Artist Finds The Balance

If the works of artist Linda Mickens — one of the recipients this year, along with fellow artist Jeff Ostergren, of a grant from the Bitsie Clark Fund for Artists — were to all appear in one gallery at the same time, you could line one wall with a choir of angels, in various poses, heads tilted toward the sky or downward, wings folded or unfurled. 

On the other side of the gallery, though, would be a woman with nails for hair, screaming, a machine gun in her lap; faceless statues in hoodies, the victims of police shootings. Light and darkness, held in suspension, with the artist always moving from one to the other and back again. And maybe, with the piece she’s about to create, finding just the right balance between them.

Mickens describes herself as ​“mostly self-taught.” The qualifier is due to her taking a class, maybe two, in 1986, in sculpture at the Newark School of Fine and Industrial Art. She was already working as a nurse then, and raising three children. 

“I did it after work, and nights I would go there,” she said of the class. She had always been ​“artful,” she said, making things — leather bags, bracelets and other accessories — in high school, but became a nurse after caring for her mother, who was very sick and passed away. ​“It just felt like the right thing for me,” Mickens said. ​“It was my first time being exposed to health care issues, and I thought, ​‘I think I can do this.’ ” She graduated nursing school in 1980.

The sculpture class called to Mickens, six years into her nursing career, because ​“I needed to put my hands on something, to make something creative,” she said. She learned to make models in clay and plaster, and to make molds so she could create pieces in metal. Her first piece, which sits in her studio now, shows that her dexterous ability at rendering faces and emotions was with her from the start. Then ​“I left the school and started doing stuff on my own,” she said.

She got into travel nursing, which took her from New Orleans to Saudi Arabia, and took her art supplies with her. ​“Back then I worked a lot, so I had a lot of money,” she said, which let her make metal sculptures. In time, though, she felt making the pieces was too expensive, and her art practice showed. By 1998 she had stopped making art altogether. ​“I couldn’t afford it anymore,” she said with a laugh. 

Two decades passed without Mickens making a sculpture. One day, ​“my daughter says to me, ​‘I guess that was part of your old life,’ ” she said. She realized, in 2019, just how much time had passed, and decided to start making art again. And she started by making angels.

“I’m a spiritual person,” Mickens said, ​“and I met this person who I believe to be an angel.” The visitation happened in 2002, in Penn Station in New York City. Mickens was on her way to catch a flight to Jamaica when a woman who looked to be in her 60s, possibly homeless, asked her for a pair of socks. Mickens offered her money.

“I didn’t ask you for money,” Mickens recalled the woman saying. ​“I asked you for a pair of socks.”

Mickens explained that the woman could buy socks with the money, and the woman took the money and walked away. ​“As I turned away from her, I was in a different place,” Mickens said. ​“There was no time or space. It was just a beautiful feeling, beautiful light all around me. It must have lasted a good eight minutes. When I started to come back to myself, I said, ​‘what the hell was that?’ ”

“For me, I just believe it to be an angel,” she said with a laugh. The woman gave her ​“the gift of love — what I imagine pure love was.” Mickens is ​“so glad to have met her,” because ​“sometimes life can be so hard,” and the possibility of a plane beyond this one ​“grounds” her.

The woman in Penn Station also lingered in her memory, and ​“I was always trying to create her — or my memory of her — and it never worked out,” Mickens said. With sculpture, she decided to try again. ​“Maybe that was the gift,” she added, to return to her art.

Mickens retired early in 2020 (before the pandemic started) from working in the neonatal intensive care unit at Yale-New Haven Hospital. She made her sculptures out of paper and glue, supported by wire frames, sometimes involving other materials and found objects. The first angels she made were for family and friends.

But current events compelled her to make other pieces as well — ​“extreme” pieces, Mickens said. Redemption is an arresting sculpture of a woman screaming, holding a machine gun, with nails for hair. Mickens made it ​“after George Floyd was murdered” in 2020. ​“I was crying all the time. I was so angry.”

