A Conversation with the Artist
The purpose of Women Who Rock is to provide an archive of artists' works as they want others to percieve them. A large part of that is in having conversations with the artist.
Here is a conversation with Nancy Macko from 29 March, 2019 regarding her background in art, inspiration for the traveling exhibits "Fragile Bee I" and "Fragile Bee II", and her curent work in progress, an as-of-yet-untitled project on composting.
[Transcription]
J: So you had said you had a gallery exhibit that also was happening this semester or..
M: I have two actually! This is one of them. So I have, are you going to see the other students?
J: Yes
M: Ok, well I’ll give you a set of three so people can do whatever they want with them. And then, this this one is also up right now. This one I’m going to speak of at the venue next weekend.
J: okay
M: And then…
J: Do you have to fly out to DC for that?
M: This one is in Irving Texas.
J: Oh! I’m from there!
M: From Irving?!
J: Well from Denton, very close to Irving.
M: Ok yeah, so I’m flying into Dallas, and I’ll be there a couple days. Cause I’m going to go to the museums and stuff on Saturday and then I’m giving my presentation to them on Sunday.
J: Well that’s fantastic, I love the Fort Worth Museum of Contemporary Art.
M: Ok, well I’ll make sure I go there because I have the whole day to myself.
J: So I saw on your website there’s been an evolution of the idea of bees, and like, different mediums you’ve done, different presentations. Can you talk me through the inspirations and the evolution of your gallery?
M: You mean my body of work?
J: Yes
M: So the gallery would be where you’d show the work.
J: Ok
M: I wouldn’t have a gallery -- unless I had another business, right? I have a studio, which people can come and visit, and we, you know, things would be hung up like in a gallery. But, usually that term applies to a specific site, and other people are handling that.
Um, when I went to graduate school, we didn’t - we were not encouraged to learn how to make art that was research based.
J: Really?
M: It was, um, still pretty abstract and analytical, and um, just more sort of following themes that, you know, of the early twentieth century. Um, and you know, that’s based off of who’s teaching you right? So if that’s what they’re doing, then that’s what they pass on to you. But at the same time, I was introduced to feminism. And that opened this whole other door of doing things differently. And I remember having a small presentation of my work, with my other graduate students, and this one young man said to me: “did you make this stuff up all by yourself?” And I thought, well, how else would I have made it? In other words it wasn’t referencing anything else in art history. Which had been sort of a common methodology. And it was - that particular work was autobiographical, it was inner-introspective… um, you know, it was kinda vulnerable. You know, it’s like, I took, and actually, one of - my teacher running that seminar, which always kind of blew me away; because she was a painter, and every figure in her work, she was always the model. She told me that that work was too ego-centric. Which I had to go look up, at that point. And I thought, my work? Are you kidding me? You’re in every painting you paint! So we didn’t become friends, you know, she was not a mentor.
But later on, um, at the same time, I met a woman who was a young woman - a feminist artist, a print-maker. And she really um, mentored several of us young women artists. And you know, gave us a different - different kind of support. And she’d say, you know, “Nancy what do you want your work to be about?” Right, instead of what, some other way to do it. And, I still probably have the notes. You know, when I say well I wanted it to be, um, beautiful, which has gone through its iterations in not being a good thing to do. And coming back to being an okay thing to do. But also sensitive, and you know kind of evocative, like you would draw people in and you know, stick with them, in a kind of a… I don’t know, atmospheric sort of a way.
So my work was still pretty abstract, and it was pretty intellectual. And then, I got together with this group of grad women, and we were sort of mimicking the dinner party that was happening in LA. And we did our own little thing, only we called it housewife blitz. And, it was all tongue in cheek. It, you know, it was feminist based, but we weren’t tromping around in our, uh, workman shoes or boots you know, kind of thing. It was just more light-hearted. So we made a lot of jokes about stuff in the kitchen, and one of my friends, we went to the thrift stores right? Got a lot of materials, and she made this sculpture out of plastic plates that climbed up in space. You know, with hot glue, and then sort of was attached to the ceiling. And then she had a recipe for making a gnocchi that she plastered all over the kitchen wall. And then we ended up inviting all these people to come to this - we did it in this house this guy was renovating, it was empty so he let us use it. We made this big turkey dinner, and we had all this food, and then we sort of made fun about setting the table. Anyway, it was really a hoot, and we did it several times in different places, and you know, we thought we were really hot shit.
