Middletown Fiber Artist Beads for Life

Once a photographer and now a fiber artist, Mary Ann Russo has always been creative, but her art was not as brilliantly colorful as it has been over the past decade.

For many years, she created traditional quilts and representational photographs, but a deepening need for self expression brought on by life and its challenges, as well as a maturing of her skills, turned her toward abstraction in everything that she does these days: photography, painting, and, most of all, fiber art wall hangings.

So the Middletown artist turned her dark room into a wet studio where she dyes fabric and creates her original silk screened art works.  It is also the place where she paints high toned canvases with acrylics.

Although her wet studio is in the basement, it is brightly lit with florescent type bulbs that actually create a natural light, as well as light blue walls and white cabinets. The room has a long stainless steel sink that her husband acquired when the company he worked for was throwing it away along with a long stainless steel table. That’s why she calls it her wet studio.

"Everything in this room is recycled and almost everything I make is made with recycled pieces," Russo said. She is proud of that because she is intuitively aware of the importance of the environment having spent her early years visiting relatives in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.

In addition, she knows from working with chemicals as a photographer that they can be very toxic, especially in the powder form. So to protect her lungs from the toxic dyes, or anything with fumes, she wears a respirator.

Russo knows that she is lucky to have an abundance of work space. "It’s wonderful to have a dedicated space to work in so that I don’t have to put things away," she said. "When I’m working on a piece, I’m down here six or seven hours a day for a couple of weeks. Once I get an idea, I go with it.”

A fiber artist for over 25 years, Russo uses a variety of surprising materials like snow, ice, and heat to achieve brilliant color, texture, and unique surface design on natural and synthetic textiles. "The fabric usually tells me what it wants to be," she said. 

When she has finished dying the fabric, she moves up to her dry studio, on the second floor of her center hall colonial, to begin the process of designing a finished piece. This is where she stores her fabrics and completed acrylic paintings. She also has her computer and a wide format printer. "This room is filled with things I love," she said.

On the wall in her dry studio, she has a design board, which is a felt-like fabric that other fabrics adhere to without pins. She hangs the silk screened piece on the board and begins "auditioning" embellishments like feathers, wool, beads, dryer sheets or even Dr. Scholl’s sole implants.

She will use just about anything that attracts her artistic eye. Sometimes, she is looking for embellishments that have a particular meaning, but other times it is just to enhance the design.

On her design board right now is a work in progress. It is a piece of felt that she made at a felt making class that she took at the Newark Museum. She calls it Sheep in the Woods because she is embellishing it with the wool that she used to make the felt background.  Hanging next to the felt piece are other items that she is auditioning. "I like a lot of embellishment," she said.

Russo’s said her head teams with ideas. In the beginning of her exploration of fiber arts, she worked on hand stitching traditional quilts, but she found it so slow that she switched to using a sewing machine. "I had too many ideas in my head and always wanted to finish and move on to the next idea," she said.

She learned to sew at her grandmother’s sewing machine when she was just 5 years old. The old treadle Singer sits in her living room — a constant reminder of the beginning of her passion for working with fabric; and a trigger for memories of her grandmother who taught her everything she knew and inspired the future fiber artist.

In fact, Russo has the first piece of embroidered fabric that she ever completed. It’s a landscape scene that she created when she was in fourth grade. "I used liquid embroidery because I was fascinated with the tubes of color," she said.

"The warm memory of Grandma and my first sewing lesson remains with me today, especially when I start a new sewing project,” Russo wrote in a short story about her grandmother and her sewing machine. 

Russo doesn’t make traditional quilts any longer, nor does she take traditional photographs or paint traditional scenes. She has moved on to abstraction and art based on her concern for the poor and disenfranchised, namely women and children who are struggling to make a subsistence living.  

She has created a number of vividly colorful wall hangings based on the lives of Ugandan women that she has come in contact with through an organization called Bead for Life. The wall hangings are made of cotton that has been hand dyed, silk screened, stamped and hand painted.

When the fabric is dry, it is machine pieced and quilted using bamboo batting and then it is embellished using the actual paper beads that the women make as well as feathers and walking sticks. To add additional dimension, the pieces are rubbed with an oil stick using a textured rubbing plate.

She explained how her connection to Ugandan women came about: "One evening a friend sent me a link to a website. I clicked to view a short video showing women in the slums of Kampala, Uganda. These women had been displaced from their villages by an 18-year-long civil war. Many of them were widowed, suffered from HIV, or had lost children to disease and malnutrition.

"Besides raising their own children, they found it in their hearts to take in orphaned children," Russo said. "To support themselves and their families, they made beautiful paper beads out of recycled paper. The only other means of support would have been to work in a rock quarry crushing rock by hand for one dollar a day. I was so moved by their stories that I was compelled to make art depicting theses poverty-stricken, yet resilient women."

Russo said she thought about what she could do to help them with her art. She had two bead parties and raised quite a bit of money selling the beaded jewelry. She doesn’t miss an opportunity to tell their story when she enters her wall hangings in shows or at craft fairs.

"It breaks my heart," she said. "They have such hard lives. I want to make people more aware of them. I feel particularly blessed to be able to pursue my art in this country and then to be able to help women and children in another country."

 Russo is supported in her endeavors by her husband Ken. They were childhood sweethearts in Jersey City and have been married for 42 years. During the early years of their marriage, they lived in Atlantic Highland with their two sons. When they outgrew the house there, they moved to Middletown, just off Kings Highway, where they still live.

Her husband is as skilled with wood as she is with fibers. "He’s a woodworker and can build anything," she said. "All I have to do is say that I would like to have this kind of table, or cabinet, or support for something and he figures out a way to construct it. He’s very supportive."

Russo has studied photography, art and fiber art at Pratt Institute, NY; Brookdale Community College; Peters Valley Crafts Center, NJ; The Santa Fe Photography Workshops, NM; MARS Professional Photography School in Cape May, NJ; Newark Museum Arts Workshops and many other workshops and classes.

Her artwork has been displayed in the Monmouth Festival of the Arts, Monmouth Museum, Art Society of Monmouth County, The Art Alliance, The Guild of Creative Art, Snug Harbor in Staten Island, the Monmouth Beach Cultural Center, Poricy Park in Middletown, Monmouth University , The Middletown Library and national quilt shows. 

She is a member of NAPP, The Surface Design Association, Textile Study Group of NY, Shore Fiber arts Guild, The Art Alliance, Art Society of Monmouth County, Monmouth Museum, Newark Museum and The Guild of Creative Art.

Like her grandmother, who passed her techniques on to her granddaughter, Russo hopes to pass her passion for textile design down to her granddaughter who is seven years old and has already taken an interest in what her grandmother creates.

As far as Russo is concerned, it is never too early to learn. In fact, Russo made her first embroidered design and cloth at the ripe old age of nine. She still has the piece of cotton fabric. Along with her grandmother’s treadle sewing machine, they remind her of to be grateful for her grandmother and the wonderful, creative gift that she passed down.