Meet Meg Kaplan-Noach

So, before we jump into specific questions about what you do, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I was born in 1960 in Coral Gables, the first child to parents who had both themselves, come to Florida as children. We lived in a garden apartment on Coral Way, but when I was just about a year old, my folks moved to Miramar where they built their first house. They planted a Mango sapling in the backyard—and since we were twins in age and I loved to play under and beside the beautiful leaves— my mom nicknamed me Megmangotree. This diminutive has remained with me ever since.

We always had pets. My first was a Basset hound when I was a toddler. The family legend has it that he was sent to live on a farm because he kept knocking me down whenever I stood up. My folks always said that I never would have learned to walk if we had kept him! Over time, we had hamsters and gerbils, and turtles and ducks. After the dog left, we always had a cat in the house.

During the 1960s and ’70s, my sister who is three years younger, and I were on our own after school. Both of my parents were college graduates and worked: Dad a Business Man, and Mama a Registered Nurse. In fact, my mother was the only mom in the neighborhood, not to mention among our entire circle of friends, who worked outside-of-the-house. Happily, my maternal grandparents lived only three blocks away and they had a pool and a whole menagerie of pets! I know how lucky I was to have them so near and to be so loved and spoiled.

My sister and I both attended the Nova public schools starting with first grade and were bused back-and-forth from Miramar to Davie every schoolday. For this reason, we had different schedules than the other kids in our neighborhood and often played alone together. For many years, our time was taken up with Hebrew and Sunday schools, and youth group. We also had a weekly dance and gymnastics classes. I loved gymnastics throughout my middle and high school years and was for a time on the gymnastics team at school.

It is not my intention, nor is it accurate for me to paint a Pollyannaish picture of my childhood. There were difficulties in my family, not all of them financial. One event, in particular, has colored my entire life. In 1967, my Uncle (my mom’s younger brother) was killed in Vietnam under tragic circumstances. He had already survived a combat tour in the Army but had returned there with the Rural Pacification Program of the U.S. Agency for International Development as a civilian school teacher. Although I was only seven, I was aware of and felt the manifest changes in every aspect of my family life. Neither my grandparents and parents (nor other members of my extended family) were ever the same again. Honestly, my Uncle’s decorated life and death still has effects upon my family all these years later. One good thing that came out of this: my grandparents and parents became active in a Jewish veterans organization.

Also, one morning a year or so later, our next-door neighbor’s teenage son was found unconscious from a drug overdose. Naturally, my mother was called for and went over to try to help. Her ministrations saved his life, but at a terrible cost because he was left comatose. Although he was not a family member, this sadly affected both of our families profoundly, even though the differences were marked. This is the stark way that I learned the danger of drugs, and I never forgot the lesson.

I want to emphasize that we were raised with a large amount of independence; also stressing that this independence afforded us the ability to develop our own personhoods. In this way, our parents were encouraging us to foster our own unique lives. They did not hover, they provided space. Something that does not seem to be done so much anymore.

On the other hand, my independence was connected to the great responsibility of caring for my sister too. This meant making sure we both were ready and off-to-school in the mornings, being together at home some afternoons, and of course, often running around on the weekends. Even as a teenager, I was charged with bringing my sister along with me and my friends, or taking her to her own activities. This was not always easy for either of us.

On the weekends, Mama tossed us out of the house encouraging us to go and have adventures and to not come back until dinner time. She taught us when supper was— and made it clear that neither she nor Dad would holler down the street for us— it was our responsibility to mind the time and come home as expected. We always did. I now know that this autonomy in my South Florida suburban neighborhood was critical to my development. I look around at young families now and see the difference in how we were raised; to have been brought up in a time when I could learn to be independent and to know that I could rely upon myself. I also understand that this upbringing was undeniably privileged.

Kids were kids back then and play was play! My imagination was nurtured both in my home by my parents, and by myself through my own experiences. Since I was a very young child, I have always identified as an artist— yet just as importantly, also as an independent girl. My earliest best friends always had their eyes on being mommies and housewives, but I always saw myself as a college student and artist. Always!

