Local Artist Highlight: Mary Jane Pories

Her work is no laughing matter…although sometimes it has been. She’s a talented visual artist and writer, but I also discovered that Mary Jane Pories is a Second City alumna in a cast you would recognize. Mary Jane has undergraduate degrees in Art and English as well as a Master of Arts degree in teaching, all from Calvin University. She has had an incredible variety of other roles in life as well, including helping run a magazine, teaching high schoolers in Hudsonville and college students at Calvin and Kendall College of Art and Design, providing executive coaching using applied improvisation, writing essays and plays and creating beautiful mixed media works. Avenue for the Arts is proud to host her upcoming show Dialogue of Souls, a collaboration with Merima Smajlovic (curated by Chris Protas) opening on March 20, from 5 to 8 p.m. at 106 Gallery, 106 South Division. Mary Jane lives in Grand Rapids Township with her wife Rhonda in an art-filled home, working in a second-floor studio full of light. My tour begins almost as soon as I enter the door.

These paintings are my father’s, and this is my mother's. I have paintings by my uncle and grandfather upstairs. That one is my dad’s, and the one over the fireplace is my dad’s. He was an art major and then realized he couldn't afford to support a family on it, so he became a vascular and thoracic surgeon. But he is still alive, and he paints every day.

Are you from Grand Rapids or somewhere in Michigan? No, I was an Air Force brat, so I was born in Rochester, New York, and then we moved all over. We lived in France when I was young, then back to Rochester, and then Dayton, Ohio, for the Air Force base there. When my dad left the Air Force, we moved to Cleveland…Shaker Heights. My parents divorced—I came here to go to college, and they divorced while I was here. They each picked an ocean, and I…I just stayed. I probably would have moved back to Cleveland—I love Cleveland. It's got a great art scene, museums, but then I met my wife here, so it was a reason to stay. I moved away a few times like when I was at Second City performing full-time for a couple of years. Then the other performers all went out to LA or New York, and I moved back here because Rhonda was here.

Well, that's being a little part of history being at Second City. So, who was there at the same time as you? I was in Detroit. I was with Keegan-Michael Key, you probably heard of him. And Larry Joe Campbell, who was on According to Jim. Marc Evan Jackson, who was on Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Parks and Rec and some other things. A lot of other brilliant performers who've gone on either to write or perform in other ways. It was a great cast. I was proud to be part of it.

You said you went to college here—where was that? I went to Calvin—it was another place in another time. My background is Jewish—my father's a Holocaust survivor. My mother's family escaped Ukraine during the pogroms. So, it was a little bizarre for me to end up at Calvin. At first, my father said ‘Absolutely not’. At the time, he was at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland. Then, he came home one day and said ‘I just found out that two of my residents went to Calvin, and they're two of the best I've ever had. So, if that's what Calvin produces, you can go.’ So, I went. My best friend had applied there, and I followed her. I got a good education—good writing and good art teachers. It was a very good school when I was there. But for the LGBTQ+ community, that hasn’t been a very welcoming environment, so yeah. Fortunately, there's a lot of good people in other places.

So, you came here as a young adult, and you were in Detroit after that? Oh well, first I helped run a small magazine with a circulation of about 15,000. I was art director and assistant editor. I moved back to Calvin because they had a master’s program that you could do in one year for teaching. So, I taught art and English out in Hudsonville for 12 or 14 years, something like that. And, I was proud of what I did there. There was one semester of art when I arrived, and when I left, there were three full years. I had come from a robust art program in Shaker Heights—four years in high school. So, I was trying to replicate some of that. I knew I didn’t want to go into administration. A friend was driving to Detroit and said ‘I’m going to audition for Second City, do you want to go?’ So, I'm like, ‘Well, you're driving, so….’ I just knew I was at a place to change, so I auditioned, and yeah, and got in—to my surprise. It was a memorable kind of life-changing two years. It was a crash course in writing, and in comedy…ensemble work…the artistic process. And I made lifelong friends—so that was really good. Like I said, a lot of them went off to LA or New York. Rhonda was here, so I thought, ‘Well, maybe I can coax Second City here. They’re good at major markets—maybe they should be in minor markets. But they weren't convinced that would work. So, I asked for their blessing and moved back here.

