Portfolio: Sarah Mecklem

Sarah Mecklem

Sarah Greer Mecklem is an artist whose life and career have always been intricately intertwined with the history and—more importantly—the experience of the Hudson Valley. Born in Kingston, she is the daughter of Austin Mecklem and Marianne Appel, two major figures from the Woodstock artistic community of yore, a magical scene that provided the backdrop for her early childhood. After the death of her father, Appel eventually moved Sarah and her sister Pixie to New York, in search of work to support them.

Having grown up in the city and attended Cooper Union, Mecklem tends to express the dual influences of the country and the city in her work, which embraces natural beauty and ecological concerns while bringing an urban edge to those issues. Crossing Paths: Smoke Rings, currently installed in “Paths: Real and Imagined,” the Byrdcliffe Outdoor Sculpture Show, involves collecting cigarette butts left behind in the forest by thoughtless nature seekers and tacking them in decorative patterns to the trunks of trees, simultaneously calling attention to them and making them beautiful. A companion piece, Compromise, uses discarded bottle caps in a similar fashion as part of the Kingston Sculpture Biennial 2007.

Ever the socially engaged artist, Mecklem runs the Art Garage at Waryas House in Poughkeepsie, providing art therapy for developmentally disabled men who also suffer from substance abuse.

—Beth E. Wilson

Triptych, found materials and salvaged wood, 2004.

Growing up “Woodstock”

I thought everybody’s family were artists. When I came home from the Montessori nursery school, I had to draw. I would get home and break out the pencils—not just No. 2s but also the HB leads, the soft ones, and every other thing. So my earliest artistic sensations were about the quality of lines in pencil drawings. I remember loving sharp pencils. And my parents were in the studio, hanging out with friends like Reginald Wilson, or we’d go visit Ed and Jenny Chavez. I remember playing in Anton Refugier’s studio, and posing for him as a child (which my sister did, too). That’s what I thought people did. It was the rare person who ran a dry-cleaning shop, or whatever.

So what I guess many people would think were unusual things were just fun memories for me. I remember going to some of the festivals—at one, there was a playground merry-go-round (the kind you have to push), made with huge driftwood creatures, spinning around. There was one festival at Andy Lee Memorial Field, when I was six or seven, where I became the temporary tattoo marquee. Julio de Diego (and a couple of other artists) painted pictures all over me, and I marched around with a top hat and high heels, wearing a bikini bottom, to advertise the tattoos they were making.