Artist Amy Lummus’ New Series Explores the Martyrdom of the American Woman

Amy Lummus, like many artists, knew that she was meant to create from a young age. There was no other option, and by the time she hit high school, she was already taking commissions and doing henna body art at festivals on the side.

“I didn’t, you know, need a summer job or whatever. I was already making money with my art. Which I think is largely due to the fact that I had a really stellar support system,” Lummus says.

However, from high school through college, Lummus notes that she never connected to art education. After some less-than-ideal experiences with a teacher in middle school, she avoided art classes in high school, and even her art school, higher-education experience didn’t reflect how she sees life as a working artist.

Rather, Lummus says that she had to learn a lot of the know-how in the biz on her own, and it goes beyond just technical art skills they harp on in school. She says that being an artist comes with a triple-facet approach: being good at business, being authentic to your soul, and being able to address what’s happening in the world.

“At the end of the day, you have to understand that you are a product, and as much as you want to be true to the soul, it’s a very fine line,” Lummus says. “It has to reflect something authentic within your soul and also has to do something societally. So that, I think, makes it a very unique business, but it is, at the end of the day, business.”

Lummus specializes in portraits, pointing to her fascination with the human figure and understanding “this house that we think inside,” the intricacies within the body, going down to the molecular level, and even those things we still don’t fully know about or can’t comprehend, in regard to our bodies and biology.

Lummus grappled with strife in her personal life before the pandemic hit, as her partner of 11 years left her with three small kids, a mortgage, and an artist’s salary. She began working on the project “Bend the Iron,” the “train speak” term working as a metaphor for what was happening in her life.

“You get stuck in ‘trains of thought,’ and ‘bend the iron’ is super cool, old-school train speak for shifting the train tracks,” Lummus says. “Someone who’s dealing with this loss and this desperation and all of that—This is what I was working through.”

She says  that it was very heavy work, but some of her most noteworthy. However, as coronavirus hit the masses, she saw that folks coming through the doors to see her work were mourning enough, in addition to taking in the subject matter behind “Bend the Iron.”

Lummus took on a new solo show, with one condition: It had to be a little upbeat, not too sad. So Lummus had to figure out how to best balance, once more, that triad of principles she holds true to her craft: creating something that people want to see, that speaks to society today, but that won’t threaten her own artistic integrity.

“You know, I think the pandemic has taught me how to be a more efficient entrepreneur, and also with an eye on how I want my art to feel to the masses. I think you have to have empathy for the masses.”

She turned back to what she knew: portraiture and the recent experience with her ex-partner, broadening the scope to focus on women in society today and the issues they face.

“After my experience being in court, going through a fair bit of domestic violence, and then at the end having nothing to show for it, not even a home over our heads, it was like, ‘I have to say something about this,’” Lummus says.

And her new project, “Mettle Martyr,” was born. “Mettle” comes with a trifecta of meaning: “metal,” the substance; “meddle,” to fiddle with or mess something up; and “mettle,” what a person is made of (and, ultimately, the spelling Lummus went with). “Martyr” relates to the idea that women tend to want to self-sabotage, adopting the views of the oppressors in order to alleviate oppression.

“I think as women, the ‘good American woman’ is a martyr, and that’s interesting, because the good American man isn’t,” she says. “It tends to fall within women, especially being a mother and also being a working artist and making that work.”

The series plays with “cute” images of women—sometimes deconstructed, cut apart, meshed with images like skulls—and rather than pairing them with traditional titles, Lummus relays a statistic about women in society. She wants to challenge folks to think about these realities, though she’ll also pair the images with a matching jest to lighten the mood.

“For instance, there’s a girl next to her car, and she’s got her little suitcase, and the fact is about how a lot of women are made homeless by domestic violence. But then the joke is, ‘Of course, I have emotional baggage, but it’s cute and it matches.’ So you’re still being informed, and you’re still being faced with these truths that are obviously not cute and pleasant, but it’s not in a way that’s necessarily assaulting.”

Lummus also says that the reality for women in today’s world ripples into the art space itself, women artists often fighting for representation in the Denver art community and beyond. She notes that the majority of people getting fine arts degrees are women, though this is not seen when pieces are curated for shows. She notes her transition to using “A.L. Lummus” instead of her full first name, seeing a nearly 70 percent increase in acceptance into competitive art shows after the shift.

“I think that women do have a strong voice,” Lummus says, citing inclusive groups like Babe Walls who work with women muralists, though that’s just one group, one niche. She says lack of accessibility for resources and grants for women is a primary issue in the conversation, alongside women artists claiming the space that is theirs to have.

Speaking specifically to up-and-coming artists, she harps on the same trifecta of principles and pushes women artists especially to recognize they can prioritize making “beautiful” art, though it might be the time to dream bigger.

“I want to make something that will galvanize the spirit of someone who didn’t know that their small voice was heard,” Lummus says. “We’re looking at martyrdom, and we get in our own way. Even though the quilt is pretty, it might not be able to be a pretty quilt anymore. You might have to make the battle quilt. It might the time; this might be the space; this might be your moment to say it can exist.”

Mettle Martyr runs at the Bitfactory Gallery, located at 851 Santa Fe Dr. in Denver, from March 19 through April 8.

For more from Amy Lummus, find her on Instagram @ALummusArt, on her official website amyleelummus.com, and her henna and body art site ,beautifulbodiesbyamy.co

Photo Credit Margaret Koning