If you live in the Providence area and enjoy art; odds are you have seen Willa Van Nostrand somewhere. It may have been at
World’s Fair Gallery, which she owns and operates. She may have served you a garden-to-glass cocktail at an art exhibition with her company
Little Bitte Artisinal Cocktails. You may have also seen Willa perform as “
Little Bitte,” a persona she created as a form of performance art. Needless to say, she wears lots of hats in the art-world.
“I have this very full spectrum of different creative projects, and I do them all.”
Willa is also a musician. She and her best friend Cody met a decade ago, and quickly bonded over music, eventually forming the band Lezzie Vibez.
“I was running a bar in a gallery, and she came in piggyback on one of our mutual friends, and with all of this energy and all of this, just abundance, Willa says about her first time meeting Cody, “and I felt like, her, I need this girl in my life.”
Both Willa and Cody beam with big smiles sharing the story of first meeting each other. Cody says they sensed right away that Willa was someone they wanted to know.
“I saw Willa for the first time and I was like, ‘Oh my goodness, who’s this goddess? And then I started seeing her around town, and then we had a show together in our own bands,” said Cody, who asked not to reveal her last name.
The feeling they both had upon meeting each other quickly materialized into not just music, but both an idea and a band name: Lezzie Vibez.
As Cody explains, “Whenever you’re watching a movie for the first time or listening to a song and there’s two women and you’re like, “Ooh, are they going to fall in love? Or is this Lezzie Vibez?’”
Willa recalls when Cody came up with the phrase for the first time, “I just remember cracking up and being like, yes, Lezzie Vibez is a brilliant way to be able to explain something ... it’s like you can’t really put your finger on it. It’s a noun. It’s a verb. It’s Lezzie Vibez.”
