She's a filmmaker who embroiders, a feminist who loves guys, an artist who's making noise as a curator: Columbia alum Marci Rae McDade (B.A. '01) believes in timelessness and finds inspiration in art history—the unapologetically turns it on its head.

By: Audrey Michelle Mast

“I’m not religious at all, but I believe in art,” says Marci Rae McDade. “I believe in the timelessness of it and its influence on people in a really emotional way.” When it comes to her own work as a visual artist and curator, this emotional connection is crucial. “I do better with what I’m working on if I’m really passionate about it,” she says.

McDade has never demonstrated a shortage of creative passion. Born and raised in Gary, Indiana, she was a member of the first graduating class of that city’s Emerson School for Visual and Performing Arts. She studied visual art, theater, music, and dance in the school’s seven-year program, and was recruited by Columbia College, where she earned all but one credit of a B.A. in film and video in 1994. (She came back and completed the single missing credit in 2001 to officially earn the degree.)

McDade “did the really traditional, old-school thing”: she got married right after college, and a year later, in 1995, she had her son, Eli. Then the young wife/mother/filmmaker had a rude awakening: “I realized it was really expensive to make films,” she remarks wryly.

It took a few years post-college and post-baby for McDade to reclaim her studio practice. “I was busy being a mom and working part-time, so it wasn’t until my son was three or four that I found a new creative outlet. I tried painting, plays, and making videos, but my son always wanted to do it with me, and wanted to ‘help,’” she laughs. Then she rediscovered her love of sewing. “I remembered that my grandmother taught me how to embroider when I was little, to keep me out of trouble. Eli had no interest in that at all—so by default, that was what I started playing around with.”

After several years spent refining her technique, weathering a divorce, and pursuing an M.F.A. in fiber arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, McDade made an artistic breakthrough in 2005.

“White Boys” is a series of affectionate, hand-embroidered portraits of male friends on whom she had crushes. McDade asked her subjects to choose their favorite colors for the thread, and the background canvases of corduroy, cotton, denim, or silk are dictated by each “boy’s” personality. McDade confidently included herself in the series, stitching a spare, masterful self-portrait in homage to an 1851 painting by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. She notes that when the series is installed, the self-portrait “is the largest, most articulated image, hung just slightly above all the others. The placement and posture is intended to assert my position of power in the visual hierarchy as the artist and admirer of my subjects.”

For her next major project, Posterity (2006), McDade invited ten couples she admired to her home/studio in Chicago’s Bridgeport neighborhood. The couples sat on a custom-slipcovered sofa while McDade traced the outlines of their bodies with water-soluble markers. Later, McDade machine-stitched those outlines with thread chosen by the couples themselves, and did the same for an adjacent sofa that bore the impressions of her partner, Eric Wert, and herself. “It looked like roads intersecting,” she says. “It was a big departure because it was a series of quick, gestural outlines, a lot more abstract and energetic than ‘White Boys.’” Posterity introduced deeper conceptual layers to McDade’s work, functioning both as a document of a performative, collaborative, sculptural experience, and as an art object/installation that could be exhibited in a gallery.

Along the way, McDade was curating art exhibitions in addition to showing her own work. “Perfect,” a 2004 group exhibition that originated at the Chicago Cultural Center and subsequently traveled over three years to exhibition venues around the country, was a sharp collection of abstractions that art critic Michael Workman described in the exhibition catalog as “a combination of elaborate process, common materials, and unexpected imagery.” The show drew rave reviews in every location it visited, from Memphis to Michigan.

McDade credits Columbia professor Corey Postiglione, with whom she studied as an undergrad, with inspiring her curatorial practice. “His classes were fascinating,” she says. “I had never been exposed to so many different kinds of artwork, and I really started learning about art history.” This was crystallized when Postiglione took McDade’s class to see the seminal Museum of Modern Art traveling exhibition, “High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture,” when it came to the Art Institute of Chicago in 1991.

“It was the first time I’d ever seen Cy Twombly’s work,” she says. “There was a painting from the ’80s, a nice big one. It looked like a person was immersed in water, knocked over by a huge wave. It spoke to me because I felt that way: I had just fallen in love with someone for the first time and I had just moved to Chicago, and everything was new. This painting just captured it. There was such a crudeness and raw energy to it. I loved the idea that everyone can be an artist. Corey showed me that I have a very specific eye and an appreciation for many different art forms.”

This expertise, enthusiasm, and curiosity sparkled this past fall in “Girl on Guy,” a sprawling show of work by 24 women artists McDade returned to Chicago to curate for Columbia’s A+D Gallery. (McDade, Eli, and Eric relocated last summer to Portland, Oregon, where she is the Emerging Fiber Artist in Residence at the Oregon College of Art and Craft) The exhibition featured works by contemporary art icons Sylvia Sleigh and Jane Fisher as well as rising stars such as Melanie Schiff and Orly Cogan. It was “a love letter to men … a love letter to Chicago … and my loud and heartfelt declaration that loving men and being a feminist is not a contradiction,” McDade wrote in her catalog essay for the exhibition.

“Girl on Guy” was remarkable in its juxtaposition of playful, accessible, pop-culture-influenced works that celebrate fandom—such as Stacia Yeopanis’s cross-stitched samplers depicting iconic cult-TV characters like Fox Mulder and David Fisher of “Six Feet Under”—and sophisticated reversals of the sexual gaze, represented by work like Sleigh’s male nudes and Julia Hechtman’s erotic, close-up photographs of men’s faces while they play air guitar. The show captured the spectrum of female desire, from teenage infatuation to adult lust.

For McDade herself, the exhibition was a microcosm of life. “This show is a representation of my journey from being a girl to being a woman,” she says, “and my journey as an artist and curator. I figured out how to love people, to love myself, and allow myself to be happy.”