And um, things were really changing! I was in Berkeley, that was in the Bay Area, you know and that’s always been a hotbed of political change. But when I came here, so I still kept making work. Until like five years later I got my job at Scripps. And um, it wasn’t until I was here, that this whole idea of doing interdisciplinary work was really emphasized. Because, my education did not include a liberal arts education per se. And so, the whole environment here and the culture was new to me. And so I went to a conference that was about feminism and spirituality. Because I knew that I wanted my work to be feminist-based, you know power - for empowering women kind of ideas. But also to have this kind of spiritual element. And, at this conference, this woman had written this book called “Hagar, Lost Desert Matriarch”. And it was her theory that there was another story in Egyptian history about some queen, who was like lost or something. And she tried to connect the dots of these two stories to make them parallel. To try to intimate that it was Hagar - who was from the Old Testament, are you familiar with that story?
J: Yes
M: Sarah and Hagar? It - you know, they kinda stayed, they never really connected. But in the book, she started talking about women from the Old Testament. And that some of their names were actually titles. That the name Sarah meant High Priestess, that like Milcah was milk mother, and that uh Deborah meant queen bee. And then at some point in this text, she put these two words together: bee priestesses.
And that just really ignited for me, I was like wow that’s really curious, and I like - I you know had this really romantic idea of um, young novitiate women in a temple in you know, Greek days. Worshipping a goddess, and you know doing all, sort of not really being nuns, you know being a little bit more in the world. As a little like, they - something I read that sacred priestesses were the sacred prostitutes of the goddess, so that was a place where young men would go to be initiated on, you know, how to have sex with a woman. So it was a lot different than being a nun right? So that just all seemed to work with me, this little feminist utopia.
And so the early work was really, uh, imagining a feminist utopia, and using the hive as a model for that. Where the queen is the mother to all the female worker bee daughters. And they run the world. Cause they do take care of everything in the hive. And that kind of opened a number of doors, in terms of doing research about bees and learning about them. And so this was over twenty years ago when I first started, so we didn’t have the political and economic concern about the bees then, yet. Right? Because other things hadn’t started increasing, like the use of insecticides and fungicides. And the whole idea of GMO products, and you know, all of that kind of evolved over the last twenty-five years.
And so, so my early work was much more romanticized, and my first big work was called the honeycomb wall, and it was like almost 100 hexagonal panels that had different images and phrases on them. And most of it pointed to this sort of empowerment, and this sort of mythological comments about bees. You know like: “bees are the souls of nymphs” and “pythagoreans worshipped you know, bees as symbols of Aphrodite”. You know, this was the literature that I was discovering. And that was already arcane, but I had tried to go back in history to before history was recorded in the Western world. And so the only culture that had any documentation was the Minoan, and even then they said that in their culture men and women were equal - mean and women were part of agriculture and economics and politics, and they were more empowered.
Because actually, in Greek culture, and I learned a lot of this from Ellen Finkelpearl, women were kept in the house. You know it wasn’t harem style but they were kept in the house and the only time they were allowed to go out was when there was these special rites that were like Holidays. Like May day, which was sort of when everything bloomed again, and things were proliferating and being you know, regenerating. And so then they could be out in the world. Otherwise it was you know, just like in Rome the men were in the public space the agora, and the women were in the house. So Minoan culture evidently was a little more broad based for women, and they were eventually assumed by some warring nation from the North. You know it’s always something like that right? Some aggressor takes over something more peaceful.
