Bed and Breakfast Inns’ Brooklyn location. There, Short met her mentor, Monique Greenwood, Akwaaba’s owner and former editor-in-chief of Essence Magazine.
Fifteen years later, Short works as marketing director for Greenwood’s hospitality group. She will be part of a reality TV series on the Oprah Winfrey Network called “Checking Inn,” which follows Greenwood’s life as a bed-and-breakfast owner. The show will debut later this year.
Eight years ago, Short returned to Richmond. On the weekends, she embraces her wanderlust, traveling to Akwaaba’s various inns up the East Coast. “I’m doing the work that I’m passionate about,” she says. “It’s a blessing to be able to do what I love.”
