Missouri Arts Council featured artist Madeleine LeMieux
Madeleine LeMieux
Each month the Missouri Arts Council releases four artists they select for their Featured Artists program. This program is to promote and support individual artists and demonstrate the variety of creative Missouri talent. One of the artists is Madeleine LeMieux, an Assistant Teaching Professor in Fine Arts, Director of the George Caleb Bingham Gallery, and Art on the Move Community Outreach Coordinator. In this interview, Madeleine talks about the process for the Feature Artists Program, the process behind her artwork, and the journey of curating and organizing exhibitions.
The Missouri Arts Council introduced you as one of the Missouri Featured Artists for August. Can you share the experience you had with this feature?
MAC has an application process for the Featured Artist Program. So, after SVS (School of Visual Studies) Professor Joe Pintz was selected, I self-nominated and was selected this summer. The process was straight forward, after they told me that I had been selected, they asked for some information - photos, bio, statement - and posted it on the website and sent it out through their newsletter. The feature comes with a $500 stipend and continued social media support throughout your selected month.
You said you like to “use art as a tool for community organizing since 2004.” With this statement, what role do you believe/ want to have as an artist and art director in society?
Art is not a job or career for me. It is the life I have been cultivating for myself since my youth. Through education and continued engagement in a variety of experiences, curiosity, and perseverance. I have built the skills and community to provide guidance and support for younger artists, and financially support myself. Art as a tool for community organizing consists of exhibitions, lectures and panels, essay writing, community mural making, strategic planning for arts organizations, special arts events, and any way I can bring people together to engage meaningfully with art.
I believe that artists are uniquely positioned to engage in very deep questions of humanity - we explore modes of expression which range from the self to the global, and even the universal - and art directors can contextualize art and conversations around art in new and expansive ways. So as both, I can both engage in highly personal conversations about the ideas that affect me as a person and explore the ways that greater dialogs can come to the gallery with ideas and themes, I'm less personally involved with by providing a platform and a creative direction for deep consideration. The limitations this practice has on society, is truly our imagination as thinkers.
As a mixed media artist & muralist, can you explain your process while creating artwork? Is it chaotic? Do you take it in sections?
Chaotic is a good description. I work in spurts. Usually, I'll think about something for a long time before I put anything into materials, often that means making sketches, taking photos, or reading. By the time I sit down to work, I usually have a good idea of what I plan to make and while there is definitely some intuitive flexibility that happens during the work, the general concept is already laid out. I will usually take up the medium that feels right for that specific concept/project, and sometimes that will just be painting, and sometimes that will be photographs, and sometimes it will demand more embellishment or fabrication and move into fibers or sculptural projects.
Murals are different, I have an extremely specific process that I follow to create community mural projects. Discovery - where we meet with stakeholders to discuss their ideas; Design - where the mural team ideates the draft design; Edits and Approval - where the design receives feedback either from stakeholders or community, edits are made, and the stakeholders approve; Design transfer - where the approved design is transferred to mural surface; Community Painting - where the community is invited to fill large swaths of color to start the painting process; Production - where the muralists complete the mural and seals it to protect the surface; and an Unveiling - where the community, stakeholders and muralists come together to celebrate the completion of the project.
Madeleine LeMieux, Haircut, colored pencil on Bristol paper
When curating and organizing art exhibitions, what parts of the work do you most like? And what are the other parts that can be challenging? Do you like that it is different every time you work with an artist as not all artists are the same?
I love working with artists who come to the school and with students to help them connect with the work. There are always challenges in installation - which can both be very satisfying and incredibly stressful. The fact that it's different every time is truly why I was drawn to this kind of work. I never get bored. I'm always problem solving, always making connections, always thinking alongside colleagues and students and that means that the work is always fresh and exciting.
While obtaining your undergraduate degree at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago you owned and managed the OAO Galleria in Chicago, IL. Can you share the obstacles you faced during this time?
Of Art and Order (OAO) was a DIY project that started as a collaborative pop-up project in my second year at SAIC. It was so successful and rewarding that I ended up creating an apartment gallery which was a common way artists were exhibiting in Chicago at the time. I was in school, and the agency wasn't fully legitimate (legal), but it was a fantastic way to meet lots of people, give artists space to exhibit, meet neighbors and expand my understanding of exhibition practices. I learned a lot in that first iteration of running my own space. The biggest challenge is that the gallery was literally in my house - so my roommates and I had some interpersonal struggles, as all roommates do, but it was a positive self-driven project.
Can you describe two experiences when you founded and directed OAO Galleria and Resident Arts further grew your passion for being a part of the art community? One from each place.
OAO came out of a pop-up project, and I tell this story often in my classes. I had been at SAIC for almost two years, I had been asking my professors how artists were supposed to actually make a living out their work and getting very dismissive, vague answers. It was frustrating, and I knew enough working artists that I knew I was not being given real answers.
At the same time, I was living in a low-income Puerto Rican neighborhood. There was a storefront space on the corner near my apartment that would often be rented out by artists, they'd host a reception, and then the space would be empty and dark the rest of the month. I thought, "what a waste of space", so one day I went to a reception and asked for the landlord's information. And rented the space for myself.
I invited 12 other artists to meet me at the coffee shop across the street and talk about how best to use the space for the month and collaboratively we decided on four 3-4 person shows that would be up for a month each. Each group had their own PR and reception snacks, but I helped everyone with gallery sitting, install and deinstall.
It was wildly successful - everyone had their own networks to bring and sell work. When I was setting up the first show, the guys who hung out on the corner helped me move materials from my apartment to the corner. On the first day we were open, some teens threw a brick through our window. The guys found out who it was, brought them to the gallery, made them clean up the mess, and made them volunteer. The next open night, they came and brought their friends, as the month went on, more neighbors came, brought friends and family, and I ended up meeting so many artists in my neighborhood.
This launched my own consideration that maybe coordinating artists was an innate skill I should consider pursuing and was brought on to coordinate the visual arts for a local arts party coop. This really launched me into being community centered and artist organizing.
At Resident Arts, one of my most favorite projects was actually a residency project of a former Mizzou student, Maddie Olmsted, who worked to create a community weaving project. She had the idea, and we worked together to problem solve how it would work. We created a 4x8 hand loom that then traveled to events across the city for 3 months, all the material was donated. Maddie would then teach people how to add to the weaving, from toddlers to the elderly, of all abilities. The resulting project was a colorful tapestry with hundreds of people having had a hand in its making, and formally was about the scale of a person. So, a truly collaborative and community centered project that benefited everyone involved and insighted so many connections and conversations. For me, this project centered on the idea of collaboration and community within the art projects themselves - not just the artwork's presentation.
Madeleine LeMieux, Mother Wound, from Frameworks series, multimedia soft sculpture
With your practice engaging with “maternity, sexuality, and feminism, in relation to bodily agency,” what do you love about fostering creativity within yourself as a woman? Even with your experience, do you still often learn something about yourself as an artist, curator, and educator that you apply to your job as well as your art?
This summer was all about learning radical intimacy (there's a book with this title by Sophia K Rosa that was very influential for me). Learning how to be more authentic, communicative, and compassionate has most definitely translated to a more present engagement in my work at the university and as an artist. This personal transformation has largely been rooted in my role as a mother and a wife, and most recently has manifested in a return to older art-making practices that engage in more courageous expression of sexuality, something I have avoided in the past. In finding my own agency, I have found ways to help encourage this type of engagement in my students and peers.