J: Right
M: So prior to that, I mean in that window of time, you know I’d get all these little threads and bits of information from people. And it turned out that there might have been matriarchal cultures in what’s now Romania. And so I went there and I went and tried to document things. And it was just such a cultural set of obstacles, because we - Jen and I went together in the late nineties - and they had just come out from under communist rule with Ceausescu for twenty-five years. And nobody - I mean they had money that was worth like pesos, so you’d get a wad of money. You know it was called Leu, and you’d get this much of it and it would be like twenty-five dollars. I mean, and nothing worked, they didn’t have credit card systems. This was of course before cell phones and just after the internet started.
J: Right.
M: But I met some people there, and they tried to help me, and they tried to take me to where there were, you know, potential artifacts. And I did learn a lot about this particular culture the Cucuteni culture. And I tried to use imagery from that culture in some of the work I did at that time.
Cause they found a lot of little clay objects in - buried with you know, when they would find skeletons they’d find these little funerary objects. So they thought that maybe this was like a Pagan sort of practice place, you know?
And then, maybe I did that for like - well, maybe ten or so years. And I sort of pulled away from the bees. And started exploring… what was my transition? Well, we moved, because my mother had retired to Claremont and she was getting older and she was needing a lot more help. And so my world got smaller cause I sort of was here now with her.
And that’s when I started photographing the garden, because we spent a lot of time in our new garden, and we planted vegetables and flowers. And I started shooting at close range. And so I did this work called intimate spaces. I did two bodies of work that’s on the second website - the Nancy Macko photography website. Because I just thought that making visible this less visible world on a larger scale would be very evocative, and it would seduce people and you know, give them something to enjoy looking at and contemplating. And again, still the same thread, you know to be spiritual, and not that that word screams feminism, but you know, interior flowers and nature itself and the freedom of nature. For me it was still coming from that same place of empowerment.
And so eventually people would start sending me things about the bees. And I was reading more and more about CCD: colony collapse disorder. And you know it was pretty widespread and it was international, and the information was much more technical and scientific. And so my focus shifted and I thought “oh, you know I need to go back, the bees need me to come back again”. Right, not that I’m their messenger but it’s a way right?
J: Right
M: And again that gave me a purpose. And so then I decided I would begin by raising flowers in my backyard that would be attracting, and watch them through their annual cycle. And photograph them at different points in their life cycle. And then that ended up being the botanical portraits. So for instance, like, let’s see… well this is part of one from the first series, and that’s milkweed. Oh here, these are better.
J: Oh these are beautiful. I love how you kept the honeycomb motif from your earlier works through them.
M: Yeah, I needed - Yeah I had some other iterations, and then finally it worked that it would just be breaking them up. So all these plants; this is poppy, this is sunflower, this is one called clarkia amoena, but it’s farewell tonight.
J: Right
M: All of these I got at the Rancho Botanic Gardens, right up here on foothill. Because they are a growing nursery that sells organic species. So I, you know, I grew them in the backyard, and I photographed them. And then I had this opportunity to have this larger installation of work at this space, which is the Museum of Art and History in Lancaster. And this is 2014. And because the room was so big, it was like a big square beautiful room. Each wall is fifty feet. You know, I could really push it out there. So I had nine of these, and then this was my second honeycomb wall, It’s called “Honey Teachings in the Mother Tongue of the Bees”. And the images on here are much more pragmatic. It’s meant to give the viewer information, and the experience of the plight of the bees. In fact, in one of the phrases on one of the panels you know, I write: abused, oppressed, something else… you know, women and bees.
Now in our culture, we’re so spoiled, I mean we have everything. You know, it’s not perfect, but what we have is amazing. But if you think about how abused women and children around the world are, by their cultures, or by their governments; to me there was a metaphor. That the lack of really paying attention to what the bees need, was the same as how people don’t pay attention to the fact that women really hold up the world. And that if we lose the bees, all of the things that we’re used to eating, that flower that needs to be pollinated, will be gone. And if they create them artificially, who knows how that will change our DNA to some degree.
