Carving Connections
By Alyssa Schmitt
When Maggie Denk-Leigh approaches a project, she comes armed with curiosity. The 50-year-old printmaker and Cleveland Institute of Art professor delves in by asking questions and finding meaning both within herself and how it relates to the greater world.
Just as she would cut away layers in a relief carving to discover the image, she contemplates topics and questions until she peels away the message she wishes to impart to the viewer.
“You are visually articulating things that you have seen or want to see so that others can try to understand them better, and help them articulate what they are feeling or seeing in the world,” she says. “That’s the role of the artist.”
In this way, she’s able to bring subjects such as intimate acts of violence, environmental impact and veterans’ stories to the attention of those experiencing her art. Her work can be seen in the collection of the Heights Arts gallery in Cleveland Heights. She’ll also be in the 2024 Faculty Exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art, opening Aug. 29, and in a group show at the Fawick Art Gallery at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, opening Oct. 14.
Denk-Leigh will also participate in a panel discussion at Bowling Green State University on Veterans Day on Nov. 11, as part of the Experiencing Veterans and Artists Collaborations project, in which she has two works displayed. The project pairs artists with veterans’ experiences to tell their stories.
“Print has this really strong connection (to) awareness,” she says. “It’s kind of like having a voice that is sometimes loud, sometimes poetic, sometimes narrative, sometimes text.”
When finishing her master’s degree in fine arts at Clemson University in South Carolina, Denk-Leigh posed a prompt to herself as guidance.
“If I’m going to go be an artist and make work, what is meaningful to say?” she asked herself.
She first practiced it when determining what she would research for her MFA thesis. She focused on intimate acts of violence and how we understand violence in our culture. She had access to a vast amount of research at Clemson and dove into the work for about eight to 10 years after her thesis, she says.
Looking back on that work, she says it is not just that one’s voice needs to be heard, but the work needs to be in front of someone who can do something about it.
“It’s one thing to be the voice for somebody else. It’s another thing to tell somebody else or show somebody else that they need to be the voice for that person,” she explains. “So, it’s like you’re making that bridge for somebody else.”
In her more recent work, she’s focused on Alzheimer’s disease, explored in prints, drawings and pulp sculptures. The theme stemmed from her mother’s struggle with the disease since 2016, and often comes out in botanical images.
“I am trying to understand it’s not the disease – it’s how we function as people, as a society caring for those that have those challenges,” she says.
Denk-Leigh is also focusing on carvings surrounding the U.S. Capitol Grounds in Washington, D.C., which she says is not something she views as politically based but rather conscious-based work. She’s looking at how society thinks about leadership or law, and the artwork itself is created in a process called white line woodcut.
Starting out
Denk-Leigh was born and raised in Parma. Like many young artists, she was introduced to printmaking through relief carving. In this technique, a blank slate is carved away to reveal the image.
She noticed how each stroke needed to be considered as she carved away layer upon layer to discover the final image. If she were to carve too deep, the image would be forever changed, showing the need to build a philosophy of acceptance. When a mistake is made, you move forward with the process, she explains.
“It taught me a lot about accepting materials and process, and kind of seeing what you want to see in the work,” Denk-Leigh says.
Entering college at Xavier University in Cincinnati, she studied business and marketing graphic design, but found herself more drawn to the print and design classes and less so to the business side.
By her senior year, she was deep in printmaking. Due to the small print department having only one printer, she planned to work on intaglio printmaking the first semester and lithography the second, when they switched the printer over. However, her instructor was going on leave and wasn’t going to change the printer, so Denk-Leigh immersed herself in lithography that year.
“I just kind of fell in love with it,” she says. “It was just a very big, curious puzzle to me that I hadn’t had before. So, I spent my entire senior year making lithography.”
It’s a process she continues to this day. She also notes that if she didn’t have a studio like the one at the CIA – where she is an associate professor and chair of the printmaking department – she would not be able to continue working in lithography. The process itself has allowed her to create pictorial images that are more illustrative and narrative, which is the way she wants to communicate, she adds.
Teaching curiosity
Teaching was not in the original plan Denk-Leigh had after college. She had an endless list of teachers in her family, including her father, and she wanted to go in a different direction.
However, coaching a girls soccer team in Indiana while working in marketing at the industrial company Hillenbrand, she realized she enjoyed teaching. She searched for a graduate program where she could pursue it and landed at Clemson, earning her master’s in printmaking.
