Mychaelyn Michalec

Mychaelyn Michalec is a textile artist who studied Painting and Drawing and Art History at The Ohio State University. She received her Masters in Library and Information Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has mounted recent solo exhibitions at K Contemporary Denver, CO, The Weston Gallery in Cincinnati OH, The Contemporary Dayton, OH; and Roy G. Biv in Columbus, OH. Michalec has been included in group exhibitions at The Dayton Art Institute in Dayton, OH, The Bunker Art Space in West Palm Beach, FL ; Marquee Projects in Bellport, New York; The Longwood Museum of Art in Longwood VA; and Untitled Space Gallery in New York, NY, among others. Her work is held in the Collections of Beth Rudin DeWoody / The Bunker, The Collection of Sarah and Michelle Vance Waddell, Cincinnati, OH, Carla Shen, Brooklyn, NY and other private collections. She was awarded residencies at Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska and The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New York and The Vermont Studio Center among others. Michalec was recently selected as a Ohio Woman to watch by the Ohio Advisory Group for the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. And is a recipient of an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award winner in Craft.

Artist Statement

My work uses craft, specifically textiles to address themes of gendered labor and stereotypes, feminism, aging, sexuality and art history. Textiles are historically a language of creation and storytelling assigned to women at birth and I use these processes as part of a historical continuum of our cultural heritage. I create large-scale tufted rugs using both hand tools and a commercial tufting gun which are often embellished with embroidery, hand knitting and found vintage sewing notions. These rug paintings have evolved into works that are exemplified by forays into abstraction, figuration, and unflinching self-portraiture. They use allegorical, collaged compositions as a means to articulate and examine fallacies in our collective understanding of womanhood, domestic life, and freedom.

Instagram: mymychaelyn

Website: mychaelynmichalec.com

Honkers

Hand and machine tufted wool on felt backed cloth, 32 x 32 IN, 2024

Hi Mychaelyn, tell us about your background. How and when did you first start to create art?

I grew up in a small Appalachian town in northeast Ohio. I had very little exposure to art; it wasn't until I went to college that I became aware of it as a possible vocation. I moved to Washington DC right after high school and I remember often visiting the Phillips collection. I took an art appreciation class that exposed me to Franz Klein's work, which was huge for me. In my second year of college, I changed my major to painting and drawing. I think because I came to art later, it influenced the way I make things. I didn’t have the exposure or practice that the other students had to basic skills like rendering or setting up their pallets and as a result, I have always made work in a sort of prescribed manner which I think holds true today.

How do you begin to work? What is your process like?

My work is a combination of daily life and historical research. I often find myself falling down a hole in something that interests me. That is one reason why I pursued a Masters in Library and Information Science. Because I love research. Recently my research interests have been in birds. Women have often been compared to birds for their beauty and grace, but there is also the mythology of women/ bird monsters such as the Harpy and Siren. And while birds are often a symbol of being wild and free, they are also symbolic of domestication and captivity. I started gathering as many images of historical artworks illustrating that mythology. I often make hundreds of drawings from this process. Then I usually look at that collection of drawings and start developing a narrative for the work, which usually involves combining documentation of myself with the other things I have drawn to create a new narrative. From there, I decide what imagery I’m going to pursue in making a textile. I project those drawings onto a backing cloth. Some planning has to happen before the creation of a rug, but what I like about this form of textile making is there is room and ability to improvise as you go along.

How did your background in painting, drawing, and Art History influence your evolution into textile art as your primary medium?

I am drawn to painting and drawing as a medium, and the thing that appeals most to me is the immediacy. In some ways, it was difficult to switch to craft techniques because not all processes have that immediacy, for example weaving is a process in which the image reveals itself line by line like a dot matrix printer. But with rug tufting, I can work on one section of an image then move over to another spot. There’s the ability to pull the threads out of one area if it isn’t working and redo it. In that manner, it’s a lot like painting. The history of how craft is perceived, how it has been gendered, how women have historically passed textile traditions from one generation to the next, really influenced my decision to move my work into textiles as my primary form of creation

Your work has been exhibited in a variety of settings, from solo exhibitions to group shows. How does the context of the exhibition space influence how you present your textile works?

I don’t think the context of the exhibition space influences my work that much. I strive to make the work that I really want to make and scale is an important element in my work. I have had the opportunity to make work for a space that had 22-foot-high ceilings, and for that exhibition, I did strive to make a work that would take advantage of that height.

As an artist with works in notable collections like Beth Rudin DeWoody’s and Carla Shen’s, how does the knowledge of your work being collected impact your creative process?

As a woman, I am proud to have work in the collections of notable female collectors. Residencies seem to play a significant role in your career. How have experiences like the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center or the Golden Foundation for the Arts shaped your practice? Residencies have been important to my artistic development in a couple of ways. One in being somewhat isolated in the Midwest it was a great opportunity to meet other artists and create relationships that have continued long after the residencies concluded. Additionally, it’s given me a concentration of time to focus on my work away from my day-to-day, and often I take back some ideas from the location in which I was a resident.

You were recently selected as an Ohio Woman to Watch by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. How does this recognition align with your personal goals as an artist?

I was proud to be selected as an Ohio Woman to Watch by the National Museum of Women in the Arts. But that sort of award comes with a duality that many don’t question, which is the fact that we need to have a separate museum just to exhibit women with separate special exhibitions of women-only artists, which is not to say that I am ungrateful for the opportunity but more so to question the fact that after all this time, we still need to create these special opportunities for artists by gender in order to create a sense of equality. The other thing about that award was that in Ohio, that exhibition was organized at the Riffe Gallery through The Ohio Arts Council, which has restrictions on the work shown, one of which is nudity. So, I was extremely limited by their censorship to show my work. In a show about women artists, women should be allowed to make work about their own bodies, especially at this contentious time in history. This experience furthered my resolve to advocate for bodily autonomy for all.

Harpy

Hand and machine tufted wool on felt backed cloth. 42 x 30 IN, 2024

Your work crosses the boundaries between fine art and craft, earning accolades like the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in Craft. How do you navigate and challenge the distinction between these categories in your practice?

The thing that I like most about craft or maybe I should say about my practice, which crosses the boundaries between fine art and craft is the ability to be so dismissive of it. There is a duality in presenting work in this manner I get to be both and neither at the same time. I switched my practice to creating textiles initially when I started making work about domestic life and gendered labor. It made sense to me that the subject and the technique were the same. There is something interesting to me about not quite fitting in. I have always felt that way. My rugs aren’t technical enough to be a craft and they’re just crafty enough to not be fine art. This process speaks to everything we have here as women in this country. Are we full citizens? Yes, but do we have autonomy over our own bodies and medical choices no.

With such a broad geographic reach in your exhibitions and collections, how do regional influences from Ohio or elsewhere resonate within your textile works?

Growing up rural and in the impoverished Rust Belt of Ohio will always influence my work. My mother was educated and had a Master’s degree, and was a big proponent of second-wave feminism and always repeated its mantra that my sister and I could, “be anything we wanted to be when we grow up”. But the reality is we can’t have it all or if we try what is the price? A lot of my work still addresses the lip service that Second Wave Feminism gave to us versus the reality at hand.

Describe a real-life situation that inspired you.

I don’t think I value inspiration that much. People attribute the idea of inspiration to the process of making art, but that makes it feel a bit lazy to me. I am curious about things and I act on those curiosities. To designate that as “inspiration” feels like some romantic inflation. Inspiration feels like a distraction to process. Process is part of a practice and that is why artists refer to their studio time as a practice.