So I mean it’s all so interconnected. You know, we know that because we have access to so much information through the internet. So then I thought, well this is a good idea. I could photograph species of flowers that attract bees in other regions in the US. Right? And then make other bodies of work. So I went to Denver, and I went to the Denver Botanical Garden and made a body of work from the species they have… there’s one. And then most of the ones on this card are from that group. So that’s called: Botanical Portraits, Mile High.
J: Ok… This one is?
M: All of those… All of these are in this group, there’s nine of them, Botanical Portraits, Mile High.
J: And mile high referring to?
M: Denver
J: Denver.
M: Yeah. So, I have plans - I’ve gone to New York, and I photographed at the New York Botanical Garden, Brooklyn Botanical Garden. I haven’t processed that work into new work. We were in Europe last June; I went to a Botanical Garden outside Stockholm, and another one in Amsterdam, and I haven’t processed that work either. And then I was in Tahiti for a while, on a trip with a friend, and photographed all the tropicals. So I’m not really sure where all these - I’m sure they’re all filed away you know, on a drive and in light rooms so I can create another body of work. But I haven’t needed to do that yet, because I have an agent in New York who finds venues for this work.
So this exhibition, which is called “The Fragile Bee” is “Fragile Bee 1”. And so it’s the honey teachings piece, the big meadow called “Mural” which I can tell you about again in a minute. These, the first set of botanical portraits, two videos, some other stuff, you don’t need all that. But, so that has been traveling regional museums, and currently it’s at fair state in Michigan, and then it’s going to… who’s getting that next? I think that’s the one that’s going to the Discovery Museum in Bridgeport Connecticut. Which opens in May, so I’m going there for that opening, I don’t have a card yet.
And then, at the - at the first venue for this show, two venues wanted it at the same time. And so my agent said, you know, can you put together another exhibition? It’s like, ok yeah I can haul out the honeycomb wall from 25 years ago, and put it together with the second group of botanical portraits, and some other work. And so I have “Fragile Bee 1” and “Fragile Bee 2”. And they both travel.
J: Okay
M: To different places. So “Fragile Bee 2” is at the Irving Fine Art Center, and then it’s going to the Chicago Academy of Sciences in the Fall. It’s very hard to keep this in my head because to me they’re like, the same. But, I just, I have little files for all these venues and I know when I sent them so I, you know, anyway.
So it’s fantastic because I get to go to these places, I get to meet people. Sometimes they have a whole day of bee events. When I go in May to the Discovery Museum, that evening they’re having a fundraiser sponsored by a woman who is a local beekeeper, who owns a honey business there. And I’ll give a talk. So it really brings communities together. And the message is simple, it’s basically, you know if, find the plants that attract bees in where you live, and plant them. Because bees need a variety of diet.
And so, are you familiar at all with the pollinating of the almond trees in California?
J: Mmhmm.
M: So one of the prob- there’s many problems with that. But one of the main problems is that during that whole time that they’re pollinating the almond trees, they’re on a mono-diet.
J: Right
M: Mono-crop diet. Which weakens their immune system, it’s not - it doesn’t have any variety. It’s like if we only ate oatmeal every day. Or asparagus, and that was it, you know? And, when they bring the bees to the orchards, if the trees aren’t in bloom yet, while they’re waiting they feed the bees sugar water instead of honey. Which again weakens their system. So it’s really such a nutty thing, and why we have to supply the world with almonds I don’t understand. And the last article I read, it was phenomenal, it was in the times last fall. They were calculating how many acres are, you know, have almond trees on them. And that five years ago some- somebody that understood the whole system economically, and with the use of bees and everything thought it was already too great to pollinate. And it’s already grown, and it’s like a million acres, a million acres of trees! Right, how much money can they be making? And most of these almonds go to China!
M: So people just get the bees, the bees are animals, they’re just industrial cyborgs for them. They’re not, like, cared about, it’s not about this organic process, you know, where something amazingly natural and magical happens. And it’s for profit, but even the people who are producing bees and hives and bringing them are losing thousands of dollars, because so many of the bees die after this. They get trucked from the Southeast in February, when normally they’re hibernating because they need down-time, and then they’re on these trucks and that’s upsetting and then they get to a new place and then they don’t get good food. So that, plus this thing called the varroa mite, which is this tiny little bug that actually lands on the flowers and then it gets on the bees and the bees bring it into the hive.
