We recently connected with Mychaelyn Michalec and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Mychaelyn, thanks for joining us today. Do you feel you or your work has ever been misunderstood or mischaracterized? If so, tell us the story and how/why it happened and if there are any interesting learnings or insights you took from the experience?

Making work about the female body is often misunderstood and is still often censored by arts organizations in this country, in this contemporary time. The naked, female form is always initially associated with s*x, and therefore subject to censorship. However, our bodies have been the subject of work by men for thousands of years and only by making work about ourselves do we get to take back some of that narrative. I used my body in my work, and I think it is often a mischaracterization of the type of person I am and subjects my work to a certain amount of censorship. But I feel strongly about recontextualizing myself and my work within the greater timeline of the art historical canon.

Mychaelyn, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I am a textile artist, living and working in Dayton Ohio. I have a bachelors of fine arts degree in painting and drawing and a BA in art history from the Ohio State University. I also have a masters in library and information science from the University of Southern Mississippi.

After I left art school, I had a studio practice for a year or two, while holding down a career in the arts. But after I decided to have children, I lost my sense of connectedness with the art world. One, because many jobs in the arts don’t afford a salary that allows for quality childcare and two because having children was so consuming it became too difficult to maintain a sense of self or my work.

After a 12 year break from my studio, I started making work again when my youngest child started school in 2014.

My work addresses themes of domestic, life, sexuality, gendered labor, art history and feminism. I was trained as a painter, but in 2018 I started using textiles as my main medium. I was interested in finding a way to address ideas of domesticity and gendered labor both in subject matter and technique. Craft and specifically needle crafts, such as embroidery, knitting and rug punching were creative outlets, historically used by women to express themselves. It is also an inherited language of creative communication passed down from generation to generation.

I use both a commercial rugtufting gun, and also handtools like punch needles to create large scale wool rugs. I also incorporate knitting and embroidery as well as found craft objects into my work..

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

It was the writer, George Eliot that said “it’s never too late to be what you could’ve been. “ I think a lot of artists struggle with giving themselves permission to take time off and when you have something in your life that brings you away from your studio practice you start to question am I really still an artist? I’ve had a lot of people who are caretakers of children tell me how they stepped away from their career and they’re worried about getting back after a year or six months or three years. And I often like to tell them that I took 12 years off and you can change the course of things in your life at any point . Recently I went through a divorce, and after many years of having a safety net, a partner who supported me financially, I had to make a series of tough choices about my future and what I wanted for myself but I think being an artist was to me more important than anything else.

How did you build your audience on social media?

I see social media for exactly what it is, which is a tool for my career nothing less and nothing more. When I frame it in that way, the time that I spend on it is used to create connection and community for myself. I use it strictly as a source for connecting with other artists, galleries, arts organizations, and curators, whose work resonates with me. And I think the best way to build a social media presence is to stay true to your interests and community and build relationships from there. I have used it to communicate with other artists about technique or connect with galleries or make connections for showing my work. Conversely, I’ve tried to remain generous with my time in providing advice or connections for people who contact me.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.mychaelynmichalec.com
• Instagram: Mymychaelyn
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/mychaelynmichalecartist