Arts & Literature Laboratory member, and Madison’s own artist, educator, and activist, Helen Klebesadel recently received the prestigious Women’s Caucus for Art/UN Program Honor Roll award. She is known across the Midwest and beyond for her environmental and women-centered watercolors. Here, Klebesadel shares with us her story of resilience, teaching, community building, and art making through the COVID pandemic.
“The world is not better if we do not do our art.”
Pivot 1: Virtual Exhibitions
The last 18 months have been surreal for me. Count me among the many who have learned to more realistically recognize, acknowledge and appreciate my relative wealth and privilege. I have been adjusting to living a balanced life on a limited income, supplemented by my earnings through art and coaching/teaching. I have a loving partner, a home we own, a studio. I have more than enough.
In mid-March 2020, my spouse and I returned to Wisconsin from a van camping trip in the southwest. As we headed home the news was 24/7 coronavirus. We realized we were going to have to physically isolate following our trip. I found myself canceling exhibitions, upcoming workshops and all other in-person events that were to happen in April and May as a way to protect my art community.
I found other creatives looking at all of their opportunities to show and sell work disappear. Anyone with a brick-and-mortar art-oriented organization or business had a whole other set of disasters to deal with. We all had to figure out what it meant to function safely in a pandemic.
I spent the first few weeks finishing up artworks for The Flowers Are Burning….Oceans Arising, my collaborative art and climate justice project with Madison artist Mary Kay Neumann and figuring out how to create a virtual exhibition. I was scheduled to do a gallery exhibition with metal artist and jeweler Georgia Lang Weithe at River Arts on Water Gallery in Prairie du Sac. The gallery agreed to move forward as a virtual version of our ‘Force of Nature’ exhibition. Like other galleries, they had to figure out quickly how to survive while on lock down.
I am a natural recluse and an introvert. The idea of being forced to stay home and work in my studio is not a hardship for me. In fact, I felt a little guilty and a secret delight to focus exclusively on my painting. I am also a social creature and my art community means a lot to me. While I physically isolated, I remained connected as much as possible through the web, social media, and by phone.
I found that some of the most creative people I know felt anxious and vulnerable in the face of social shut down and an unknown future. My academic artist friends were scrambling to effectively turn studio art courses into online offerings for their students, while figuring out how to keep their children engaged and educated now at home. Older artists were feeling especially vulnerable, especially those who live alone and were experiencing the imposed isolation in much deeper ways. My attitude usually is to look to see what I can do to improve a situation, even if it is beyond my means and abilities to solve a problem. No one is good at everything, but most people have some kind of agency in their situation. What could I do to make a difference?
Pivot 2: Community Building
I realized that good mental and physical health depends on maintaining connections with friends, family and creative community. Connections and shared awareness was going to be very important as I faced the unknown of the global pandemic. I ultimately responded with social media and online resources to build an online community devoted to encouraging creativity and art processes, and as a way to channel the emotions many were grappling with. I invited creatives at all levels to share their works on a Facebook Group called the Cabin Fever Creative Community.
The group is for people who would like to build a creative community from a distance. I called for all creatives who found themselves alone in their homes or studios during this period of cocooning to make and share their art. All media across the arts are welcome including poetry, music, dance, and movement. Professional and amateur artists are welcome, and everyone in between.
The response has been overwhelmingly positive. The art is amazing. The creativity is life affirming. Artists with international professional careers alongside people who have created their first drawing, painting or craft share their work. Others share posts that they know the group will appreciate or share invitations to participate, as well as information about resources of interest to the group. Participants enjoy the posts that make their Facebook feeds more palatable in these turbulent times.
Sharing art with political themes is allowed. The pandemic revealed the flaws in our political and health systems, and the murder of George Floyd and other Black Americans became the nexus for discussions of the extreme racial disparities that could no longer be ignored. Disagreements must be civil. Bullying and hate speech, symbolic or otherwise, is not allowed. Occasional heated discussions occur, but there is a supportive and inclusive atmosphere in the group that we all work to maintain.
The group grew to 1000, and then two thousand members very quickly. Now there are nearly 8000 members from all over the world, with the largest contingency from Wisconsin. I have many online friends I hope to meet in person someday, and I treasure a few pieces of art from my Cabin Fever connections.
Pivot 3: Teaching On-line
I have been teaching face-to-face watercolor and creativity workshops nationally, and internationally for years. At the University, I did some online teaching, and I had been thinking about traveling less and moving some of my workshop teaching online.
When the pandemic became a reality in March 2020, I had plans to teach a career building workshop for the Oneida Nation Art Program and a studio workshop Shake Rag Alley Center for the Arts. Art venues were forced to lay off staff and cancel most programming. After discussing the crisis with each venue, I offered to shift to teaching the planned workshops virtually. The venues were happy to pivot, too.
After the successful experience of teaching shorter workshops in 2020, I decided to also offer my beloved watercolor workshops virtually beginning January 2021. My process for creating my workshops has been to imagine them from the student’s perspective. I considered the difference between taking a workshop where everyone is in the same room for a designated and dedicated amount of time, as opposed to taking a workshop online when the rest of your life is all around you, and you are in the middle of a pandemic. What would my student need to have a successful learning experience?
Turning a face-to-face weekend workshop into an online learning experience where people could do deep learning at their own pace requires time and effort, planning and flexibility. I reviewed the curriculum, and thought about how to scaffold it in a way where one lesson provided a solid base for the next. The four-day, in-person workshop morphed into two six-week workshops that could be combined for a twelve-week watercolor intensive. I thought this could work for an audience of creatives in isolation seeking an opportunity to expand their creative life through a long winter.
My enterprise has been greatly aided by the presence of my very technically savvy stepson, Daniel Torres, who became a part of our pandemic pod. He is my assistant and technical guru and helps moderate the chat during the live-stream events. He is an excellent artist in his own right. I could not have done it nearly so well without his support. Workshops are posted on my teaching and coaching website: CreativityLessons.com.
I was honored to have been the President of the national Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) from 1994-1996. Founded in 1972 in connection with the College Art Association (CAA), WCA is a national member organization unique in its multi-disciplinary, multicultural membership of artists, art historians, students, educators, and museum professionals. The mission of the Women's Caucus for Art is to expand opportunities and recognition for women in the arts. The WCA has been an NGO since 1975.
In 2015, one of the projects of the WCA IC was to establish an Honor Roll to recognize important artists/activists who have made significant contributions to the field. It was my extreme pleasure to have been acknowledged as the 2020/21 recipient of the WCA IC Honor Roll Award. It was a bright moment in a difficult year.
I would like to acknowledge Arts + Literature Laboratory as a local community-based contemporary arts organization that stands out as making a difference in the support of the visual and literary arts, and youth and adult arts education.
While traveling, I always check out the art centers in other cities and reflect on what it would take to have a vital art center in Madison. I do not have to wonder anymore. I have joined as a member and I support the programming. With their move to the new space, I anticipate even greater things to come. None of us can make a difference alone, but we can all do something. Let's all make Arts + Literature Lab part of our something!
You can find more about Helen's work here:
http://Klebesadel.com
http://CreativityLessons.com