Dolly Parton; "Find out who you are and do it on purpose."

journalreflections
Written By Robbi Firestone

My heart is breaking. A woman of Grace has left us.

Dolly Parton is gone.

I keep saying it out loud, testing whether it gets easier to hear. It doesn't.

I am a hillbilly girl. Rural Missouri raised me before NYC, LA, Seattle, Santa Fe.

Dolly was the first proof I ever had that where you come from doesn't decide who you become. She built an empire out of rhinestones and heartbreak and never apologized for the accent, the story, or the shape of her own body. She let people mistake all of it for something to laugh at, and she let them keep laughing, because she already knew who she was.

Dolly took cruelty for six decades; comments about her look, her voice, intelligence, her choices; she didn’t flinch.

I have a video of hers I return to constantly, where Barbara Walters tries to provoke her, insult her, catch her off guard. She doesn't defend herself.She stays soft, stays funny, stays exactly herself, and the attack just... falls off her.

That is not weakness. That is the hardest kind of strength there is.

"Find out who you are and do it on purpose," Dolly said.

She spent a lifetime proving she meant it. Every rhinestone. Every joke at her own expense. Every dollar she put into that library, that town, those kids; on purpose.

I aspire to be like Dolly. Not the sequins. The certainty.

Grace isn't the absence of a fight. It's choosing, over and over, not to become the thing that's attacking you.

Dolly Parton chose that in front of the entire world, for as long as the world was watching, and it was never a performance. It was just who she was, permanently.

Rest now, Dolly. You were an exquisite Being of Light.

The rest of us are still working on it.

Robbi Firestone

Robbi Firestone is a contemporary American painter and conceptual artist working between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her practice spans three decades of sustained inquiry into how beauty, urgency, and ethical responsibility coexist in a fragile world.

Her paintings, in oil, acrylic, pastel, and graphite, emerge from sustained observation of landscape and sky, rooted in the high desert of New Mexico. These are not depictions of place but states of being: the land as inner weather, the horizon as meditation on presence and the radical act of sustained attention.

Her conceptual practice, most notably the 2026 series Existential Snacks: Food for Thought, deploys mass-produced consumer materials as a Trojan horse, seductive in their familiarity and disturbing in their implications, addressing ecological collapse, cultural numbness, and the human tendency to consume without thinking.

These are not two separate bodies of work. They are one philosophical position expressed in two registers: feeling as the ground from which thought becomes possible; thought as the ground from which action becomes necessary.

Firestone's work has received formal recognition from leading figures in the contemporary art world.

Louis Grachos, Executive Director of SITE Santa Fe, writes: "Robbi Firestone's Existential Snacks project is a brilliant contemporary extension of the longstanding tradition of Satirical Artworks. Innovative in her use of materials, Firestone's paintings/sculptures reveal a sense of humor, are clever and reveal a substantial insight into her subject matter which makes this series so successful."

Merry Scully, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art, wrote of The Infertility Project: "You are telling a powerful story...this project may take on a life of its own and take years to unfold," drawing comparison to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. The National Museum of Women in the Arts described her work as "a testament to the power of transforming personal pain into a benefit for the greater good."

The Infertility Project premiered at the United Nations in parallel with the Commission on the Status of Women. The project became the subject of a documentary film by Betsy Chasse, director of What the Bleep Do We Know, available on Amazon Prime.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Worth Magazine, the Boston Herald, the Huffington Post, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Firestone's work is held in distinguished private collections across the United States. She is currently represented by 203 Fine Art, Taos, New Mexico.

Studio visits are by appointment in New York City and Santa Fe.

https://www.FirestoneArt.com
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