Estelle Roberge

from We ARE Here | Cultivate | Exhibition Catalog

We ARE Here: More Than Just a Number

At the age of sixty-nine, I now live an artists’ life and it seems near to paradise every day. It is the life that I had always wished for, a time when I am fully an artist. I collage, bake muffins, send in applications for residencies, write essays, build costumes, walk the mountains and read. Though I have household chores and home maintenance, to do, each day is also spent in visual practice. Generally, I do not feel marginalized nor do I experience ageism, yet I know it exists. I have had to redefine aging. I go into the studio as my new job. It has taken time to reemerge, but the new work has been well received, even chosen for juried shows. I’ve accepted that I will not become well known. Yet I bring integrity, discipline and research to the creative process. It is a form of home-based activism. I find hope through imagination. I process the violence of the world through positive creative practices. It is like a counter revolution. I am a carrier of visual observations. My tenacity allows me to endure grief and the sadness of injustice. My gift, a gift that I do not take lightly, allows me to endure, to speak out and be hopeful at a time in history that is often destructive. The most valuable lesson aging has taught me is that of artistic growth. The relationship between making art and daily living has to do with practice, consistency, and undoing. Through daily practice, I dig deep. Although I struggle with some of the same objectives that I struggled with forty years ago—the two dimensional surface, unifying all parts into one vision, red juxtaposed to green, a touch of yellow, a little orange—I now go deeper than color and shapes, in search of enduring meaning, that of being unified as a whole person.

Estelle Roberge grew up in Biddeford, Maine, the sixth of nine children, in a Franco-American Irish-Canadian household. After graduating from the nearby Portland School of Art in Printmaking and the University of Southern Maine in Art Education, she traveled west in search of employment. In 1990, she began a teaching career at Navajo Community College in Tsaile, Arizona, a college dedicated to the preservation of Navajo traditional life. Later, Roberge pursued an MFA at Idaho State University with a focus on wilderness desert landscapes in South Central Utah. After receiving a MFA degree in Painting, she taught in Maine and Utah for five years. Finally, she made a home in Magdalena, New Mexico where she continues to reside.

Roberge’s teaching practice and interest in wilderness is interwoven in her daily artistic practice. Her work has focused on the interplay of memory, place and presence within wild terrains. Vast wilderness settings inspire her to abstract landscapes. Pre-Covid, she began to think and paint about those who are not in the wilderness by choice, but are forced to live there by climate emergencies, the refugees at various borders around the world. This emergency has occupied her mind for decades. During the Pandemic her painting practice was altered. The practice of collage became her way of coping with pandemic panic.

Her works have been included in the New Mexico Acclaimed Artist Initiative and the Eco Art Project, The Bristol Art Museum, and the Kolaj Festival in New Orleans. Currently, she is preparing for three upcoming solo exhibitions at the Sun Valley Museum of Art in Idaho, The Charles C. Thomas Gallery at Maine College of Art, as well as the Kind of a Small Array in Magdalena, New Mexico. Her work is also featured in several private collections in California, New Mexico, Maine, Massachusetts, Vermont, Idaho, and Canada.

Lynn Stephenson

“I consider myself in my prime artistically and it has nothing to do with age. I find it curious how young artists are sought after so much more than older artists. Why does the industry think an “emerging artist” is a young artist? Ageism is merely another form of prejudice, born out of ignorance. Age doesn’t have anything to do with where you are in your career. Age has nothing to do with the amount of talent you have, and age has much less to do with how well you can execute your craft than anyone would think. It is merely a number. I have more time now than ever before to spend in the studio. My art has improved immensely since doing so. What was once reduced to a spare time hobby is again a full time passion. I’d like to share my work with more than just a few, but finding ways to do so is a challenge. Shining a light on older artists is going to shine a light on some amazing talent.”

I was an “Army brat” born on a U.S. military base in Misawa, Japan. Luckily for me, my father was also an accomplished artist. We were stationed in Japan, Washington DC, New York and eventually settled in Michigan, where I grew up. I have been drawing all my life, taking classes and private lessons up through high school, with published newspaper illustrations along the way. All of my artistic training, interest and practice culminated in an acceptance into the University of Michigan’s School of Pharmacy. Sounds like a misprint but was actually a well-intentioned parental steering that led me on a 3-year detour. Pharmacy predictably proved a poor match for someone craving a creative outlet. Walking through Michigan’s Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design opened my eyes to what I was missing. Inter-school transfers followed, eventually leading to an introduction to colored pencils, and to a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. After graduation I worked in print advertising and product photography, married, and 4 years later started a family. Three kids took priority and I turned to free lancing, juried shows, and commissions. Kids grown, I now work full time as owner of Pencilmarks Studio in Traverse City, Michigan. My subject matter comes from my favorite place to be, nature.

Back to the Wall, the Being Slept

Hand-stitched, Waxed, Single strand embroidery floss, 7 colors on paper, 2016

4.5” x 3.25”

Hand-stitched, waxed, single strand, shaded embroidery floss, 2 colors on paper, 2016

4.5” x 3.25”

Dolores Slowinksi

“At 75, my imagination is still on fire with ideas for new work: installations. The stitched work is very labor intensive and takes a long time to execute. Transporting installations is costly and requires physical assistance. Recently I applied for an exhibition and when I was sent the names of the recipients, it was obvious that people much younger than myself, who had already had museum shows, were selected. Ageism may or may not have been a factor. Nevertheless, rejection has lost its sting. Having to postpone my art career for 30 + years may make me feel like I am trying to catch up with artists who begin showing their work right out of school. However, I would not have had the ideas I have now at that young age. My lived experience, of parenting and care-giving aging parents and in-laws until their last breath, provides me with a stronger perspective and a fearlessness to express my ideas. In September 2022, I sold three of my most expensive pieces made in 2012, in that suburban studio. My persistence and hard work paid off. I will keep working no matter what.”

Dolores S. Slowinski, a long-time resident of Detroit, has a BFA in weaving and ceramics from Wayne State University. Her work experience includes art writing for national, regional, and local print and electronic magazines as well as serving as arts administrator and resource person at the state and local level for over 40 years.

Slowinski returned to studio practice in 1999 and began showing her work in local, state, and regional galleries in 2005. She is among the first 100 World of Threads Festival Artist Interviews posted online at worldofthreadsfestival.com. Most recently her work has been included in three international exhibitions: 23rd International Open, Woman Made Gallery, Chicago, IL, 2020; Shifting Landscapes, Surface Design Association, juried, members exhibition at form & concept gallery in Santa Fe, NM, 2017; and World of Threads Festival 2016 in Oakville/Mississauga, Ontario, Canada. Her work has also been published in national and international magazine, books, and zines.

Her art work explores the use of thread as line in the form of hand-stitched drawings on paper. Recently she has begun applying these drawings to re-cycled, industrial grade corrugate to create architectural statements about neighborhoods, urban decay, and gentrification.

During the COVID-19 pandemic she created a body of 80 miniature, stitched, friezes: Marking Time Series, that she sent to numerous friends and colleagues to subvert the tactile contact usually discouraged when viewing art but so necessary in human experience, especially during pandemic lockdowns.

We ARE Here: More Than Just A Number