M: ‘Cause I was—I went to Hawaii over Spring Break and I photographed at a bee farm,
J: Okay
M: And had spent quite a long time talking with the people that worked there, just adding to what I knew,
J: Right
M: And they were describing, you know, how the varroa mite functions. ‘Cause it’s a speck, it’s like, um, like a grain of sand, that’s how small it is.
M: But it gets in the hive and then it eats at the larva, you know, it just infests the hive and then the bees get sick and they, you know, can’t fight it off. It sort of takes over. I’m not sure how the varroa mite first got here, but it seems to migrate through the air and then gets on the bees, or it’s in the flowers and the bees bring it into the hive. So there’s that, there’s if you’re using them to pollinate plants that have been sprayed, then one of the things they discovered, which was, I thought, so fascinating when colony collapse first started, it was about the bees not coming back to the hive, like, where did they go? What happened to them? And they figured out that the neonicanoids (neonicatinoids?) that are in the fungicides and insecticides cause memory loss, and the bees can’t find their way home.
M: So they die. And I—I just thought, wow, that’s sort of like the um, current rampant thing we have with, you know, older age people having dementia. They don’t know the purpose of the, you know, the reason for that either, but there’s a—there’s always parallels, right?
J: Right.
M: Similarities. So, uh, I’m thinking that my next foray will be more about documenting pollination and I did that when I was in Hawaii. This man was pollinating the macadamia nut trees. He produces raw, organic certified honey, it’s non-pasteurized, there’s no corn syrup in it, there’s nothing added to it. It’s called Big Island Bees. He’s a fourth-generation beekeeper, and he is also a sculptor.
J: Ah!
M: And I first learned about his work when I got interested in bee art in the Nineties. And he was—he’s so, uh, facile with the bees. He’ll build a metal armature, like a real basic, abstract shape, he’ll have this kind of enclosed room, he’ll bring a hive in, he’ll release the bees to—and he’ll coat it with wax, so that’ll attract them, so then they’ll build honeycomb on it.
M: And when it’s kind of the way he wants it to look, he smokes them out, back into their house.
M: And he gets another hive that, it’s not their house, so they come in and they clean it.
J: *small laugh*
M: They take everything out of it that they could use. So then it’s perfect. And this is the work that he was doing in the Eighties and the Ni—and part of the Nineties, until—and he was in New York, he was doing quite well, he had a show at the Guggenheim, I mean, very successful. And he called them Apis Sculptures, A-P-I-S, you know. And so, um, he had to go back to Hawaii and take over the family business, basically. Which had been quite a huge deal. So, I met him when I went there, and we had a great time, he’s gonna start making work again and showing it in New York, which is really fascinating. So, I’d always admired his work and what he did, and so getting to spend time with him and just, you know, talk about bees for several hours—
M: You know it’s like lear—it’s sorta like school! Right? You’re just like learning all this stuff! And when I listen to it and I hear it, I mean, it’s facts that I can give to people. But then I’m also trying to… rearrange it into, how—how can I make this art. Right?
J: Right.
M: So, that’s just twirling around now, ‘cause I haven’t ever done anything straight-documentary. I mean, the bees—I mean the—
M: The—these portraits are, but they’re also incredibly artistic.
J: Yes.
M: Meant to be beautiful, give you information at the same time, so we’ll see what happens.
M: Eventually I wanna go to the Central Valley and document the almond tree pollination, but I was intimidated, so I thought if I did something smaller, more accessible, like fly to Hawaii for five hours, right?
J: *laughs*
M: *laughs* That would be easier to start out.
