Today we’d like to introduce you to MaryBeth Garrigan.
Hi Mary, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today.
As a Minnesota-born artist, I have the ability to implement an idea or concept of what I wanted to create from a very young age. One of my earliest memories was sculpting the blankets in my crib into landscapes to march my toys around while shredding paper to create snowscapes. I always created worlds whether on paper, cardboard, my mother’s plants, or outside sandbox sculptures in which my toy subjects played out adventures. In those earlier years, I can’t help thinking that this was my way of working out my own childhood problems and stresses. I was an only child 5 years old when my first brother was born and I was 7 when my mother had my last brother. After my youngest brother was my mother was admitted into the hospital for losing her vision.
My mother’s hospitalization and diagnosis of Multiple Sclerosis when I was 7 years formed the basis of my life’s purpose of “art-making my world a better place”. Making art is what I wanted to do all the time so all my high school notebooks were pretty Impressive illuminated manuscripts. By the time I entered the University of Minnesota my Studio Arts classes had to compete with my love of Science at the College of Agriculture. That is where my life direction pivoted away from an art degree into an Animal Science Major. As a student, I was enthralled by the fact I could work to help rehabilitate the injured eagles, hawks, and owls to be returned to the wild through the work of mentor Dr. Pat Redig.
I still continued my art but moved to more Illustrative, even scientific illustration work. The wings and other structures of birds fascinated me and I continued to paint and make art pieces for various projects for work and pleasure. I also volunteered at Como Zoo this time doing educational animal programs as I lived at home to help with my mother’s chronic M.S. attacks that left her eventually paralyzed. One of my lifetime fortunate experiences I had and am forever grateful for was the opportunity to raise several exotic animal cubs from Como Zoo at my parent’s home. While raising several lions and tiger cubs, and babysitting orangutans along with other monkeys during programs, my parent’s home became an episode of The Addams Family. One of my favorite stories is about when the meter reader came to our house to get the water meter read at the time I was caring for a wallaby (a small kangaroo-like marsupial) named Susie. Susie loved to lay on our basement couch with her head up on the arm of the sofa. I’ll never forget the look on the technician’s face when he came up the stairs from the basements and said, “Are you aware that there is a kangaroo on your couch watching television?”
As I worked my way through college via student positions, i.e. Bell Museum of Natural History, and Poultry Research, during the fall and winter semesters, I also was fortunate to work for Cornell University in the summer of 81. For Cornell, I monitored released peregrine falcons at the Aberdeen Maryland Proving Grounds for the US Army Corps of Engineers and assisted with monitoring peregrines released off the Smithsonian Castle in Washington D.C. It was in D.C. where I had time to study art pieces in the Smithsonian and the Hirschorn Museum of Modern Art between monitoring falcons. At that time, I worked in primarily pen and ink. I came back to Minnesota releasing Peregrine Falcons for the Midwest Peregrine recovery program working in Kellogg MN at Weaver Dunes and on the roof of the IDS Building In Mpls. from 1983-1986. I also resumed painting and graduated with an Animal Science degree in 1986 and became a licensed falconer. Then in the winter of ’86, I started working in a full-time position at Como Zoo and worked there as a provisional keeper until I went to Europe in the summer of 1988 and stayed with falconers in the south and north of England, in the Bavarian Forests in Germany and the Netherlands. During that time I trained and hunted with birds of prey, I had different raptors including a red-tailed hawk named Raica for many years that hunted rabbits and pheasants.
In the winter of ’89, my art practice was still painting and some selling but my main focus was shifting to my new full-time position at the new Raptor Center at the University as a raptor information specialist. The program I volunteered for as a student had grown into a full-fledged new facility and program run by Dr. Redig. I traveled a lot to work for the Raptor Center setting up programs around the nation, and within many sovereign tribal communities, I was honored to help facilitate bringing eagles to veterans’ honoring and other community ceremonies for indigenous nations.
Many of my works at this time were raptor-inspired plus all of these adventures qualified for the value of the “Making the world a little better place” life goals. In 1998 I was a part of the Raptor Center team that traveled to Washington D.C. to meet President Clinton at the White House and celebrate the delisting of the Bald Eagle off the Endangered Species list. I really had no other path then but it set up many experiences that I use now in my painting practice to draw upon as source inspiration material.
In 1989 my brother and I bought a house and in the spring of 1990, my friend Shirley and I canoed from Lake Itasca to St Paul 589 miles on the Mississippi River to raise money counting bald eagles for the Raptor Center, On this trip I got frostbit feet from getting caught in a late April snow storm and having to portage over beaver damns on the Mississippi River. It was also in 1990 I met my artist husband Mark Garrigan who was a curator for shows at Rifle Sports Art Gallery and in 1992 we married and had our first daughter in 1993. Our second was born in 1996. Any full-time art practices and falconry took a back seat to the children as Mark and I became full-time parents. We decided I had a better-paying job so I worked out of the house and Mark worked as the stay-at-home parent.
