We recently connected with Meg Lubey and have shared our conversation below.
Meg, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
In 2021 I participated in a program called Creativity Works and received a grant to organize a community art project. Something that’s really important to me is access to inclusive and comprehensive sex education so I decided to partner with The LGBT Center of Greater Cleveland, who was at that time setting up such a program. For my project I created a collaborative zine issue that highlighted work by local queer artists and writers. The zine was titled “Ordinary” and the pieces included focused on queer joy and existence in the everyday and the mundane. 100% of the proceeds went towards purchasing safe sex kits for the LGBT Center. The range of work that I was able to feature in this issue was so incredible and beyond anything I could have asked for. I received poems, comics, photographs, drawings, and even more from such a wide range of members of my community. I was especially excited to be able to publish a drawing by a 14 year old artist. I connected with so many wonderful people I never would have been able to otherwise and I will never forget what it felt like to be able to provide a space for someone to share a part of themselves. I hope to do another project similar to this one sometime soon!
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
My name is Meg Lubey (they/she) and I’m a painter and writer currently practicing in Cleveland, Ohio. I was born and raised in a town outside of Buffalo, New York, came to Cleveland for college, and have yet to stray.
I graduated about a year ago from the Cleveland Institute of Art where I received a BFA in Painting with an emphasis in Creative Writing. While I was in school I researched and created mixed media paintings revolving around themes of intimacy, communication, and collection while heavily thinking about the concept of “Queer Time”, objects, and memory. Towards the latter half of my undergraduate experience I began to feel pulled towards writing. I took multiple poetry classes and during my final year of schooling I wrote a poetry collection that paralleled my visual art. I ended up titling this collection “About Cutting Limes and the Moon Being and Half” and later that same year, it was published as a chapbook by Bottlecap Press.
This past year has been all about adjusting to a post-grad life as it’s my first time not being a student. I have been learning to create work without deadlines, write poems without prompts, and balance a creative practice while working full time. I’ve also started venturing into the world of curation at Gallery East alongside Cara Romano, which has been an incredible learning experience.
My current visual art still follows themes similar to my old body of work, though the pieces are much smaller and a bit more illustrative. I have been really focused on still lives, trying to find the ways in which someone’s presence lingers in a room or the trace they can leave on objects. My writing, though still focused on poems and prose, has begun to expand into something a bit more fantastical or fictional. Rather than strictly working in a biographical sense, I have started merging my own life with something imagined. I guess this year has been a bit about letting go and taking off simultaneously.
For you, what’s the most rewarding aspect of being a creative?
The most rewarding part of being an artist, to me, is the community I’ve gained from this pursuit. As much as I love the experience of painting or writing, it really doesn’t compare with viewing work made by other artists and connecting with them about their process and experiences. I have always loved visiting my peers studios and dissecting our work and what’s been on our minds together- it’s endlessly gratifying.
When I started to really get into writing I was mostly keeping it to myself and very occasionally had work being published online. It was so hard to assess what parts of my work people were connecting with, if anyone at all. I was pretty new to writing spaces at this time (and still am) and barely even had any idea as to what the possibilities were. During the summer of 2022 I was invited to read at an event organized by Cleveland Art Workers and Grieveland (2 incredible, local projects/organizations you should definitely check out) alongside some really strong poets. It felt like such a treat to read what I had worked on out loud and to hear the audience laugh when they were supposed to or get serious exactly when I anticipated it. It wasn’t like anything I had experienced before and it was the first time I could really see proof of my art connecting with people. And just as much as I enjoyed performing I also enjoyed being on the other end of it as an audience member, connecting with someone else’s work and being a part of this great whole.
We often hear about learning lessons – but just as important is unlearning lessons. Have you ever had to unlearn a lesson?
After graduating college I’ve had a lot of people ask what it is that I’m doing with my degree. It’s not always easy explaining that I went to school for the resources and to learn, not to get funneled into a specific career. I’ve since been beginning to understand how to balance my jobs and my creative practice and though it’s not always the easiest, I’ve started to really enjoy the separation of these things. For the first time in a long time I am creating work without immediately sharing it, and asking for feedback or validation. I’m spending a lot more time with my work and creating it fully for myself- I was never able to tell if this was something I was doing/ever could do. I’ve even started extending my practice into something that’s just for fun and that’s it. Art has never been only about pleasure for me- it always ran a bit deeper than that. Recently though, I have joined a ceramics studio and have been making silly, hand-built mugs and I’ve found so much joy in this routine.
In a world that demands production over process, it feels really good to create for the sole purpose of creating. I have always loved and savored my studio time, though it now feels so much more precious than before. While critique and cold reads of art work are vital for learning and progressing in your craft, I have become so aware of the importance of taking time to create, rest, and reflect in a way that is much slower. I am endlessly grateful for everyone who has walked beside me while I learned about my work and who has pushed my art-making forward and it’s because of them I can change the nature of my practice. I guess I have been learning that I have all the time in the world and that I can use it slowly and deliberately and sometimes just for fun.
Contact Info:
- Website: meganlubeyart.com
- Instagram: @megan.lubey
- Twitter: meganlubey