The Year According to Nikki McClure

Working with paper, X-Acto knives and one word commands, an artists's calendars become a self-sustaining industry.

Photography by Aaron Barna

Skyrocketing South Sound artist Nikki McClure may be the strangest success story in Northwest art. Self-taught and self-invented, she has made her living for ten years by making calendars that combine one-word demands and utterances and exquisite images cut from single sheets of paper. These calendars have become the object of international acclaim and swelling sales.

The word for January 2009 is “FIX,” which is accompanied by a picture of firm hands wrapping a broken rake with twine.
The May 2009 image is a bold silhouette of a black cat catching a blue bird, alongside the resonant word “WITNESS.”

McClure, a former K Records performing artist and onstage punk performer with Nirvana and Bikini Kill who once focused exclusively on the art of the moment, now needs to keep her sights set on the future. Each April she must sit down at the drawing table and, as she puts it, “visualize what people will need in December of the next year. My work has these images paired with the word, and the word has become sort of like a horoscope. It’s like the people’s Word of the Month. And what will they need to hear?”

For November 2008, the prospect of a scary election prompted the word “SURVIVE,” with an image of crows (a favorite McClure theme) beneath an ambiguous sky. “The clouds are coming in or the sunlight’s coming, depending on what the outcome would be. We’d have to survive this. And we did! Hopefully.”

Besides the esoteric, arresting words of guidance, what sells the calendars are the illustrations, striking images composed using only paper and an X-Acto knife — a tool originally designed for surgeons but adopted by artists. The images circle around domestic and natural life. The SURVIVE image was inspired not only by the abstract notion of the election but by the weather outside when she sliced its intricate patterns, a process that takes about a week.

“That was made from that winter we had eighty days of rain or whatever, fifty-six inches of rain,” says McClure in her backyard Olympia studio, which was built by her furniture-maker husband Jay T. Scott and paid for with the fistfuls of receipts stuffed in a bulging manila envelope for her accountant to sort out later. (She can only handle specialized forms of paperwork.)

“My work is very much based in reality. I’m not one to draw my dreams or anything. It’s kinda nature porn.” She loved it when she was sweeping leaves out of her studio and discovered that some of the leaves were actually paper, the negative space left by tiny leaves she’d cut for a calendar illustration. In her compositions, negative space is as important as the positive image, and her sense of time’s progression is as important as the captured moment. While sweeping out her studio, she feels bonded to everyone who ever swept, “every generation back to someone sweeping out a cave, like my blood is connected to that person.” She thinks her work connects generations today. “It’s something a punk rock feminist could hand to her mother and say, ‘Here’s a present for you; this is something that I believe in and this is something that you believe in, and we can share and have this bond.’ And that’s the market.”

The market is good. Last year, the major art-book publisher Abrams published a collection of her calendars, Collect Raindrops: The Seasons Gathered, and next month comes an illustrated children’s book, with text by Cynthia Rylant, who’s won both of the field’s top awards, the Newbery and the Caldecott. Princeton Architectural Press featured her in the book Handmade Nation: The Rise of DIY Art, Craft, and Design, soon to be a movie. “Now I’m going to be doing another two books of my own writing and images,” says McClure. The first, inspired by her four-year-old son Finn’s response to our melancholy climate, is called Mama, Is It Summer Yet? “Maybe [the answer] will be, ‘Sorry, we missed it. It’s yesterday.’”

Growing up in Kirkland, McClure feared she might miss the chance to be an artist. Kirkland was sleepier than Olympia today, and far less arty. “There were sheep grazing downtown, and still some horses grazing up by the freeway on-ramp.

My mother was a single mom with three kids, working night jobs. The bill collectors would come — ‘She’s not here!’"

McClure declared her vocation early. “I told everybody I was going to be an artist, and I didn’t need to take my business education classes. And they believed me.” In retrospect, she says, “They should make people who say they’re going to be artists take their business classes!”

At Evergreen State College, McClure decided to be sensible and study environmental science instead of art. “Hunkering over the microscope, I was giving myself a visual education, really examining things, like flower structure. My eyes opened up, and I was training my hand with technical drawing.” Her science work studying birds in the woods led to the first flowering of her creative career. “I’d made these songs to kinda scare away the bears, and I sang those.” Only in Olympia could a science student singing bear-scaring songs a cappella (occasionally flailing a ukulele) debut to sellout crowds at the International Pop Underground Convention at the Capitol Theater, and go on to perform with fellow underground visual artist/musician Kurt Cobain’s band.

