By María Eugenia Guerra

SAN ANTONIO - Fabric artist Susie McAtee Monday radiates an energy field that, if not nearly visible, is most certainly palpable. And it's not just artistic energy; it's how she moves through the whole of her life like a dynamo clothed in serenity, clothed perhaps in something she made or colored.
An appropriate headline for this story might have been: Susie Monday does exactly as she pleases, and pleases many along the way.
For 30 years she's been the artist in residence at Froebel House, the spacious stone cottage she shares with Linda Cuellar in the King William historical district. The Washington Street home was built in the 1860s by a wheelwright named Martin Froebel. The high-ceilinged home of plaster over caliche block features wooden floors, original fenestration, a metal roof, and a veranda that spans the width of the structure. One wing of the home is a bed and breakfast, furnished, according to McAtee Monday, not in Laura Ashley but in Annie Oakley.
The old place is so kind to the eye, and like the artist herself, certain parts of the house offer comfort or enticement to experience art and color in the pieces of her textile work that fill the house or in the vast collection of Mexican and Central American folk art. Froebel House is but one medium on which McAtee Monday has splashed the endearing expressions of self that characterize her life and her work.
Life and work. Try as you may to find the line about her that separates the two, you won't succeed. In a balancing act that has her holding a day job as a nana/tía to two teens, McAtee Monday carves a balance into a finite number of hours in a day to also teach art and writing and to reserve a time slot for her own creative efforts.
Far more organized than you would think someone possessed of such creativity could be, she has refined her personal schedule to ensure that all she must do in a day or a week or a month gets done. That's probably why her resume is dotted with consultant and/or teaching jobs for the Austin Children's Museum, Abilene's Grace Children's Museum, the LBJ Heartland Council, the Making History exhibition at Lyndon Baines Johnson National Historical Park, the King Ranch, and the University of the Incarnate Word Fashion Design department.
From 1993 to 1998 McAtee Monday served as exhibit director, educator, and administrator for the San Antonio Children's Museum, taking responsibility for the overall design and fabrication of 23,000 square feet of exhibition. The downtown children's museum, regarded as one of the most stimulating and imaginative in Texas and in the country, bears the signature of McAtee Monday's creativity.
Other of her design credits include interactive exhibits for the Weisner Wing of the New Orleans Art Museum and the Children's Museum of Houston; exhibitry and educational programs for the International Year of the Child at the Smithsonian Institute, Department of Symposia; participatory exhibit at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts Children's Theatre Festival; and exhibit consultation for the Texarkana Children's Museum.
Her graphic design credits include illustrations for Learning About Learning Educational Foundation's "Imagination Works" product line featured at Neiman Marcus, theater curriculum adopted by the State of Texas, Lessons in Looking (a children's book about architect O'Neil Ford), illustrations for Our Kids magazine and curriculum materials for the San Antonio Children's Museum.
There is all at once a sweetness and a vibrancy to Susie McAtee Monday's work, and I am choosing my words carefully -- not only because her work commands the best description possible but also because she was once a journalist and knows herself all the best words.
It's been a pleasure to be a guest at Froebel House and to have regular exposure to her work (and to her), to experience her art and to feel it in the place we allow art to touch us, to walk through rooms dressed with this kind of beauty.
I've concluded that it is first the colors that engage you and then the fabric textures. Then it is the story of the piece that pulls you inexorably into it, the story the artist wanted all along to share with you, or the story you have brought with you to filter through the dear and bright craft of a thousand stitches.
McAtee Monday earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Trinity University in 1970, graduating cum laude. She has studied surface design and papermaking at the Southwest School of Art and Craft in San Antonio. She took museum studies at the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA. She recently was part of Germinate, a group show of textile artists at Textures Gallery in San Antonio. She has had a one-woman show at the Blue Star Art Space in the Jumpstart Performance Gallery in San Antonio.