M: And then the other thing that I've been doing for probably over 5 years now in relation to, um, sustainability, is when we started growing fruits and vegetables and, um, flowers and stuff in our backyard, we also start to compost. So, in the kitchen we have this plastic container that, you know, you might put dry cereal in, or something. And so we put all the kitchen scraps in there, and just—for vegetation. And I started watching them, watching that um, container, and saw that the way things fell in there was so organic and natural and ordered—like in its own ordered way. So I have been photographing that container for about five years. So about usually once a month, you know, I have my different ways now that I do it. Sometimes if it's half empty and the light’s going through it a certain way, I photograph it. You know, sometimes, um, I used to never intervene at all, but every now and then I might give it a good shake, just to change around, you know, the way the pieces have fallen. And of course, after a week or so, and before it gets full, the bottom is completely gunky because it’s already decomposing. And I love it because it's like geology, I mean it's like striations of change. So, I haven't decided what to do with the compost work, but I’ve talked to a couple curators about it, um, just to say you know, I think this is timely, and it's also a little bit, um, abject to look at. You know, it’s kind of like ‘eeugh,’ right? But it’s also fascinating, and it’s at arm's length. So, I don't know, but I have a lot of work and that should be what I sh—you know, should, to present next, the compost work. It doesn't have another name, yet.
J: *laughs*
M: You know, I thought, “Oh, Compostables, that sounds dorky…Compostitions, that sounds dorky.” So I'm waiting for the muse to drop the title in for me. So far, it’s just “The Compost Work.”
J: *laughing* Compostition…
M: Right? Exactly! Yeah.
J: So, with the compost work that you're working on, do you think—you said that it’s timely, abject, but fascinating. Would you, in exhibiting it, keep it more abstract, or would you go further with the documentation process and like, its effects on humans and the world? Or [overlapping] that’s not the…
M: No, that could be the conversation, but I would keep it abstract, because if I blow it up and crop a section, you don’t know what you're looking at. And it’s, it’s more fascinating. Because then you’re looking at these forms, these shapes, and you think, “Is that, is that a wing? Or is that..?” Would you even think to say, “Is that a piece of paper from the garlic?” You know, “Is that brown thing land, or ground? Or is it a coffee filter.” Right? So it's sort of a game in a way, it's kind of a puzzle, which I, I love that. I love hiding things in things, teasing them out, and then you sort of guess what they are. And at the same time it's in relation to these forms and shapes, you know, so that’s the um, the more uh, academic part of art, in a way. Composition. Yeah.
No, I'll send you some pictures of it, I have—
J: I would love that.
M: I've worked on a few, right? I’ve shared a few with people. But I haven't produced any, so I don't know… I mean I love making things big. These things are forty inches square, so they're a little bit bigger than the square on the table. So I don't know if I would make ‘em that big again, or if I’d make ‘em mural size, um, so you can just sort of fall into it. You know some of it’s wettish, some’s dry. I haven't decided any of that. That would probably depend on where they might be shown. But I haven't put them on the website yet either.
J: Okay.
M: Yeah. Yeah, I suppose that would be the next step.
Now this thing, the meadow mural—
J: Yes.
M: I made this specifically for this exhibition, because I knew that we had so much great space. And so this, you can't see the whole thing, but the wall is like fifty feet long. And I was going to have three murals, and it was going to be the meadow, which is at the Botanical Garden here, at three different times of year. So I went to photograph it once, and then I went back in the winter and, yeah, I took pictures then ‘cause it was pretty dormant, or fallow, whatever. And then I went back in the spring and nothing had happened. And this is kind of like, you know, months before I'm supposed to get all this work ready. And so I said, you know, “Are you—are you seeding the meadow?” And they were like “Oh, no, we thought we’d wait and just see what came up on its own.” And I’m like “Oh great, there goes my whole idea! I can't have one-two-three because it's not going to be consistent!” So I looked at the files that I already had, and I had to sort of, um, Photoshop it together. And you can kind of tell that the color in the background changes from here to here—this isn't the whole thing—but it's more yellow-y on this side and redder on that side, and I could have changed that but I didn't. And then I had taken detail shots of the flowers that were there, so they're blown up and they’re in these hexagons. And then it didn't occur to me ‘til, you know, after this—this is twelve by thirty-six feet, so it's kind of like a outdoor billboard. I work with a company just here in Ontario that's a, uh, sign business, and they make all my vinyl phrases for me. And so they had, um, they actually have a printer that's twelve feet wide.
