Welcome listeners to 5 Questions: A Critical Mass for the Visual Arts Podcast in which we ask 5 questions of our interviewees aimed at positioning and contextualizing their respective bodies of work within the St. Louis artworld. This episode, we’re talking with Mel Watkin!
Mel’s solo exhibitions include shows at Franklin Furnace, New York, Illinois State Museum-Chicago, the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago, and the Philip Slein Gallery, and the Missouri Botanical Garden, both in St. Louis. Her drawing installations, works-on-paper and artists’ books have been exhibited nationally in group exhibitions at the Sheldon Galleries, and Laumeier Sculpture Park both in St. Louis, the Grand Rapids Art Museum in Michigan, Longue Vue House in New Orleans, and the Salina Art Center and the Daum Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas. In 2011 she was one of nine artists selected to create a permanent public art installation for Lambert Airport in St. Louis fabricated with Franz Mayer of Munich, Germany.
Articles about her artwork have appeared in Art in America, The Washington Post, The Baltimore Sun, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, The Atlanta Journal, Riverfront Times, St. Louis Beacon and The New Art Examiner. She was also featured in New American Paintings #83 (August/September 2009).
Mel Watkin has been awarded residencies, fellowships and grants including the Critical Mass Creative Stimulus Grant and the Kranzberg Foundation, St. Louis, Pollock-Kranser Foundation, New York; Palazzo Rinaldi, Noepoli, Italy, the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest Illinois; the Illinois Arts Council, Chicago; Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, Artist’s Space; New York and Pyramid Atlantic; Maryland.
Her work has been included in the flat files at Pierogi Gallery, New York and her works-on-paper can be found in the collection of the Spencer Museum of Art in Lawrence, Kansas, Laumeier Sculpture Park and a number of private collections nationally. Her artists’ books are in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Franklin Furnace Archive, New York, Harvard University’s Fogg Museum, the New York Public Library, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the Joan Flasch Artists’ Book Collection at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Thanks to Mel, and to you our listeners and community. 5 Questions is a program by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts – a nonprofit, self-formed visual arts collaborative dedicated to promoting, enhancing and initiating contemporary visual art in the St. Louis region. Pick it up on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts or at criticalmassart.org/fivequestions, on twitter @criticalmassSTL.
with Mel Watkin and Joe Kohlburn
Editor- Sarah Hammond
Producer- Brett Williams
Critical Mass for the Visual Arts 