Then in 2000 I received to the position of Executive Director of the National Eagle Center Project through the National Audubon Society and moved the family to Wabasha MN. I guided the National Eagle Center through its various incarnations and worked with developers, architects, donors, tribal members, and city, state, and federal legislators until a 4.5 million National Eagle Center facility was built in 2007. I traveled again to Washington D.C. with a bald eagle I had trained for the center named Harriet. Harriet and I were part of a presentation to congress with Minnesota Senators Klobuchar and Coleman to adopt a national “Bald Eagle Day” on June 20 to acknowledge the day in 1789 when the Bald Eagle was deemed America’s National Symbol! It was then Stephen Colbert from the fledgling cable show The Colbert Report on Comedy Central who invited Harriet and me to visit New York all expenses paid to be on the show. If you google MaryBeth Garrigan, Harriet the eagle, and Colbert Report, you can actually still see the episode on Comedy Central’s archive site.
My husband Mark’s health was worsening after a 10-year-old quintuple bypass he had in 1999. I retired from my position at the National Eagle Center and took online certification classes through a grant at Hamline University after my husband’s death in 2013, I had to assess what was my next path as both my daughters were in college and I was soon to be an empty nester. The inspiration to return to my art practice was my husband’s last birthday present to me of a watercolor paint set. He wanted to see me start painting again. Those watercolor paints got me through the grief and anxiety of restarting my life without Mark.
By 2014 I had moved back to St Paul to the Schmidt Artist Loft Community and founded Ugly Daisy Studio. I was hired as a Special Ed TA at the American Indian Magnet School where in my previous life with the Eagle Center I had brought on numerous occasions bald eagle education presentations for the school’s culture fair. I loved being an educator and teaching art and it seemed art was a kind of therapy for many special needs students. I continued to be inspired by the Indigenous beadwork of my students’ dance regalia and many of my initial paintings I composed from shapes of beads. I had my first public exhibition in 2015 at the Landmark Gallery titled “Cousins” with my bead painting series along with my cousin Judy Nielsen who does bead mosaics. After the “Cousins” show, I started exploring assemblage work with my piece “Particle Theory” and showed it in group shows. I submitted work to numerous exhibitions which included the Hinkley Fire Museum which coincided with an exhibition titled “The Great Hinckley Fire of 1894” in St Paul. I co-curated this exhibit at the Schmidt Brew House Gallery and was one of four artists including David Feinberg, Lynn Gray, and Petra Johnita Lommen, where I also exhibited my assemblage installation work with a piece called “New Climate”. This piece was also featured in Will Steger’s Climate Generation Exhibition in 2016 at the Vine Gallery. My birds were making their way back into my work and a Grey Grey Owl piece placed second in the SPAC Winter Members show 2019.
Among some of my favorite projects were with my students from AIMS. In 2018 I received a grant through the American Indian Youth Enrichment Program from the Minnesota States Art Board to guide a student art project exploring water. I developed the summer project with four other artists helping indigenous students to learn assemblage, printmaking, and painting, and then creating a water-themed Skill Crane called The Mn Wiconi Machine( Water is Life in Dakota) that dispensed recycled water bottles with student art inside as the prize. The money from the plays on the machine went to the Indian Youth Program for more art supplies. The MnWiconi Machine was installed at Can Can Wonderland in 2018. In 2021 my collaboration partner Lommen and I coordinated online classes and a special gallery show Titled: “This Me Indigenous In 2020” where 7 of my AIMS students created original self-portraits and had shows in both the US District Court Buildings in MPLS and St Paul in which they sold all their work!
In 2019 I was selected to be in an exhibition that paired special needs artists with a partnering artist. This exhibition was titled the CoLab Show and was also judged by the comedian Bill Murry. My partner and I won the Bill Murry Choice Award with our piece. I was especially moved by this event as my partner Katie, her father had passed away a week before and this award made her so happy. I felt grateful that working with my art can help make someone else’s world a little better. So this brings me through the covid years and currently working on several series of works and exhibitions.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
I have had the privilege and benefit of growing up in a middle-class household with two parents and a supportive family. During the 70s and 80s when I attended the University of Minnesota, my tuition was less than $600-$1,500 a quarter I was able to pay as I took classes each quarter, and I wasn’t shackled with student debt or had to make sure I had health insurance paid by someone… it was a very different world that had advantages on some levels yet as the world of opportunity for young women was just opening up but still had many obstacles. I feel that in the art world in particular during the 70s-80s women had to fight and or become radical conceptualists to be seen which was very amazing and I loved but it was very tough for me to participate as I had to stay at home and help my sick mother who was housebound, that’s why my studies in Animal Science and work at the zoo happened at such an opportune moment. I was able to bring the animals home to care for them and it was something my mother could help with by bottle-feeding the lion cubs.