Even as she had spent a career in an emotionally taxing job, the emotion of Floyd’s killing, and the killing of so many other Black people by police, threatened to overwhelm her. ​“You can’t keep feeling like this,” she recalled saying to herself. ​“You have to put this somewhere.” She thought about Nina Simone, who ​“went to go get a gun” after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, with the intention of going on a shooting spree, and then instead decided to use her art.

For Mickens, the gun in Redemption isn’t intended for revenge, but for protection. ​“For me,” she said, ​“she’s always had the gun, metaphorically. When can she put the gun down? When does she not have to protect herself? When is that day coming?” The figure’s scream injected urgency. The nails in her head were symbols of strength and vulnerability. ​“It’s dark, but it’s also reality,” Mickens said.

She used Redemption as a centerpiece for an installation at the Ely Center of Contemporary Art that was in many ways even more intense, as it involved her using the names of Black people killed by police. ​“I was writing the names sobbing,” she said. She also recalled thinking: ​“You have to get out of this! You’re not going to survive this.”

So ​“I do extreme pieces and then I do my angels,” she said. ​“It’s a balance.” It also means she doesn’t stay in the same artistic space. ​“You have to do something different.”

She can also find that balance within an individual piece. With support from the Bitsie Clark Fund, she intends to revisit the theme of a small sculpture she made when she lived in New Orleans, of second-line dancers at a funeral procession. ​“The whole concept, that … you’re celebrating their life. That was everything to me.… I’ve been to a lot of funerals in my family, and it’s always a sad thing.” In New Orleans, she found it beautiful that the procession brought the deceased to their favorite places, in a festive way. ​“So I made a small piece” to commemorate it, in the late 1990s.

The original sculpture is small enough to fit in Mickens’s hands. In the new piece, the dancers will be life-size, and Mickens will build their bodies out of paper, wire, and washboards ​“for their core.” She may incorporate actual musical instruments into the piece.

She has also received a $20,000 grant from the Arts Council to create six ​“angel benches.” One is going to Bregamos Community Theatre. Another is going to an HIV clinic. Joe DeRisi of Urbanminers is building the benches from reclaimed wood. Mickens will then alter three of them according to her artistic vision. She’s then giving one bench to artist Susan Clinard, one to artist Shaunda Holloway, and one back to DeRisi, all to alter as each of them sees fit.

But the swing between light and dark continues. Her next ​“dark” project, she thinks, will address how ​“we, as African Americans, shoot each other all the time” and ​“there’s not so much outrage as when a cop kills you. But it’s just as impactful.… you have the same gun and you’re shooting the same person.” It’s ​“trauma” for the ​“parents of the people getting shot and killed” no matter who does the shooting. ​“Why aren’t we marching?” Mickens asked, the same way people marched in response to police killings? ​“It’s so multifaceted” to her that ​“the outrage is not equal,” when ​“both should be outrages.”

“It’s part of the insanity” of being a Black person, she continued. ​“We are an insane people, and it’s no wonder, because we have suffered so much trauma on this planet.” And yet, ​“we’re still living. We’re still loving. We have families, we have birthday parties, and people are going to universities. They’re studying, they’re doing. It’s happening at the same time.”

“The whole story has to be told,” she added. ​“It may not be one person’s walk to do every piece of it, but I think that it’s happening.”

But she doesn’t forget to take care of herself, either. She making a nest in her yard, into which she will place meaningful objects that relate to nature and to her ancestry. ​“I am growing in that way,” she said of the expansion of the materials she uses. ​“I don’t have to be so literal any more.”

Some artists have a grand concept they work from; for a few artists, that can define their careers. For Mickens, however — as in her nursing career, which found her moving from place to place — the inspiration in her art comes from moving from one project to the next.

“I get an inspiration about something, I want to say it, or do it.… Whatever the art spirit moves you to do, that’s what you do,” Mickens said. ​“Sometimes you have to surrender yourself and let things go.”