I started Fishladder, which I still own. I used applied improvisation to do workshops, keynotes, write shows, do executive coaching in corporations and nonprofits. So that’s how I made my living. Which was great. I mean, basically, you’re going in and playing with people, but you're helping them to be more innovative and spontaneous—and basically deal with the unexpected. How do you do that? You know, our first impulse to say ‘no’ or to blame other people if things aren't going the way we expect them to go. We have an agenda, and it doesn't happen. And as you probably already know about improvisation…you instead start with, ‘yes, and ____.’ I have to say ‘yes’ to at least one thing if we're going to move forward and build on it. And we all know if you say ‘yes’ to one thing, you're saying ‘no’ to something else. So, you're finding something that is positive and can move forward. And that's what I use in all my art. I'm still performing, I write, and I paint. That's really the core of it—you make a mark and you're like, ‘Ooh, wish I hadn't done that.’ But I did, right? Because the ‘yes’ is basically just to accept reality. This is what is, and now what do I do with it? I will occasionally still do some of that teaching these days if it feels right. But, I also wanted to make a shift—a little less Fishladder and a little more painting, writing, and stuff like that. So, I still do it occasionally, and I also use it in what I’m doing now.

What do you write? I've been writing essays and poetry. I wrote a novel which I shopped around a tiny bit, but I feel like something's not quite right with it, so I'm letting that rest. I'm part of the Michigan Playwrights Project. I have one play up in the New Play Exchange. I’m also working on a play that was produced back in 1999, and I'm revisiting that. I'm trying to clean it up, update it, and I'd like to get that one out there. Writing is a great thing to do when I don't have access to my studio. And I still love to read and to perform—it's just another nice outlet. I started to do more writing and more painting in 2013 when it became clear we had to do some kind of intervention with my mother and bring her from Laguna Beach to here. That was a very traumatic time. She was here for five years…not living with me…but I was the only family member in town. At that time, to be doing a lot of performing and a lot of traveling for work was less appealing. To be able to do things that I could do while I was with her, paint or write—that's kind of what helped me make this shift.

When you're writing plays, essays, poems…are there particular kinds of problems that interest you? Yeah, I'm very interested in the environment, environmental justice—just this incredible planet we have and how do we protect it? That is what I'm doing with this newest painting series. Mental illness—because it runs in my family. What is our own reaction to it—why are we embarrassed about it or how do we treat the person? Who gets to tell the narrative? Usually the strong, the powerful or those with money, which I guess is power. So, I'm interested in that…and the loss that comes around it. Then taking care of my mother, I guess, if I were to name the top three. Well, my mother…that's part of the mental illness issue. So then, I guess the top three would include being Jewish—what does it mean to be a daughter of a Holocaust survivor and how did each side of my family deal with their Jewishness? Some worked very hard to hide it. And others have worked very hard to be bolder about it. But just how relevant it is—whether it's antisemitism or how we treat those with mental illness or how we treat those with any kind of difference, racial or religious. Those are probably my top three themes.

Was there a point in your childhood that you remember having your first kind of impactful art experience? Yeah, probably it was being around my father. I mean, because he always had a pen and paper. And it didn't matter what he had near him, even if it was just coffee and his finger, he would be creating something. I love my father, and so I realized that the more I hung out with him, the more I painted. We got to spend time with each other. Since then, we still paint together. We swap images, to see what each other's doing. We take workshops together. But I think it was always having it around that was impactful. My sisters are all very good too, but they didn't end up pursuing it in ways that I have. I have a screenprint from my youngest sister, and I was just saying to Rhonda the other day that I think that's probably the most moving piece of art in the house. Just being immersed in art always, going to museums and talking about art, and having lots of art books around—that was important. Early on, I think I remember not liking what I made…because my father was so good, and I wanted to emulate him. Now starting to do things in my own right more regularly, I realized I will never paint like him. And I shouldn't keep trying, because that's not how I express myself. And that really opened a lot of doors for me because he's so good at perspective and realistic art. I would say it's more of the opposite for me. Things didn’t look quite right, but I think I was always good with color. And I always liked doing it. Maybe there’s one piece that I did early, early on, right after college, and that I liked a lot. But not when I was a kid, yeah. Though I do still have my hand turkey if you want to see it.