“We danced onstage in Seattle and Portland.” As Nirvana won abrupt fame — “Oh my God, you’ve gone gold! Platinum! Titanium!” — Nirvana’s manager strove to replace McClure’s Riot Grrrl contingent with conventional Hollywood blowup-doll beauties. “John Silva did everything possible to not have us dance, but we thwarted his thwarting. We infiltrated.”

The importance of infiltration cannot be overstressed in explaining the mammoth artistic impact of teensy Olympia. Because absolutely nothing was going on there — “There was nothing on TV except Fox, so we watched The Simpsons, created by an Evergreen grad” — artsy types were forced to create their own culture in defiance of mainstream society. Inspired by her art-studio roommates, the Ace Detective Agency, who conducted citywide treasure hunts for treasures of their own invention, McClure recast herself as a graphic artist.

“I was like, well, I’ll just be wasting my time if I wait for someone to ask me.” She figured a calendar would give her a structure, twelve images on a theme: “Hunt and Gather,” things one could forage for oneself.

In December 1997, she xeroxed her papercut pages, bound them with ribbons, printed up a hundred and hawked them to gift shops and such. “It was like, ‘We don’t have room!’ Yes, you do. This will sell. Just give it a little space.” She had to print another hundred, then another. “And it was like, that’s it. It’s the middle of January, nobody wants a calendar anymore.” Yet as of this writing she sells seventeen thousand sixteen-dollar calendars a year worldwide.

The key to success was a businesslike pragmatism wedded to the local culture’s sky-high idealism. “When I first was starting to be an artist, I had to find or make money every day. It could be the dime somebody dropped when they put it into a parking meter, that counted. It could be fifty dollars to draw a duck for someone. As long as I found some money or made some every day, it would be OK.” Until it wasn’t. “Once in a while the red light would go off: one hundred left! What are you gonna do? I bought beans and tortillas and rice, went to my community garden plot, made burritos and sold them at Yoyo A Go Go, and I doubled my money. Now it’s not at that level at all. The calendar is really the thing that supports my family.”

McClure’s art career has entirely bypassed the conventional art world: no art school, no gallery, no First Thursday schmoozing of Prada-clad collectors. She admits that she sometimes wishes she’d gone the conventional route, and she’s about to head to Greg Kucera Gallery, one of Seattle’s most prestigious, to see the show of a childhood friend from Kirkland, Contemporary Northwest Art Award-winner Marie Watt, who makes towers of blankets in bronze, with feminist and political themes that echo McClure’s own. “I’m kind of starstruck by her. Her father was my soccer coach.”

But there’s something to be said for the DIY route, too. Word of McClure’s work has proliferated. “It’s spreading like spores. More symbiotic than a virus. The calendar is like my calling card. It’s sending my portfolio out into the world, and opportunities have come back to me through it. I’m doing work for Patagonia.” The enormous, eco-friendly clothing manufacturer buys designs and T-shirts from  McClure, opening up an audience bigger than any at First Thursday.

“Someone bought my calendar, had it up in their office, and someone said, ‘Why not ask her?’ And then because of that exposure, other things have happened. I’m doing work for The Progressive [a big national lefty magazine]. They said, ‘We saw your calendar in an Iraqi Veterans Against the War director’s office.’” You can hear McClure’s very Olympia-esque deference in her ’90s-generation voice: instead of making arrogant pronouncements like so many artists, McClure’s voice tends to rise, as if her statements were questions: “My work has kind of gone to these places that I really wouldn’t have thought of sending it to? Or even had the . . . gumption? To send it to?”

Will McClure have the gumption to mount an assault on the straight art world? Or should she? “Ah, I’m not ready to play that game. This is a different kind of way. It took a while to move from calling myself an illustrator to an artist. And it’s kind of another shift to turn it from less of a populist art stand to a gallery artist. There’s that world, versus art that’s made for kitchens. Yeah, I like kitchens. I mean, kitchens are really important. They’re where people are.” •