Marsha McDonald

Virtual Exhibit

2021-2022 ARTservancy, Artist in Residence

Not all artists create for the sake

of the end product.

For some artists the experience is the art.

This is true for Marsha McDonald who creates through site specific intuitive exploration..

Her yearlong virtual exhibit features

daily poetry and photography meditations

inspired by experiencing nature.

Milwaukee River Greenway -

River Revitalization Foundation

Image borrowed with permission from A Wealth of Nature blog by Eddee Daniels about Marsha McDonald Click here to visit the blog.

Marsha Mcdonald's Story

As an artist and educator (with part of the year abroad teaching EFL—English as a Foreign Language), I have been able to walk and live among a variety of urban environments. I have been keenly aware of the edges and influences of nature found in or near, coexisting with, urban places. The Milwaukee Greenway has provided city residents—as well as animals and plants—with a corridor that sustains our well-being. I am creating visual and written work, documented through a blog, that honors those connections. I hope to create a chapbook and exhibit images. I’m also planning an event for late summer 2021 with the River Revitalization Foundation, which is celebrating the 15th anniversary of the establishment of the Greenway.

Artist StatEment

For decades, I’ve undertaken site-specific “intuitive exploration” of landscapes, and things in landscapes, that I have lived in or traveled to. Water is physically or metaphorically present throughout my practice. Intentionally meditative, I record relationships - human, (pre)historic, poetic - that exist or have existed between people, objects, plants, animals, and real or imagined places. I use text, printing, paint, ink, paper, metal, collected stones and glass, photography, and video. I translate my experiences into interrelated image/ object series, using spiritually significant numbers (1000, 108, 99, 36, 39, 24, 12, 7, 8, 4, 3, 2, 1, 687, 28, 13).