Jenie Gao
Walk around Madison these days and it’s hard not to feel the presence of artist Jenie Gao. There’s the stunning mural she helped create on the side of Trinity Lutheran Church and the one in the popular Working Draft Beer Company. She also painted a mural on the side of Mary Burke’s house.
Gao’s trademark bold style will also catch your eye if you’re walking by the Wisconsin Veterans Museum on the Capitol Square. Gao painted the door at 30 W. Mifflin St. as part of the Downtown Doors public art project.
A full-time printmaker, mural artist and entrepreneur, Gao works out of a studio in the east-side co-working startup One-One Thousand, where she also teaches woodblock printing workshops.
Her latest commission is a timely one. Her Flag is a national art project designed to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Gao’s charge was to create a stripe of the flag to represent Wisconsin, the first state to ratify the amendment.
Gao is one of 36 female artists — one for each state that ratified the amendment — tapped by Marilyn Artus, the artist behind the collaborative project, to participate. There were 341 applicants in all.
Artus says in an email that she chose all the artists by the “quality of their work. Jenie’s work was bold and colorful and I thought it would translate well.”
Gao’s stripe features portraits of the members of the first all-female school board in Madison and focuses, says Gao, “on the role of education in moving women forward and gaining them the right to vote.”
On June 10, Gao will publicly hand her stripe to Artus, who will be traveling “the path of ratification” in 2019 and 2020. Artus hopes to draw attention to the historic barriers to voting for women, and especially women of color, by collecting the stripes in each state and sewing them together to make an entire flag.
She says she is delighted that Gao’s flag has “an assortment of women with different nationalities. Women’s history is important and celebrating this anniversary can be a gateway into learning more. I am seeing dialogue about women of color, and the important contributions they made in passing the 19th Amendment, in other groups and organizations that are planning to mark the anniversary across the country.”
Gao, 31, was born to first-generation immigrant parents from China and Taiwan — two places with what she calls a “tumultuous political history.” Growing up in semi-rural Shawnee, Kansas, Gao says her family was expected to assimilate rather than to express their individual identity — people often had stereotyped ideas about why they chose to come to the United States. “I grew up knowing there are these stories that people like my dad yearned to tell but didn’t, or didn’t feel like they had the proper avenue to do so,” she says.
Art wasn’t a part of her parents’ plans for their daughter. They wanted her to have more opportunities and a more stable life than they did as owners of a Chinese restaurant. When it came time for college in 2006, Gao headed to Washington University in St. Louis to study engineering. “But it didn’t take very long for me to realize that I was horribly misplaced to be choosing engineering over the arts,” Gao says. At the end of her sophomore year, she transferred to the art school. Her father died just one year later, when she was in her junior year. “What the work became about was capturing the stories that I didn’t want to lose,” Gao says.
Gao was drawn to printmaking because of its long history in social movements. “It was the first social media that predated electricity to communicate a mass message in all sorts of contexts — from people protesting for their rights, to Martin Luther putting up pamphlets on church doors,” says Gao.
Jenie Gao
“Man’s Well-Regulated Friends” from Gao’s Survival Tools show at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Her site-specific installation, Survival Tools, exhibited last year at the Museum of Wisconsin Arts in West Bend, offers a glimpse of her contribution to that history. Her prints are provocative, featuring creatures such as dogs with guns and bullhorns for heads. “I think a lot about how people say they don’t want to talk about politics, or don’t want to mix politics with the personal, because it’s contentious and controversial. What it really says to me is that we’re in a place in society where we’re honestly not good communicators.”
She says all of her art has some common threads. “I see the pieces I do as being a part of a lineage and a part of a family. It needs to come into its own and command its own presence in a space,” Gao says. “It’s not going to match the couch; it’s not going to assimilate. It’s going to have its own voice.”
Now as chair of the Wisconsin Artists Biennial 2020, which curates and showcases contemporary artworks from artists all over the state, Gao wants to help other artists gain opportunities to share their stories and work. She advocates for fair compensation and resources for her fellow artists, and speaks out against the exploitation of creative labor when organizations or institutions ask artists to work for free or in exchange for “exposure.”
Karin Wolf, arts administrator for the city of Madison, has worked with Gao on the Madison Arts Commission. “Jenie has quickly become a major connector of artists throughout our community,” says Wolf, adding that she has “guided decision-makers toward more artist-friendly policies and raised the bar for the entire community, both for artists who need to understand their value and for those who wish to hire or commission art.”