Has it been a smooth road?
I have known since I was a small child that I am an artist. While I naturally identify as many other things— like “daughter-sister” or “feminist” or “Jewish”— “artist” is primal and primary. Over the years I have come to see my life somewhat romantically, like the oxbows formed in a natural running river. It feels like I have always had to fight for my art. This began initially as family arguments with me fighting to go off to an expensive private art school versus a state school to earn a BFA. Then the rapidly succeeding struggles to stay in art school financed by student loans. And then even later, as an adult to financially support myself.

Like most artists, there have been times when I have had to put making-a-living first before concentrating on making art. This is not easy. Oftentimes the jobs I have worked have not involved art at all. But I never gave up my dreams. In 1999 after twenty years I finally was able to return to school to complete my BFA in Painting. I worked hard to earn a second BA in Art History simultaneously. I graduated Magna cum Laude in both degrees and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa.

Then, as of now, I have struggled with my inner voice. Debating the important ethical role of an artist to serve both society as well as the self. I have also endured the devastation of long-term artists’ blocks. The last one caused me to virtually disappear from the South Florida art scene, unable to even attend art functions. I became so invisible that although I was earning an MFA in Curatorial Practice from FIU, I was completely overlooked from an expansive 2015 multi-decade survey exhibition and catalog of South Florida artists. It is important to know that I have been exhibiting and curating in South Florida since the early 1980’s— pre-dating even the legendary Artifacts artist group— in which I was one of the original core members.

I am currently going through a difficult time but am able to persevere because I know this time too, will pass. I am grateful for my family, friends, and mentors who have all been supportive in so many ways. This is doubly frustrating since I naturally want to be independent and self-sufficient. But on the positive side, I am drawing again.

Please tell us more about your work, what you are currently focused on and most proud of.
I have always worked in the series format. I do this so that I have the creative space to fully investigate whatever I am exploring. This structure also affords me a visual and chronological sense of time which helps as I am working the series, but also afterwards when I have moved on. I can look back and then see changes and growth in my practice. Although this is a very linear concept and keeps me focused— since I am easily distracted— I can then see my works in a grouping which contains my thoughts, techniques, and the successes and failures.

In addition, unless I had “readymades” of old single-hung windows or mirrors to paint on, I have cut and skewed all of my surface edges. Changing them from the always-expected severely straight lines with their ninety-degree corners; to imperfectly softened and rounded edges and corners. Creating for myself uneven, undulating and floating spaces instead. I just cannot bear the strident and conventional rigid rectangles that nearly everyone else requires.

I am an artist who curates exhibitions, but I will tell you specifically about my art practice: I am a painter who draws. I used paint brushes and paints for decades until I began to feel annoyed with the brushes. I realized that I needed to use my fingers instead. Simultaneously I was encouraged to draw more— and did so, very intently. Drawing for drawing’s sake— not just for sketching or capturing preliminary ideas. Of course, I do those things too, but my focus is drawing. It took me some time to find the best surface and materials: acrylic primed Arches watercolor paper and oil pastels.

In my younger years, I was only interested in transparent surfaces, and painting inside spaces or bodies as subjects. I used pattern and decoration and inserted my own prose within the compositions. Much later, I fell in love with portraying the natural world outside instead. Some of the things I have painted and drawn over the years are: memories of significant rooms, clothesline-closets; the body as a map, my vagina; a monumental pile of cut and cleared trees, an aspect of a beloved park, and the landscape in my backyard. At this time, I am studying the ideas of physical space, and the micro and macrocosm of my backdoor garden.

I also have three other separate but ongoing series: an exploration of “intuitive drawings” (taught to me by a mentor-Professor who developed the technique) that is focused on the archetype of the spiral; fiber works in which I sew found objects from nature into organza “Spiral Wombs;” and an artistic political activism practice that is made up of a series of homemade handbills and stickers.

Has luck played a meaningful role in your life and business?
I definitely do feel that I am somehow under a dark cosmic cloud. I was taught to believe that “we make our own luck,” so this is a tricky question for me. But alternatively, I also believe in chance, serendipity, and coincidences. I guess I have contradictory ideas about luck: juxtaposing choices we make with the interventions of the divine. The mundane versus the sacred. What I do know in this time is, that own my best efforts have not often resulted in wished-for outcomes. It has taken a great deal of stamina to keep-on-trying. I know I am making gains with the support and encouragement of many others along with a highly personal sense of fight. Is this good or bad luck? I am not sure.