Meet Mary Joyce McFarland | Artist, Poet, Designer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Mary Joyce McFarland and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Mary Joyce, we’d love for you to start things off by telling us something about your industry that we and others not in the industry might be unaware of?
One, the people who are having the most fun, posting the most, performing the excitement behind the creative industry tend to already have wealth. As a working class person living in New York, I meet many young creative people who happened to a limitless toe in their parents bank accounts. Realizing that not every artist is creating from a deep place was difficult for me, and learning how not to view my work as an extention of myself was just as hard but very important. In a world driven by imitation and greed, being entirely passionate and connected to your work can end up hurting you more than helping. People will always steal from small artists, the person with more followers will always been assumed more important, and if you already have wealth, selling your work isn’t as vital. It’s not gonna change if there is food on their table. when I put my art into the public world I was often left down or feeling deeply unstable with the quality of my work and therefore the quality of myself. I didn’t want to detach myself from my art, but if I didn’t I probably would feel obliterated. I feel like people are unaware the most artists that get to be known are very few, and that has nothing to do with talent. Art takes resources and resources cost money, and to find the time as a working person to save the funds for materials and find the time to practice your craft is one of the hardest things in the world.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
I started creating before I can remember. I wanted to be a fashion designer, interior designer, painter, writer and lawyer all before the age of seven. But things didn’t really take on significance until my mother passed. I was 16 and my father sent me to boarding school in CT, completely lost on what to do. There I turned to painting, because words felt too complicated to express how I felt. I was also made to study writing and language at boarding school which lead me to poetry in College. In the last 4 years, I’ve been completing my undergraduate at The New School. I went to school for personal reasons, not really for a job. I’m from a small conservative town in Utah and throughout university I’ve been grappling with the mindset of my upbringing and how it had affected me. Utah was white supremacy and Christianity in concentrate, so it kinda represented the most extreme parts of American/Colonialist ideology. Post colonialism plays a huge role in my art work. Looking for modes of radical expression, reclamation, denouncing authority and oppressors and more. Often in my work i’m playing with the American assumptions, ideas of faith and prosperity, and where our blind spots are and who made them. I dream of life without boundaries, life without war and bigotry, but I know i’d be a fool to believe that would ever be the case. So, I try my best to engage with that dream or at least rationalize it in my work. I think to myself, if there was a way I could make the most ignorant person aware of their oppressions how could I do it? How can I make this expression familiar to even the furthest stranger. What are the common feelings and questions. feelings of Isolation are very acute to colonialism, versions of God and deities in society, over consumptions, shame, warfare. it’s seems vast but to me it’s all very specific. It’s like I needed to figure out why I didn’t like myself growing up, why I sometimes felt worthless when I wasn’t working, why it felt easier to judge people than love people and I wanted to question al of that.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
Take them to drink at coney island and eat hot dogs by the water. Get airbrush tattoos and lie to strangers about our origin stories. Eat burgers at Ruby’s Bar and Grill right on the board walk and probably end up kissing each other.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
My late mother who passed in 2017. She taught me everything I know, and art was the only way I could process her death. She is my art.

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