Introducing Janice McCoy, Flint Artist in Residence

By UMS

Janice McCoy “Printing Say Nice Things”. Photo: Flint Institute of Arts

UMS is pleased to welcome Janice McCoy as this season’s Flint Artist in Residence. As an artist, Janice seeks to create dialogue between people and the natural world, using flora, fauna, and man-made objects as visual symbols driving dramatic storylines.

Born and raised in Michigan, her fine art studio focuses on drawing, printmaking, painting, and the intersectionality between these practices. Janice attended the University of Michigan-Flint from 2012-18 and holds two degrees in Visual Arts Education (BS) and General Studio Art (BFA). She currently works full-time at the Flint Institute of Art Museum + Art School as the 2-D Programs Manager and is an active member of the Buckham Fine Arts Project.

Janice hopes that her residency will bring attention to the necessity of creative work as part of being human, especially in her exploration of the Flint community and landscape and her education on the process and power of printmaking.

UMS University Programs Manager Maddy Wildman recently interviewed Janice about her hopes for the residency, personal connections to Flint, and overall artistic process.

What is your connection to Flint, MI and how will it inspire your work during this residency?

I’ve lived in Flint for 12 years now, and this is one of my top 10 favorite places on earth. When I first moved here to study biology at UM-Flint, I don’t think I quite got it, but after a year of living here, I started to value the connections that I was able to make. The people here are so authentic, honest, and generous with what they have, and they all possess a real sense of scrappy problem solving, trying to do better or to be better.

I’m an artist because I moved to Flint. I came from a small town, and the notion of a “working artist” or anyone in the arts beyond a high school art teacher was foreign to me. When I took a general education credit in art here, with an instructor who was a working and teaching artist, I saw for the first time someone who was able to support their life making art, and something just clicked.

The community has provided so much support and inspiration for me, be it the teaching staff at UM-Flint or the people in the community who are a part of institutions like Buckham Gallery, Greater Flint Arts Council, and MW Gallery. At this point I feel the need to represent Flint and give back to Flint in any ways that I can, helping others who are a little bit further back in their path with recognizing that they might want to be an artist, that they want to do creative work.

I hope to create something that does justice to Flint and all of its complexities, something that represents the spirit of Flint. I hope that by sharing what I do it’ll give people something new to consider about Flint, something interesting that they’ve never seen before, or even inspire them to be creative.

You plan to host a public printmaking demonstration at the end of the residency. How does printmaking differ from other forms you work in? What value do you think programming like this has for the community?

Printmaking is a really cool medium that a lot of people don’t know about. The multiplicity of the practice is appealing for both artists and collectors because you can sell prints at a much lower price point than something like paintings or drawings. You can also get a lot of different results from utilizing marking, shape and color layering, and combining various methods. Because of this, it’s naturally a very experimental medium. And it also has such a big communication role in social movements, as well as in technology and development.

There’s always a nice atmosphere with printmaking and printmakers too; everyone is willing to share information about their process and their materials. Unlike the “solitary artist” archetype, printmaking opens doors to a vibrant, hands-on community.

Artist Janice McCoy holding “Your Flint River Is Alive”. Photo: Matthew Osmon

Your work has previously explored residents’ connection to the Flint River. Might this show up in the work of this residency, and if so, how?

I’ve always been interested in natural forms like plants and animals, mostly because I grew up in such a rural area. In moving to an urban area, I therefore gravitated towards those green spaces where I could see glimpses of a natural environment.

A few years ago, I did a project with Buckham Fine Arts Project/Buckham Gallery and the Flint River Watershed Coalition called On-Screen. For this project, we created prints for different nonprofits in the community that might be lesser known, bringing awareness to their mission and to the work that they’re doing. It was important to me to bring attention to the fact that the river has an ecosystem; it’s not just barren. There are many misconceptions regarding bodies of water that have been abused in industrial environments; the Flint River has long been associated with sewage, industrial waste, lead poisoning, bacteria which led to Legionnaires’ disease, and more. This is entirely understandable and valid for people who have been through a traumatic event like the Flint Water Crisis, but that event and its consequences was largely caused by human error and government mismanagement. When you look at the condition of the river, that is a little more nuanced. Organizations like the Flint River Watershed Coalition are charged with care of the river and surrounding areas, encouraging programming and use of the river, and helping change people’s perception of the river to encourage public recreation. The Flint River still supports an ecosystem and that’s what I tried to highlight with Your Flint River Is Alive.