My uncle on my mother's side was a speech pathologist at Mayo. He did very precise drawings. This drawing of a grasshopper is his work, and it is just incredible. This was the kind of thing he did…and then he had a stroke. So, his work had been very left-brain, analytical, and then after the stroke, he started working almost entirely on images of the Holocaust like this. When he died, I received a number of his paintings. It's an incredible story. He kept expressing himself.

Has there been an evolution in your painting—where you started out and how you evolved? Well yes, like I said, I was trying to paint like my father for so long. I don't think I want to say I would take it back, because I learned a lot in trying to do that. He paints beautifully, and I could take what I learned from that. But I think when I finally just gave myself over to ‘That's not how I paint…,’ it became more expressive. I would say it's non-objective. I wasn't trying to represent something at all, but to play with shapes and colors. These two on this wall, I would call abstractions, although they look non-objective. The impetus is the ‘blue mind’ theory, which tells us that, whenever we're near or in water or looking at water, our heart rate goes down, our blood pressure goes down, we become happier. I thought, rather than trying to paint a lake or a river—because then you're just getting my interpretation—I thought, ‘Can I evoke water on a two-dimensional plane and allow you to have that same experience when you can't access water?’ So, that's what I was trying to do with those. That’s the latest work, but I’ve also been experimenting and collaborating with friends.

Those look like collage. Are they collage? Yeah, it's handmade paper, acrylic paint and tissue paper. And then there are other things like this one…finding there are ways to include my words. These are bits of a poem. So that's been a fun technique. The paper used with these is the back of my invitation to my mother’s law school graduation, which I missed, which I felt terrible about. After she died, I found this paper. It was printed on beautiful paper, and I thought, well, I feel bad I missed it. How can I still get her out in the world?

Which pieces are you putting in the show? We have a curator, Chris Protas from AllArtWorks. I thought it was just going to be these latest pieces, but he actually chose more. 

I have a lot of pieces that are quite different from each other. This one is from ArtPrize, and it’s about my mother. I did a show at Monroe Community Church, and people would say to me, ‘Oh, which of these pieces are yours?’ Well, they were all mine. And people thought they were all so different, they didn’t realize they were from the same artist. Like we should have an identifiable ‘thing.’ But, you know, we change every day. You just think about your moods, the weather, the news, your relationships, everything. Yeah, so that one probably, and this one, would go into the show, but not that one, because that was part of this series I was doing about my mom. I don't know if writers get asked that—that you’ve got to stick to the same thing. But think about it when you write things. You’re a different person when you write different things, and I mean, maybe you use some of the same words, phrasing maybe, but the emotional content is different.

I don't agree with that pressure on artists to create identifiable work. I think that's people trying to help artists develop something that would be marketable in a profitable kind of way or reputation-building. Which, if you want to make your living doing art, it's not a terrible suggestion. If you can do it that way, but for me, that would not be interesting. I would burn myself out. I find it much more relatable to just pursue something while you're interested in it and then change direction. Right, these probably have the most in common of the things I've done, and I would call them a series. First, I thought, ‘I will only use blue.’ And there are some that are just purely blue that really work, but then it's like, I can't. Now I want to do something different. But I totally agree with you, and if you're painting or writing or whatever for money, our culture just does not support that. So, I feel very fortunate that I can do this. I'm grateful that I have that opportunity. I wish we could do that for a lot more artists, writers, dancers, musicians.

Yeah, where money comes into it, we are not free. Right, yeah.