LareDOS: Why fabric?
SMcM: I have been working with my hands and making art as long as I can remember. I've experimented with a number of different media, but landed on fabric printing, dyeing, and complex cloth explorations with a sure sense of my "home" a few years ago. The field and the media seem to answer, to embody, many of the qualities that I long for. And, rather than having to pick one of the disciplines and technical skills that 40-odd years of working with my hands and mind have given me, I can use many skills, many approaches, and many techniques.
As I look back, several threads run through my creative life, and the work of hands, the making, that I do for myself, no matter how gainfully employed I am at the moment: Pattern, kinesthetic and aesthetic notions, a subtle level of storytelling and narrative, a sensual desire for the tactile qualities of materials, the joy of seeing and having stuff in multiple numbers, a fascination with color, a desire for spontaneity and the excitement of seeing what happens next, and most of all my inherent, nonverbal way of working, thinking, and creating -- the collage of elements into a predetermined space. My strong call to color, movement, texture, and repetition, these are the nonverbal elements I notice and respond first to.
I get to do all of these things working with textiles.
I've collected fabric and textiles all my life, without quite knowing what to do with them. One of my favorite things to do as a young girl was to make doll clothes and paper doll clothes and to redecorate my giant doll house with scraps of wallpaper, fabric, and magazine pages. I've sewn banners and flags, costumes, and wall hangings. I've done hand work and machine work. I've filled spaces with fabric and other materials and used paper and plastics in a fabric-like way. I've painted and drawn and made paper.
I have a bank of skills -- hand embroidery and needlepoint, bead-making and silk screening, collage, drawing and layering -- that lend themselves to cloth. And I don't have to give up some of those to concentrate on one. This work with fabric can embrace them all.
The physical work itself has lots of variety, essential for my character -- in size of action, scope, functionality, wet and dry, meticulous and fast.
Best of all, fabric is a material that even when "worked" still has the potential to be used again and even reused. I like its functionality, its workaday use for one of humanity's most basic needs -- sheltering ourselves, protecting our skins, softening our surroundings.
I like that fabric connects me to a parade of female ancestors, all of whom took joy and pride in their work -- woman's work and works of beauty, even when other avenues of expression were closed by chauvinistic constraints.
LareDOS: What about a fabric calls you first -- color, texture?
SMcM: When I'm using commercial fabrics and "recycled" handwoven and other ethnic fabrics in my wall pieces, I always go for color and pattern first, then texture. I love intense hues like turquoise, golden yellow, rose red. Faded sarape stripes have a real appeal, and I like all Guatemalan hand-wovens, too.
For fabrics that I'll re-dye and print, I must use natural fibers -- cotton, linen, silk, and cellulose rayon -- most of the table linens I dye are old soft damasks, some so lovely I can't imagine people giving them up to the "give-away" bin.
LareDOS: Do you prefer old fabric, old types of fabric?
SMcM: Recycled old fabrics are my favorites -- I rarely buy new fabric except for silk, and I comb thrift stores and estate sales for old garments made of handwoven, hand-embroidered fabrics and cotton and rayon damasks that can be dyed, cut up, and/or reused. I also love the texture and faded quality of old bark cloth -- the heavy kind of fabric that was often used for upholstery and drapes in the 40s and 50s with the palm trees, magnolias, and florid roses. That's getting harder to find and often quite expensive though -- so if you know anyone with old drapes in their attic, have them call me!
LareDOS: How early in the gazing upon a fabric is your mind already working to see a finished product? Do you sketch and measure? How do you determine the size of a piece?
SMcM: My pieces usually grow organically starting from the heart of a few pieces of fabric that echo with an image or a heart or a head or a pair of legs. I generally work in a rather human scale, people- sized, but I have this secret longing to do some really big pieces. I don't sketch finished pieces, but play around a lot with different swatches until the colors and patterns click. I do collect images in my sketch book , especially for the wall altars that include my version of some historical and folk images. Other pieces, like the Bird of Loss that you have, were the result of a silkscreen image version of a small tempera painting that I did several years ago. I even recycle my own work. I never know what the end result will be until its there in front of me.
LareDOS: Describe your work space and where it is in your home.