As I was thinking about this residency over the past few months, I walked along the river quite a few times and noticed the recent redevelopment efforts. There are several groups trying to clean up both the river and its reputation, promoting efforts to remove decaying infrastructure, to be able to walk up to the river, to introduce recreation along the river. There’s still a lot of work to do, obviously with the physical aspects to the river but also with changing the community’s mind about the river. With the work in this residency, I want to explore the history of the river, how it got to where it was, how people feel about the river, and what the river could be and is moving towards.

In practical terms, I have been thinking about different print techniques and how they could be introduced to support the ideas in my body of work. For instance, I am considering how to use river water as a tool in the printmaking process, experimenting with trays of river water, placing the ink on top to create these organic patterns depending on the wind and the weather. There’s also such an abundance of plant life around the river, so I think there’s potential for impression printing to be done, capturing the texture and the shape of the local greenery.

“It Is What It Is,” 2023. Hand Carved Linoleum

Some of your recent prints feature nihilistic themes and statements, e.g. “It is what it is” and “Screaming Crying Throwing Up”. What are your motivations and goals in exploring these themes?

Most of the time when you see a letterpress relief print in a workshop setting, the text content is aspirational and meaningful, which makes sense as people want to surround themselves with positivity. As I was thinking about the different messages that I was seeing online and the general feeling about the world at that time, sometimes it seems overwhelmingly negative in an almost comical way. So I thought it would be funny to carve and print out all of these ideas. The multiplicity of having a message printed so many times as part of one piece, it seemed to parallel the repetition of something trending online, how it hits you over and over and over again.

I wonder why negativity and apathy seem to be our only ways to respond today, both offline and online. I think part of it is that people get overwhelmed, with their lives, with the sheer amount of information out there, or with the kinds of suffering they see through the media. When we relate to all of these emotions and responses, sometimes we can only laugh — no matter how overwhelmingly unfunny these problems are.

I see two major themes in some of your recent work: one of the natural world, flora and fauna and its relationship with humans, and another of internet cultural references and the proliferation of memes. Some may view these themes as unrelated or even opposed. Are they opposed to you? Are they related? What do you find in the tension (or lack thereof) between these ideas?

I do believe that there is a tension between these themes, and I like that tension. They’re both part of the 2024 human experience, and as we continue venturing into these online spaces we’ve created as a society — social media, virtual reality, and artificial intelligence — tension between how we utilize technology and our connection to the real world will continue to grow.

I don’t think that technology and the natural world are completely at odds, though. As with much of life, we have to find a conscious balance between these categories. They exist within the same sort of ecosystem even if they don’t naturally overlap, and so each of us are responsible for our own prioritization and responsibility for maintaining the usefulness of this tension and balance in our lives.

Can you share some of your artistic heroes and how their work has impacted yours?

In regards to letterpress, one artist I like is Amos Kennedy, a Detroit-based artist with a special knowledge of texture and unconventional printing. His works are steeped in historical or social justice. I admire how he prints very intuitively with the layering of type and shapes, almost looking like paintings because of how rich and colorful the outcomes are.

I’m also a big fan of Caledonia Curry, who uses the street name Swoon. She combines printmaking, sculpture and painting to create these massive installations, often incorporating the natural world into her work.

Finally, Robert Rauschenberg has explored a variety of types of printing, as well as combining them with other artistic mediums. All three of them seem to be expanding the definition of printing, taking risks and being bold, and for me, that’s inspirational.

All this to say that the heart of my artistic practice is the people I’m directly talking to and working with in Flint. Having exchanges about what it’s like to make work and to be an artist inspires me to create and evolve, and being a teacher is also fundamental to my work. Talking with students, friends and colleagues about art or the things they’re thinking about and struggling with is the crux of the human experience, and it helps me to find my voice.

Explore more of Janice’s work at janicemccoy.com or on Instagram.