Do you have a vision for where you like things to go if you think of this trajectory? What would be fulfilling if it happened for you? Well, Merima and I are doing this collaborative show at 106 Gallery, “Dialogue of Souls.” She’s an artist from Sarajevo. We had this amazing connection, and we have a lot of similarities or commonality in our stories—her fleeing war in Sarajevo and so on. This is a traveling show. First, it was at AllArtWorks, now at 106 Gallery, and then we're looking for other opportunities. Merima just wrote an article for a magazine in Sarajevo, and we'll have photos of our work in that because she is a well-known artist over there. So, the goal is to get our work maybe to Sarajevo!

I should mention too that I just finished a commission for our church. It was three large panels. I've done commissions before, but that was the first big one for an institution. That’s at Neland Church near Martin Luther King Park. That was something I never thought I'd be able to do. It felt like a real big stretch.

What kind of image did you make? It's abstract, but I took my inspiration from that Nietzsche quote about how ‘The essential thing in heaven and on earth is there should be a long obedience in the same direction.’ This church has been there for over a hundred years, and I felt like that's what these people are trying to do. None of us are perfect, but they've been very welcoming and supportive of my wife and me. There is also that Leonard Cohen quote: ‘Ring the bells that can still ring, forget your perfect offering; there is a crack, a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in.” I was thinking about each person's journey, and how for all of us, there are some real highs and lows. So, can we find ways to find light? I tried to make it so that no matter how dark things get, there is light.

Yeah, you can really see the light in it, and it feels like the sun. It’s gorgeous. I like how you have the darkness too, and the strong colors in the dark areas. Great movement. Oh, good, yeah. Well, thank you. I just thought about all the people I've known at the church through the years. I started by placing each journey, and that gave me the overall feel and shape for the piece.

The work with Merima—I appreciate her energy and her vision. And why not? Why not go for it, you know? We'll see where it takes us. I am going to reach out to some people I know in different cities, who maybe have some connection to galleries, and then if we can get our work to Sarajevo. I don't know how you do any of this—like transport it and all that, but those are logistics that people can figure out.

Yeah, it'll be a good problem to have. Right??? And that whole “Yes, and ____.”

Is there something you’re hoping people will experience with your art or do you make it for how you experience it? I do. Well, I think anybody who's pausing for time in their day and going to an art gallery looking at art…I mean, that's wonderful. Given all the chaos and uncertainty, if people find some comfort or a recognition that someone else has experienced some of the same pain or joy that they have, that would be a good thing. I don't often stand near my work when it's shown, but sometimes people have chosen to share their story with me, and that's been a huge benefit. If the art connects people to each other, that's a really powerful thing. Maybe it gets them to be more empathetic, because that's what art does for me.

We just stayed in a 21C Museum Hotel. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that hotel group—it stands for 21st century art, and you're basically sleeping in a museum. They take structures that were either in disrepair or pending tear down, but that are meaningful to the community. The first couple of floors become a gorgeous museum of 21st century art. There's about eight of these hotels in the country. You sleep upstairs. The one we just went to was in Durham, North Carolina. It was all about immigration…the immigration experience. So, we were immersed in that—we toured the art, there's art in every hotel room, there’s art in the area where you eat.

If my art can get people to be more empathetic, to have insights into their own human experience, to be more connected…yeah, that would be wonderful. I have this ongoing struggle to tell the truth…and this would be more about my writing than my painting, I guess. But it first means you have to be super truthful with yourself and not hold back. But you also don't want to hurt people, and that is a challenge. That's one of the real benefits to artists is that there's that effort to find out who you really are and what you really believe—and are you really willing to live that way? Because that requires courage, and truth is scary. It's also what makes people laugh, when it comes to performance, but it can be scary. So, I think if there is anything I struggle with, it is that continual effort to get at my own motives and truth-telling. But right now, it's exciting. I'm having fun. I love the people that I'm meeting and collaborating with. If there's ever a time that we need artists and truth-telling, regardless of our medium, it's now. We need the connections, the empathy, and just to see that there's another way… and to celebrate beauty, which we all need. Yeah. That’s probably it.

Dialogue of Souls with work from Mary Jane Pories and Merima Smajlovic, curated by Chris Protas, opens March 20 from 5 to 8 p.m. at 106 Gallery, 106 South Division, Grand Rapids, Michigan.