SMcM: My dye and print studio is in my garage and it is usually a mess. It's a single car garage, un-air-conditioned, and filled with big plastic bins of fabrics, drawers of dye, and a zillion things I keep thinking I'm going to need one of these days. A two-foot by six-foot printing table is in the middle, padded and raised to make it good for silk-screen printing.
I usually sew in the big living room in the front of the house or in the bedroom, or if the weather is really nice out in the studio. My dream is to make enough money selling art to justify remodeling the garage into a "real" studio with better storage, climate control, and a really big sink. But I decided three years ago that if I waited for the perfect work space I would never get any work done, so I make do like millions of other artists and, guess what, the work gets done even without a fancy space.
I also work one day a week, except in summer, in the studio of my mentor and friend Jane Dunnewold and in the company of a group of 10 to 12 other fabric artists. We give each other support and feedback, help with technical issues, buy and trade each other's work, and in general serve as a kind of messy sisters-in-company much like an old-fashioned quilting bee circle, although we work individually and within a wide range of styles. I also carry work with me often, adding a few minutes of hand embroidery while I wait in the car or for an appointment.
At home I tend to work frantically and for hours, then leave my studio in turmoil until I have to clean up and start again. I wish I could master the "clean as you work" method, but I couldn't when I was eight years old and I still can't.
LareDOS: What is your equipment?
SMcM: My grandmother's Singer sewing machine, circa 1959, another portable Singer, same era, a bunch of silk screen frames for hand printing, buckets for dye. Needles and pins. Pretty basic.
LareDOS: Who taught you to sew and embroider?
SMcM: My grandmother and mother taught me the basics and I've learned more from books and other artists. I hate to sew garments, by the way.
LareDOS: Who buys your work?
SMcM: Other artists, friends, people who see my work in shows. I have a loyal following now at the Southwest School of Art's Fiesta Arts Fair -- the only craft show I sell at. People now come and find me for a new piece each year.
LareDOS: Aside from the colors and textures of the fabrics themselves, what inspires you?
SMcM: The materials and fabrics and even the techniques can be an inspiration -- such as learning to use bonding web as a way to make fabric collages that are then machine quilted. Stories also inspire me, as does the work of other artists.
LareDOS: Where do you think your ideas come from, the ideas that let you visualize a piece of work?
SMcM: Over the past four years or so, I've worked a lot with images and symbols that have some kind of spiritual -- for want of a better word-- meaning to me. Archetypal healers, the Virgen de Guadalupe, other saints, personal symbols inspired by readings in the Tao and the Bible, the Talmud, and other wise texts, love and loss, the female faces of God. I want to make work that will have some kind of deeper meaning than just being a pretty thing to hang on the wall that matches the sofa, something that has some kind of healing power or celebratory space for the owner.
My tablecloths are more straightforward explorations of image and design, but even they have this kind of magic, I hope -- something that once it is on a table makes the gathering into a party, a feast, a ritual of human connection.
LareDOS: What do you feel when you are working?
SMcM: The best I ever feel. In the flow. Like what I am doing is what I was born to do. And sometimes driven.
LareDOS: What do you feel when you believe a piece is finished?
SMcM: Ready to go on to the next one, energized by the gift of having time and space to do my work.
LareDOS: What is a typical day for you?
SMcM: I don't think I have a typical day! I have a couple of dozen different hats to wear these days, being an artist is all of them and just one of them. So I try to play my weeks in blocks of time, with certain times held sacred for "big" work times on fabric art. The other jobs I have right now are: planning and teaching two weeks of children's art classes, one of them in residence at the King Ranch, working on research for a web site about Paul Baker, a man whose teaching in theater influenced my creative process deeply, part time duties as a nanny -- actually more like the "tia" role -- for two teenagers, a few freelance writing gigs, long-range planning for a public art program for the San Antonio Public Library's 100 year anniversary next spring, teaching Central American teachers in a program at the Alamo Community College District and, on a personal note, getting ready to take a road trip to Vera Cruz.
I start the day with exercise -- sometimes with journal entries or sketchbook time. Usually I have a little work to do as a nanny, or preparation for a course I'm teaching. I try to have some time to work on fabric each day even if it's just some embroidery or throwing things in a dye bucket, but I admit don't always succeed.

The Bird of Loss
Guadalupe/Tonantzin in the Garden - Triptych

Eve Tells A Different Story

I Am the Garden / I Am the Gardener