What makes a residency?

• Time away from your regular life and responsibilities.
• Inspiration.
• For me, a change in geography.
• Quiet time to think, read, think about art, make art.

My recent Road Trip Residency, part of the Summer Residency in Reuse, ticked all those boxes! I had a week off from teaching and kind of last minute made plans. My original idea didn’t work out because a casual residency/kind of an AirBnB for artists, didn’t work out as they were fully booked.

My second idea was to plan a route around going to museums and creative reuse stores in Iowa and Wisconsin. I went to Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Madison, Wisconsin and a few places in between.  My trip was 3 days and 2 nights – chosen to keep costs down.

Pound and Inch Fabric Store in Moline, IL, a resale shop.

I shopped at three creative reuse stores – Pound and Inch (fabric resale) in Moline, IL, Create Exchange in Cedar Rapids, IA and Hello Art Hatchery in Stoughton, WI. Confusingly, the two creative reuse stores in Wisconsin both have Hello in their name. The other one is Hello Happiness and is in Sheboygan, WI (I’ve been there too).  And I hit a few thrift stores.

Hello Art Hatchery is the cleanest, cutest of all the creative reuse stores I’ve visited – and I’ve been to 20 of them, across 10 states.  It has a boutique vibe and even a big shelf unit with salt water taffy, old fashion sticks of hard candy, and more fun favorites.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind a dusty warehouse at all, just reporting the vibe at this store.  They sell both new and used items, so I was able to pick up some (desperately needed) Japanese washi tape.

Interior of Hello Art Hatchery in Stoughton, WI

Did I find some awesome things at the reuse stores that will definitely show up in my art? Yes, yes I did. I won’t show them here because I don’t want this blog post series to turn into a thrift haul. I took a photo of a gingham apron I left behind to post – because really, I have enough vintage aprons. I was going to do a social media post about leaving it for someone else, but then looking at the photo, I kept thinking, man, shoulda bought it, so I deleted the photo.

Change in geography? Check! Northern Iowa is surprisingly hilly (by Illinois standards, as we are the second flattest state), and the Madison, Wisconsin area also has hills.

Quiet time to read and think? Check! I brought this book with me:

and it’s an absolute revelation. I already knew a fair bit about Asawa, but this book is about her community of artist mothers in the 1950s in San Fransisco. I’m glad this kind of scholarship is finally being done and published.  The cover photo is of course by Imogene Cunningham, who I knew had taken a lot of photos of Asawa, but in reading this, I learned about their friendship and the context of taking those photos.

Here’s part of the publisher’s description of the book:

“How a group of artist-mothers in postwar San Francisco refused the centuries-old belief that a woman could not make art while also raising children.

…Delving into the archive, where the traces of motherhood have not yet been erased from official history, Troeller reveals Ruth Asawa’s personal and professional dialogue with several other artist-mothers, including Merry Renk, Imogen Cunningham, and Sally Woodbridge. For these women, motherhood was not an essentialized identity, but rather a means to reimagine the terms of artmaking outside of the patriarchal policing of reproduction. This project unfolded in three broad areas, which also structure the book’s chapters: domesticity and decoration; metaphors for creativity; and maternal labor in the public sphere, especially in the public schools. Drawing on queer theory and feminist writings, Troeller argues that in belatedly accounting for the figure of the artist-mother, art history must reckon with an emergent paradigm of artmaking, one predicated on reciprocity, caretaking, and futurity.”

I had lots of time to think while driving and got ideas for art, which I then had to write down at the earliest opportunity. I had decided in advance I would take back up my “The View through the Windshield” photo series during this trip, which means, always stop to take the photo. Go back, go around the block, get the photo. The original constraints for that series was that I had to be in the car, or if out of the car, touching the car. (The photo series began when my kids were little and in car seats.)

While I got some good photos, I wish I’d taken more and gotten out of the car more to get the shots – but sometimes there’s nowhere to pull over and also, it was really, really hot.

The single biggest benefit to me, about being away from home, is being responsible for only myself. I was away from needing to feed the family, do the laundry, take out the trash, and the mental load of keeping track of all that. Being some distance away is helpful to me in the process of letting go of family and household responsibilities. I don’t think I could stay at an AirBnB one town over and feel like I was “away.”

Let’s talk about the museums!

I visited the Chazen Art Museum on the campus of the University of Wisconsin – Madison, which was quite good and had a surprisingly high number of artworks by women. That museum deserves its own blog post, we’ll see if I get to that.

Exterior of the National Pearl Button Museum in Muscatine,Iowa.

And I went to the National Pearl Button Museum in Muscatine, Iowa. I know, I know, you’re jealous. I didn’t make it to the National Mustard Museum. Maybe next trip.

I learned about the Illinois and Iowa history of pearl button making ten years ago, or more, while attending an arts conference in Moline, IL, which is one of the Quad Cities around the state border. I learned about it from a quilt! I wish I could track down the quilt and the quilt maker. If I still have a photo of it, it would be too hard to find. It was a pictorial quilt that showed some factory buildings along the Mississippi River in Iowa and had, if I remember it correctly, some pearl buttons sewn on and a piece of mussel shell with circles punched out.

The signage explained that before plastic buttons, buttons where made of shells. They weren’t really pearl buttons, but mother of pearl buttons, that’s the shiny part inside the shell. Muscatine, Iowa was the world capital for pearl button production for a time. In all, the pearl button industry there lasted about 100 years. Done in by plastic.

How did the Pearl Button Industry in Iowa Start?

Tariffs. Previously, we’d gotten our pearl buttons (or or shells for raw materials can’t remember?) from Japan, but then restrictive tariffs made that too expensive. A German immigrant in Iowa had been a button maker in Germany and went looking for a type of American mussel that work work well for buttons. He went from river to river until he found an appropriate mussel in the Mississippi River.

From there, it was an explosion of factories, patents for all kinds of clever machines, and of course, in fine American tradition, exploiting natural resources to the extreme. At least we didn’t throw away the mussel meat – that was used for animal feed.

If you want to learn the rest, plan a visit to the National Pearl Button Museum!

Image of part of a display on the labor movement around the pearl button industry in Iowa.

I want to learn more about Pearl McGill, a labor organizer in the button industry. And yes, her name really was Pearl! Okay, it was her middle name, but that’s what she went by.

Making Art and Preparing for Making Art

I had thought about taking along supplies to make small cyanotypes on the road, but decided I didn’t want to do hotel-cyanotypes. And while I have a brand new mini printer that I can use to print from my phone, I hadn’t tested it out yet at home. But I did take photos, some of which could be good cyanotypes. And I got an idea for a new series!

Best of all, I feel rested, refreshed, inspired, and can’t wait to get back in the studio, where I’ve just installed a new, larger drying rack inside a cabinet. This is for drying cyanotype-treated papers and fabrics that I treat myself. I’ve modified the rack to fit inside the cabinet and next I add a black out curtain over the doors, to prevent light leakage during drying time. (Update – I’ve tested it and it works perfectly!)

It was a short trip, so that’s about it.  It was totally worth it and I definitely recommend taking yourself on a mini residency road trip!

P.S. In case you missed it, I’ve declared myself “Artist in Residence at All Creative Reuse Stores” this summer!  There’s a blog post about it here.