With every brush stroke and each layer of paint, Conway artist Faye Hedera is retracing the lines of her heritage, discovering a deep connection with a family member who she’s never met.

“That’s my great grandmother, Lenis Bevill, and she was an Arkansas native. She is a folk artist whose life is going to be archived at UCA,” Hedera said.

Whether through remnant stories, her art or long forgotten letters, Hedera has taken a step into the past, getting to know Bevill as the artist, mother and woman she was, showcasing this in her piece titled, “Lenis at Home in Center Hill.”

“This painting is definitely memorializing her as a person. She was a very shy, humble woman, and I think this would have been something that she wouldn’t have minded seeing, because it’s all the things she loves,” Hedera said. “The apple blossoms behind her head, and the cotton that her family would pick to survive, her beloved piano, which she played all the time and [where] she taught her children to play. 

“This was trying to show her as a powerful woman with her brush in her hands and sitting upright with her mysterious smile. I never met her in person, but I feel like I know her through her work and through the stories people preserved because they loved heroes much,” she said. “They saved everything of hers, like her purse when she passed away, they kept everything intact. So we showed that at the museum. She was a remarkable woman.”

Hedera’s admiration for her great-grandmother culminated in “Hymns and Hearthstones,” a solo art exhibition that featured both original works and artifacts from Bevill’s life. The exhibition opened on March 14, 2025, and was housed in Little Rock’s Old State House Museum.

“I think that we are connected to our ancestors biologically,” Hedera said. “I think the trauma that is passed down is worth recognizing and honoring while still looking ahead. So even though I’ve never met this woman, she’s in my blood, she is part of my lineage. So it’s very important to acknowledge where we came from, and important to acknowledge that we are breaking patterns, that we are able to learn from the history of people in our families, that maybe were not able to leave situations that did not serve them, but empowering us to make those choices.

“I think that we both have stubbornness and resilience. I think we are both very prolific, that we have to create. She had 12 children and she created so much, so many paintings. I mean, hundreds of paintings, drawings, sketches, because she had that compulsion she had to create,” she said, “And if I’m not making, I get antsy, like I have to be creating something, whether that’s music or film or photography or painting, I have to do these things because that’s how I best express myself.”

Since the Bevill exhibition, Hedera has been headstrong in several other, lengthy projects, including a documentary, a full-length music album, and a new, deeply personal collection of paintings, all while continuing her beloved Channel 5 series, “Meet the Conwegians.”

“It [the collection] came about right after the “100 Faces of Conway” ended,” Hedera said. “Toward the end of the whole exhibition I realized that I was ready to step into something on a much larger scale. So these are paintings that the smallest one is probably four feet by three feet. So they’re all really large scale, highly detailed pictures of portraits of women and their children. So my personal connection to it was just trying to find my pathway as a mother and to find abundance and how I can be self-sustaining in my life and in my practice.”

Hedera’s documentary, “System Disrupted,” is currently in post-production.

 “It’s a medical documentary about an investigative journalist who has an illness and she’s seeking treatment and trying to figure out how to understand the condition,” Hedera said. “I’m the director on the film, and we’re producing it in collaboration with the Center for Independent Documentary … The idea [for the film] came to me because I have Functional Neurological Disorders, so it’s something that I’ve had for five years, and I have found ways to live with it and flow with it. It’s a neurological disorder where, basically – or how we understand it – is that there’s a misconnection between the neurons firing in your brain and your nervous system. So it’s a condition that ranges in severity. It can mimic conditions like multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, even ALS, and there’s no physical damage happening within the brain, it is just the wiring is kind of tangled … [the film] it’s kind of considered a medical mystery to some people, but we’re hoping to demystify that and educate people and create a tool so people can watch this feature length film and fall in love with the protagonist, who – like I said – she was an investigative journalist for Frontline and had to quit her job in order to get better,” she said.

Hedera’s upcoming full-length album comes after years of writing original material.

“I am actually right now working toward coming out with a music album, so I’m planning for that. I’ve been a musician, singer songwriter, for a long time, and this is going to be my first full length album in 15 years,” Hedera said. “So that’s something that I will also be working on this summer. I’m really excited about it. We’re just in the process of planning which songs we want to have in it, and so that’s an exciting thing that’s kind of new for me … So I’ve written a lot of songs over the years, and I’m just trying to figure out which ones will make a cohesive music album.”