As I started a family, most of my male colleagues had jobs, and families with children were still able to practice their passion in falconry or art. It seemed impossible for me to do art just for myself. As Mark and I raised children, for about 20 years as I was a single-income earning parent, my creative energies were diverted into creating children’s programming, designing, and planning the zoo exhibits or eagle facilities and exhibits. My falconry was diverted into training non-flighted eagles for educational ambassador work. But I feel most of my life was lucky that I was able to channel my passions into work that connected to my values. I felt that ever I worked on, I was helping to make the world, or someone’s world if not my own, a little better. I still love animals but the only exotic creature living with me is my chihuahua mix Rooster. So Rooster helps me to keep active and grounded. My two daughters live close by and we love to hang out together. We all have survived the pandemic so far, so life is good to be alive and grateful we live in Minnesota (Mni Sota Makoce) the land of the Dakota and Ojibwa peoples who are still here and whose cultural values I try to live up to. I’m grateful to keep making art!
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I love my collaboration work with other artists. I feel like musicians collaborate all the time and I find that visual artists’ collaborations are really not that common at all. In fact, there are many art exhibitions that do not allow collaborations or do not have a collaboration category. In my studio, Ugly Daisy Studio, I have invited 2 other artists to create pieces based on collaboration. In 2015 Petra Johnita Lommen and I started a series where I started painting my birds again. The Avian Night Sky Series has about 14 pieces and made its collection debut at the National Eagle Center’s Mississippi Gallery in 2019. Another collaborating artist I work with is Rick Pirtle who partnered in the piece “The Canyon” based on a vision I had while hiking out from the bottom of the Grand Canyon. In 2019, Petra, Rick, and I all collaborated together on a mural-sized four-panel painting called the “Morrighan” inspired by the Irish “Book of Invasions”. Our challenge was how to blend our three completely different visual styles into the same piece.
I take my inspiration from mythical stories and real-life experiences. In 2016 the Minnesota State Capitol was in the process of getting refurbished, As I watch a news story about how the four-horse statue on the Capitol Portico titled “The Quadriga” had its gold copper plating restored and was being reinstalled in the capitol building, I became curious about that statue’s story and meaning. From the MHS website, the four Quadriga horses represented the elements earth, air, fire, and water. The two women figures that held the horse’s reigns represented Agriculture and Commerce, while the man in the chariot being pulled was Prosperity. During that time, a lot was happening at the Capitol as well as the 100,000 Women’s March in 2017, so I thought what if the women in the Quadriga statue let go of the reigns of the horses? How would the horses look then? How would the horses become their true elementals? I painted a 4‘ x 16’ acrylic piece called the “Quadriga: Elements of the State”. Fast forward 3 years in 2020 the pandemic hit, and I submitted a portfolio to the MSP Airport Art Program and was contacted about the possibility of recreating the Quadriga Horses as four separate 10’ x 10’ mosaics for Terminal 1 at MSP Airport. In 2020 I received the commission as the general contractor and hired the amazing mosaic work from Miotto Mosaics out of NewYork to recreate the horses out of a special fired glass produced in Italy called Smalti glass. I originally went to Italy to work with the artisan studios but the pandemic happened so all of our work and communication was by the internet. But they did an amazing job in creating the magic and shimmer of the Quadriga including the glass containing 24-carat gold in the facial discs of the horses.
The public can visit the horses anytime at the Arrival Level of Terminal 1 (baggage) and you don’t need to check through the gate security. I took my students from AIYE on a tour last summer to see the art at the airport and it was a great field trip for them to be able to see other Indigenous artists whose work is at the airport along with my own.
So this brings up to where I am today. I retired from American Indian Magnet School and the St Paul School District as of June 2022. Artist, I still live in the Schmidt artist community and have worked on many new pieces including several new collaborative works with Lommen. I just finished up several group exhibitions in Arizona, Idaho, and showing work at the Rochester Airport. I do have work for sale and the collaborative pieces are still on exhibition so most of the originals are not yet for sale until after 2024. Although you can purchase prints of many pieces on http://artpal.com/uglydaisystudio
I have a multimedia exhibition collaboration planned for 2024.
Alright, so to wrap up, is there anything else you’d like to share with us?
In 2009 my brief musical artistic practice ensued when my daughters and I formed an Irish traditional Music band called “Garrigan’s Quarrel”. My daughters when on to compete in the Fleadh Cheoil (All Ireland US division competitions) and I have since retired from playing music publicly. I feel our other artistic family has been the Irish Community of Minnesota!
Minnesota is a great place to practice the arts in any form, and here is my shout-out to attend the annual Irish Fair of Minnesota if you have a chance to go in August!
Also, visit my website at http://www.uglydaisy.com and if you like any art there or want to inquire about an installation, I can be contacted via email at marybird@uglydaisy.com or by text! You can visit my Quadriga Mosaic installation at MSP Airport Terminal 1 just inside the Baggage/Arrival Level anytime, no ticket needed, and also come visit me and my installations at the Schmidt Artist Lofts by appointment or during St. Paul’s Spring Art Crawl the 3rd weekend in April!
Contact Info:
- Website: http://www.uglydaisy.com
- Instagram: @marybirdgarrigan
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/uglydaisystudio
- Youtube: @marybirdgarrigan1754
Image Credits
Saving Sacred Space Article by Margaret Wimberley
