Sept. 11, 2024

Artist Megan Klco Kellner’s creative rebirth leads back to Ferris State’s KCAD for ArtPrize 2024

Artistic inspiration often strikes where least expected.

For Megan Klco Kellner, that artistic inspiration occurred in the middle of a make-believe hair appointment in her daughter’s room that she struggled to find the energy for.

The Grand Rapids-based artist and graduate of the MFA program at Kendall College of Art and Design of Ferris State University would turn that moment into one of her most defining works to date, an oil painting titled “Pretending.”

“I wasn’t into the activity at all—I had all these stresses and pressures on my mind. When I looked into my daughter’s sticker-covered mirror, I couldn’t even see myself,” Kellner recalled. “It was this moment that held a lot of the tensions I experience as a parent.”

“Pretending” will be featured in KCAD’s ArtPrize 2024 exhibition, Coming Home, a showcase of 13 artists whose work highlights Michigan’s diverse landscapes, industrial innovation and resilient spirit as sources of creative inspiration.

That last aspect—resilience—is at the center of Kellner’s story. 

“Pretending” reflects the artist’s broader creative focus on the complicated dichotomies of raising children, motherhood and selfhood, the chaos and quiet, the happiness and discord, and the sense of time moving too quickly and slowly. 

Kellner seeks to capture moments born out of this tension and explore what it means to live consciously through them.

“It’s fascinating to me that my daughter’s preferred method of play is performing these feminine roles I struggle at times to even identify with or know how to work inside of,” she said. “And there’s this constant thread of wanting to spend every moment with my kids but also feeling like I don’t have time for me.”

The relationship between Kellner’s creative practice and her parenting has always been fruitful—even when she wasn’t actively making work. She didn’t paint for three years after her second child was born. That’s understandably common for artists who become new parents. Also common are the ensuing guilt feelings for not maintaining a certain level of dedication and productivity. 

But Kellner resists this framing. She sees parenthood not as an obstacle to the creative process but rather as a natural extension of it. 

“Mothering is a creative practice,” she said. “I grow as an artist through witnessing my kids’ unselfconscious creativity and through the ways caregiving has demanded that I become more open, flexible, and attentively present.”

When Kellner began painting again, she felt compelled to rethink everything and move beyond where her journey as an artist had previously taken her. 

The Grand Rapids native moved to Missouri to attend both high school and college, earning her undergraduate degree in painting at Truman State University. She also studied abroad at the Marchutz School of Art in France, where she became fascinated with the work of preeminent Post-Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne and his deft manipulation of the picture/plain relationship.

“I became really interested in artists that play with the pictorial space, flattening and unflattening it,” Kellner said. “I like the way it enables the artist to take the viewers out of their sense of reality.”

Her experiences led her to focus much of her early career work on observational painting of urban environments. It wasn’t until she entered KCAD’s MFA program that she understood how much room she had for technical growth.

“I realized I really didn’t technically know how to paint yet,” Kellner said. “There were things I wanted to do but lacked the technical skill. KCAD sharpened my understanding of how to use oil paint as a medium, and how to be more intentional with the more abstract elements of my work.”

Motherhood was the next pivotal moment in Kellner’s career. 

Following her hiatus from actively making work, she eventually found her way to a more exploratory approach, and a renewed sense of what she wanted her art to be about.

Kellner started taking her children’s artworks and older incomplete pieces of her own and tearing them up, rearranging them into layered collages that gave them new life and meaning.

“Collaging was a great re-entry point because it’s a totally different brain space. It’s less intense for the times when you’re not in deep focus mode,” Kellner said. “In a lot of ways, the collage format looked like what my brain felt like inside.”

Her time studying abstraction at KCAD opened her eyes to new possibilities for the medium.

“I learned how to make a harmonious whole out of abstracted elements, and that’s been a perpetual interest of mine ever since,” Kellner said. “It would have been really hard to make the collages I made without that experience at KCAD.”

She also began making small watercolor paintings to document the story of her children’s growth, first out of what felt like necessity, but eventually because of what the act revealed about her own perceptions. 

“There’s this inherent grief to being a parent as your children start to become more separate from you,” Kellner said. “You’re overjoyed about that, and you want to see the person they’re going to be, but you’re also actively losing who they were. I just had this intense feeling of need to hold on to some of this.”

All of Kellner’s artistic experimentation in the second phase of her career crystalized into a powerful body of work that took cues from the abstraction of her collage work and her manipulation of pictorial space as well as her lived experience. Her pieces beg close inspection of their aesthetic details—and introspection into the patchwork of our own lives.

Kellner’s work has been broadly exhibited on a national level, and she’s represented by Grand Rapids-based LaFontsee Gallery. She is also a visiting professor of painting at Grand Valley State University and an accomplished poet whose chapbook “What Will You Teach Her?” won the 2019 Michigan Writers Cooperative Press Prize.

From artist to educator to mother to woman, the thread tying all these aspects of Kellner’s identity together is the desire to live fully in each. And with hundreds of thousands of ArtPrize visitors set to lay eyes on “Pretending” in the coming weeks, she’s excited by the prospect of so many people connecting with her work. 

“What ArtPrize gives people is a way to get in, an opening to see a bunch of different kinds of art, to learn and to dig further into their curiosity,” she said. “I’m proud of the things I’ve made and want people to see them. I get excited when folks have an interpretation of my work that I never anticipated—it gets me thinking differently about the next thing that I might make.”

Coming Home is on view now through November 2, 2024, inside KCAD’s main campus building at 17 Fountain St. NW in downtown Grand Rapids.

See more of Megan Klco Kellner’s work at meganklco.com.