J: Oh, wow!
M: That they printed that for me. So it's on a outdoor vinyl material and it's got grommets all around the edge, so it goes on the wall with nails, so it hangs straight. So um, and it held the wall beautifully, because you just feel like you're falling into the meadow, so it’s really quite wonderful. But it's way too big for the places that this work has been traveling, so I made a small one that's six by twelve feet, and most people can fit that on a wall. But it wasn't until I entered it in a mural competition at Glendale City College that it occurred to me, I should make a legend, and tell people what the flowers are that are in the hexagons. And so I went back to the garden, and I met with the horticulturists over there and showed—I, I printed out a copy of that, you know like table sized, ‘cause the meadow’s not there anymore the same way. And I said “Can you help me identify these plants? What—What are they?” So recently, I have a, a legend that mimics the exact location of the hexagons and then below it, there—there’s a number in each one and then below it says what plant is in that actual num—where the number is.
J: Nice!
M: Very scientific.
J: *laughs* Interdisciplinary.
M: Yeah, exactly, yeah.
J: I also wanted to ask you a question about the two iterations of the, the honeycomb exhibit. ‘Cause you said that they were twenty-five years apart, and so when you had to put together a second one, did you find that your inspiration had changed a lot, or did the ideas flow together, or did you kind of mix and match between the two sets?
M: Yeah, it became more of a “What, what will become a complete exhibit?” and “Does this feel con—you know, at least consistent?” So most of the time when I go and talk about this work, whoever has the older honeycomb wall, I point out the—what we knew then, you know, what my inspiration was, that it's more romanticized, and even the technology, because the images that are affixed to the panels had to be produced as superchrome photographs, right? Where these are all, um, you know, archival inkjet digital prints. But the earlier piece had to be—I had to take pictures, well I made the work in Photoshop, and then I had to export it to become four by fives, and then that had to become superchrome photographs, and then I attached them to the panels. So they're pixel-y, you know, they look like from 25 years ago. But I—but now I like that. It doesn't bother me, because I think it's important just to—it stands in for something, you know, that we experienced over time in a short—in a short period of time, actually.
What's odd from—what I always think in my head is that, that—the show with the older honeycomb wall should have the first set of botanical portraits, just chronologically. But because I made these and showed it with this work, this became its exhibition. So the second set, which are only a few years later, go with the old wall. But, you know, they—they all look alike, they’re just different species, so it doesn't matter. The—the difference with that second Fragile Bee show, is it has a suite of ten lithographs that I made, called the First Ten Prime Numbers. And they're all framed and they—usually people make two rows of five, and they're very minimal and very abstract. There is um, this—this little round form called a reinforcement that—actually, I love that you're using loose leaf paper, nobody does this anymore. I—I used to rubber stamp on loose leaf paper. No, so, you know when this rips?
J: Yes.
M: And you get that little ring to put on it to fix it, right? So when I was a kid, we had them, but you had to lick them and they taste—you know, it was horrible. Now they’re adhesive. So that thing is either called a reinforcement or a page reinforcer or something. So I use that symbol to represent an integer of a prime number. And you can see these on my older website, the nancymacko.com website. And you go into, um, Prints, and you look for the First Ten Prime Numbers. And I don't have a, um, printout of that otherwise I'd give it to you. So that set of prints is also part of the second Fragile Bee show. So they get the small mural, the old honeycomb wall, the nine newer Botanical portraits, and the ten First Ten Prime Numbers.
J: *laughs*
M: Everybody seems very happy with this, right? And, um, there's—so the First Ten Prime Numbers is a suite of ten, and then each one is in an addition of ten, so there’s ten sets. And I have, um, had some of those suites collected during different museum collections. But the big—my big, exciting, fabulous thing last year, was that that set, and there’s a second version of it, were both acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
J: That’s fantastic!
