Mychaelyn Michalec is a textile artist and painter working in Dayton, OH. Her work depicts the private, awkward, and mundane moments of family life through a medium traditionally associated with domesticity and craft. The work explores women at midlife and the effects of motherhood and time on self-identity, the body, sexuality, and family relationships.

By using an industrial tufting gun as well as hand-tufting, Mychaelyn optimizes texture, color and line, while recognizing the impact of both manual labor and technology on her work. The idea of modern technology as a disruptor also surfaces among her subjects where compositions show family members distracted by their electronic devices and seemingly disconnected from one another. Her work touches on how personal and artistic relationships are mediated through technology. More poetically, the work is about what we choose to focus on an how those choices shape our lives.

Mychaelyn earned a BFA with distinction in Painting and Drawing and a BA in Art History from The Ohio State University and a MLIS in Library and Information Science from the University of Southern Mississippi. She has shown her work internationally and has been awarded residencies at The Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, the Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts in New Berlin, NY, and The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, in Nebraska City, NE. Mychaelynis a 2021 recipient of an Individual Excellence Award in Craft from the Ohio Arts Council and exhibited at The Contemporary Dayton in a show called From a Basement on a Hill. Her work has been published in Friend of the Artist, Create! Magazine, and Art Maze. A review of her two person show, Femme Maison at Houseguest Gallery in Louisville, KY, was featured on NPR’s All Things Considered.

Mychaelyn Michalec

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