Today we’d like to introduce you to Mary Ellen Croteau.
Mary Ellen, please kick things off for us by telling us about yourself and your journey so far.
I have been making art since I was 3, but I only started a professional career when I was 39. Born and raised in Chicago in the 50s-60s, my parents were not supportive of an art education or art as a career. So I got married and had kids first, and then went back to school and got my BFA when I was 40, and an MFA when I was 48. What that gave me was information and a lot of life experiences which I could bring into my art.
Before I was a working artist, I was very active politically through the 70s and 80s in feminist, peace and justice and electoral politics. When I went back to school, I thought I would just make pretty pictures. But my political interests soon found their way into my work, and my art became my voice, a dialogue I could have with the viewer.
Soon after my first solo exhibition at Artemisia Gallery in 1989 (an internationally recognized woman’s cooperative gallery here in Chicago) I hooked up with a radical feminist art collective also based in Chicago, SisterSerpents, which was making quite a splash. Those two collective experiences propelled me into local, national and international activism.
Can you give our readers some background on your art?
During the 90s, I was making radical feminist art which addressed women’s oppression. Since 2000, I have been focusing on environmental issues (which I think parallel women’s issues, as patriarchy treats women and the environment equally badly). I began working with plastic bags, which were then a real curse, lodged in every tree and stuck in every crevice. I found they were not recycled, even when collected. I credit my own and other’s activism on this issue with the restrictions those darn bags now receive.
Then I learned plastic bottle caps were also not recycled, mostly because they were too difficult to sort. So I began to make art from them. My 2011 self-portrait made of discarded plastic bottle caps went viral, and I have been working with this waste since then.
What do we do with all the plastic waste we are creating? It is made from petroleum. It doesn’t compost or decompose. And what little is recycled creates its own pollution.
My work with plastic is intended to make this waste visible and make the connection between our throw-away culture and our responsibility to the earth. Single-serve plastic bottles are the worst of the worst and should be assiduously avoided. Excessive packaging comes next. We need to rethink our needs and our desires if we are going to save this planet.
Any advice for aspiring or new artists?
Every artist needs a patron, someone who supports them emotionally, physically or financially. We are not the trope of the genius in the loft struggling in isolation with our unique ideas. We are all a part of this community, and we need that connection to produce work that matters. Don’t compete. Cooperate and communicate.
What’s the best way for someone to check out your work and provide support?
My work is available online. Just google “Mary Ellen Croteau”. Or go to my website, www.maryellencroteau.net I also have work at ZIA Gallery in Winnetka, IL.
I love it when book authors contact me about my work or teachers tell me their students are making work after seeing my bottle cap work online. Schools in France, South Africa, Brazil and Florida have sent me images that they have made.
What I really want is for everyone, child and adult, to think about all the plastic in their lives and how that plastic will live on centuries after us, fouling the environment and leaving untold problems for our children’s children to deal with.
Contact Info:
- Address: 5418 W. Foster Ave, Chicago 60630
- Website: www.maryellencroteau.net
- Phone: 7739303215
- Email: crodo55@yahoo.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mary.e.croteau.7
Image Credit:
All images copyright Mary Ellen Croteau
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