M: It's very good, I like it too. They haven't shown them yet, but you know one of these days…
J: So, as an artist how much does the Public's view or like the Private Collection’s interest in your works affect what you do?
M: They always happen after I’ve made the work, right? So, it’s, you know, it's already made so it’s their choice. Um, I mean, I, you know, my—my education in graduate school was works on paper and printmaking, so all this digital stuff happened after I came to Scripps, and actually, that was one of your questions in the list. Um, what an, um, what an opportunity! I came to Scripps to teach Printmaking and Beginning Drawing and Design. And, we had no Computer Art here, right? Nobody had laptops, we didn’t have the internet yet. And the Chair at the time said to me “Would you be interested in teaching Computer Graphics?” Graphics being the kind of common word to Printmaking. And I said “Sure! What is it?” And he said “Well, you have to find out, but, you know, I think it would be good for us to offer it.” I was like “Okay…” You know, and my mentor at Berkeley said “Nancy, just do whatever they ask you,” you know, that you are at such a fine place, you just, you know, do whatever you can to stay there.” And so I took these classes in LA and they were in C programming.
J: Whoa!
M: You know, it was like “What does this have to do with painting and drawing?” Right? But it was where I learned why I took trigonometry in high school. Like “Oh! I see! This is where this comes in handy!”
J: *laughs*
M: Anyway, I didn't teach C programming. A little while later, the very first, um, FreeHand--Aldus FreeHand and Aldus PageMaker arrived. And those things, you know, have morphed. And Adobe came on the scene with Photoshop, very limited everything, and I just got hooked! I mean, printmaking is a fabulous way to make art, but it's also incredibly time-consuming. You have to really, you know, just devote huge amounts of time to it. And when we moved into this building, the press that I had been using, ‘cause printmaking used to be in the CGU Art Building, the press—the room we have here is very modest, there’s not a lot of room, you have this one press, it's very modest. And it just didn't work for me to work in there. Right? So I was spending more and more time on the computer, doing stuff in Photoshop, learning Photoshop, then starting to teach Photoshop, and establishing a Digital Art program in the Art Department. And so it—for me it was a really easy transition. So many people go into Photoshop fr—from the needs of photography. My—that came later, for me. I went into it as a printmaker, and so having multiple layers of images, and collaging, and scanning was much more related to working on paper and, and working in printmaking. But it was a gift, you know, to learn it, to have access to it, to be able to create a program. Um, you know, this was the first—this was the Computer Art classroom before we got Steele 5. You know, the classes were a lot smaller. And it's just continued that way. And so eventu—because I was photographing my stuff in the backyard, then it was this, like, smooth, but I guess pivotal transition to photography. So when I do printmaking, I work with a master printer in Oregon. And he actually does all the, you know—I mean, I—I’m the idea person and I—we work together. He produces the editions, he etches the plates, he gets every—gets the paper ready on the press, he does all the ma—the things that a master printer does. And so even now when I teach printmaking I tell the students, you know “I'm teaching you these techniques and these strategies, we bring guests in that sort of demo them. Um, I—I can, of course, facilitate and participate, but I'm not a master printer.” You know, which is kind of better, because we learn together. It's like, “Well, what do you think I should do here, now?” and I'm like, “Wow, okay, let's figure this out,” because I don't know either, right?. And I think that's a good model.
J: Right.
M: And I think a lot about what I—what am I modeling, as the professor, to my students, especially my women students, because you—you just need to see a lot of things that might open doors, or, not break rules, but at least make them more flexible, right? Just how, you know, how do you do it? How do you facilitate in the world? ‘Cause it took me a really long time! I mean, I had some good mentors, but I had to figure a lot of it out myself. So we can speed that up, right? *laughs* So you guys can like, move ahead sooner and do the work you're meant to do!
J: Um, I think that’s about it. Is there anything else you feel like you want to say and want to—
M: I think we did a—I think I covered most of it with the stor—with my little story. What do you think?
J: I think so. I mean if anything comes up that you feel like “Ah! Why did I not say that!” feel free to email us.