When it comes to higher education, Denk-Leigh believes there’s a crisis. She questions whether students generally want to continue to grow and learn, or rather pursue education because it’s expected of them. And, how can professors and school leaders help them? To her, the answer is simple: It’s about helping students become thoughtful members of society, she says.
That’s why in her teachings at CIA, she encourages her students to be curious about what they want to learn and see.
“My dad’s idea was that if you have the capacity to lead and lead others to do that, then you should,” she says.
Her younger students have a hunger to learn, she says. She breaks down her approach into four questions: How do we learn the thing? How do we introduce the thing? How do we work safely in this shop? And, how do we work as a community together?
She notes that if she were teaching anywhere else, the courses might be a little bit more prescribed.
“We’re really lucky here to have students who are genuinely interested in image making,” she says. “I just plow into it because I can bank on the notion they’re going to come with me because they’re already there.”
For her junior level or intermediate students, she evolves the questions to: Why do we do it this way? How can we do it differently? And, how can we incorporate new things?
Sarah Kabot, a CIA professor of visual arts, admires how Denk-Leigh’s teachings combine the technical and the conceptual.
“She brings a kind of care to her teaching that involves technical expertise – teaching the students how to use all the materials and equipment that are in front of them – that is paired in such a sophisticated way with her thoughtfulness around their conceptual development,” Kabot says.
Creativity works
While at Xavier, Denk-Leigh was responsible for securing her own internship. She was told to keep asking until she was told yes. Through this process, she was able to intern in Cincinnati’s recreation department, which led to a full-time job. And due to connections there, she secured the marketing position at Hillenbrand.
Teaching at CIA, she noticed a lack of opportunities for her students. Thus, Denk-Leigh shepherded in a program called Creativity Works, which is going on its 10th year and has had more than 100 students involved.
The program is open for visual arts and craft and design students in their junior years to explore how their creative pursuits can be applied in the real world. They come up with a project, make a proposal to receive funding and then “they have to make it happen,” Denk-Leigh says.
The students have partnered with outside institutions such as Hospice of the Western Reserve in Cleveland, Neighborhood Pets in Cleveland and the LGBT Community Center of Greater Cleveland. The projects have been exhibits, classes, art donations or installations.
The program’s structure allows students to connect with corporations and organizations in the community, showing them that there are ways to work as artists.
Kabot says Creativity Works demonstrates Denk-Leigh’s “big picture thinking, and also an understanding of how that big picture structure would ultimately filter out and impact all of these different communities, and encourages students to understand that their work has relevance in various ways –
in traditional art ways through museums and galleries, but also in maybe less traditional ways through various kinds of community engagement.”
Building community
What’s so clear to Denk-Leigh about printmaking is that it’s about community. Even though a printmaker may be alone in the print shop when they’re creating work, they are not far from their peers.
“(Because you’re in a shared studio), you might not be in here at the same time, but you’re using the same equipment,” she says. “You have to care for the shop. That’s just a community aspect of print that has informed my work for a very long time.”
Denk-Leigh, who now lives in Independence, has been a driving force in making Cleveland a hub for the printmaking community. She’s shown that by bringing conferences to the area and linking her students with the outside printmaking community.
She’s also shown this through her work with the Morgan Conservatory in Cleveland. The conservatory is the largest arts center in the United States focused on papermaking, book and letterpress arts. It also helps cultivate new artists and is open to the community.
The conservatory was founded in 2008, and Denk-Leigh was a founding board member. She currently serves as board president.
“I’ve been able to see this business model grow of like what it means to have artists come in, make the thing and have a community engage in that,” she explains.
She’s very much involved in the organization and considers how to make old technology new and reinvigorate it. Part of the answer is continuing to teach it, she says.
“To me, when somebody asks me, how is growing plants and making handmade paper going to make it?” she says. “We are living in a world where less and less of that is available to an artist (and students). … To me, it’s a really easy answer: teaching handmade papermaking and teaching how to set type and teaching how to run presses. It just seemed obvious.”
Upcoming
• Denk-Leigh will have work on view in the Cleveland Institute of Art’s 2024 Faculty Exhibition. An opening reception is from 6-8 p.m. Aug. 29 in Reinberger Gallery, 11610 Euclid Ave., Cleveland. On view through Oct. 6. For more information, visit cia.edu.
• She will also be featured in the curated group exhibit “From Woodblock to Ink Jet” at the Fawick Art Gallery at Baldwin Wallace University, 95 E. Bagley Road, Berea, from Oct. 14 to Nov. 1. For more information, visit bw.edu.
