Hellah Horrah: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” – Soft Light, Sad Jazz, & Candy Corn Dreams

Written By Tya Alisa Anthony

🎃

There’s something about that soft-grain animation—the way Linus’s blanket dragged like a faded memory through fields of watercolor leaves. The lines were never perfect, just like childhood. You could see the brush strokes, the air between frames, like the animators were breathing right along with the story.

Vince Guaraldi’s jazz piano floated through our tiny house like incense. My brother knew every riff. He’d hum it while carving pumpkins with a butter knife, the kitchen glowing in the golden light of a single lamp. Every time Charlie Brown got a rock, my brother would toss one from the driveway into my candy bucket and laugh until he couldn’t breathe.

The simplicity of those scenes—ghost sheets with too many holes, Snoopy’s silhouette against the moon, Lucy’s smug smile—still holds more truth than any 3D-rendered blockbuster. It was about hope, faith, and the ritual of waiting for magic even when you know it might not come.

That’s Halloween in its purest form: a blanket, a breeze, a sugar rush, and a night sky that feels endless.

Tya Alisa Anthony

Tya Alisa Anthony is an American artist, photographer, writer, and independent curator whose work explores memory, mythology, ancestry, and the quiet ways people leave themselves behind in the objects they touch. For more than twenty years, her practice has existed at the intersection of visual research, education, and cultural storytelling, investigating resilience through the body, the landscape, historical archives, and the natural world.

Working across photography, collage, cyanotype, botanical collections, handmade books, and mixed media, Anthony approaches each body of work as an evolving archive rather than a finished statement. She is drawn to weathered photographs, heirlooms, medicinal plants, folklore, ritual objects, forgotten architecture, and the symbolic language that connects cultures across time. Her work asks how identity is preserved, transformed, and remembered.

Alongside her studio practice, Anthony has spent more than two decades building educational programs, exhibitions, and community-centered initiatives that expand access to the arts. Her leadership has helped shape institutions, mentor emerging artists, develop sustainable systems, and create spaces where creativity becomes a lifelong practice rather than a privilege.

Anthony’s artwork is included in the permanent collections of the Denver Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver’s Octopus Collection. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is held in numerous private collections.

She is currently creating Organic Tarot, a 78-card hand-collaged tarot deck and accompanying memoir that intertwines mythology, autobiography, botanical symbolism, and the archetypal journey of transformation. The project reflects the central thread running throughout her career: that art is not simply something we make—it is a way of understanding ourselves, preserving what matters, and leaving a map for those who come after us.

http://www.tyaanthony.com
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Hellah Horrah Presents: “Witch’s Night Out (1978)” – Glitter, Ghouls & the Grooviest Magic Hour
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Hellah Horrah Presents: SINNERS