An Interview With Xavier Wynn and Edwige Massart: Main Street Mural Artists
Xavier Wynn and Edwige Massart are the creative duo and husband-wife team behind EMXW— a joint exploration of art and life reflected through shared experiences. They’re also two of the artists behind the Main Street Mural Project!
In this interview, they sshare more about their creative process and why they’re excited to be a part of the Main Street Mural. Keep reading to get to know them better and stop by Gallery 901 in March to see some of their work in person!
Thanks for chatting with us today! Can you start by telling us a little bit more about your creative background?
Xavier: Sure! We kind of go everywhere. I come from a marketing background and have done some digital work, but have also been doing art for a long time. I work with a lot of different mediums, most recently ceramics. There is something really nice about clay because it's constantly changing. It's almost alive. And it's also nice for me because being on digital, you can constantly rework something a million times. But with clay, it's a very malleable material, so you can always fix things as you're working with it, but it’s a limited time frame. So it forces me to get things done and then just accept it.
Edwige: I lived and worked in advertising for seven years in Paris. Then I wanted to explore new directions. I met someone who went to the School Superior of Painting Van Der Kelen in Belgium, which is a fabulous school for Decorative painting. They teach you the old master techniques and a few tricks. It was an amazing door that opened for me. After I finished the program I moved to the States and eventually Miami. I had jobs all over, and I worked for some celebrities like Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Versace. I really loved my job. It was really part of my identity for many years.
Can you share more about the work you’re currently showing at Open Studio?
A ceramic sculpture by Xavier Wynn.
Edwige: It will be two of the Heads from our collection – the collection has about 30 of them, so we will be showing the two main Heads. Xavier will show some of his ceramics, and I will show work from 2001 from when I lived in Miami. But I’ve never shown it before so I'm pretty excited. The goal is that the public can get a feel of who we are.
Xavier: Yes, Edwidge is showing pieces that she had done that were based on her decorative arts and fusing that into artwork. I'll be bringing some ceramic pieces there, as well as we'll have some heads. So, just like the mural, the whole show is a little bit of a combination of different aspects of life.
What prompted you to start making things together?
Edwige: I’m a collector, I’ve always been a collector. I collect, you know, stuff I find on the street, on the beach, in the desert, in the mountains, and all over the world where I have been.
Xavier: She collects beauty. So, a lot of the artwork we do is about finding the beauty in the everyday or in the ugly sometimes. And so Edwige had collected a lot of things, and I had been working in the digital world on a computer for so long that I wanted to do something that would get my hands out of the computer. We also wanted to do something together, so it was just a combination of different passions.
Edwige: Yes, we combine thousands of different things! We have drawers full of stuff so it was just time to use it. Otherwise, what’s the point of collecting, right?
How did you get connected with Open Studio to do the Main Street Mural?
Xavier: Hope went to the Art Institute, and my sister used to work there so we’ve known Hope as acquaintances for a long time. Then Edwige also has another connection through Rob – Rob used to work at Project Onward, and Edwige is an art facilitator for the developmentally disabled at Austin Special Chicago so she knows a bunch of the people that are a part of that community, and that’s how we got involved.
Xavier and Edwige’s work is showing at Gallery 901 March 7-31st. Stop by to see it in person!
How do you see your different creative backgrounds coming together for this mural project?
Edwige: We previously had a show at Open Studio to show our collection of Heads, which we make from found objects. Rob saw that and said, “that would be really cool to use their skill of using found objects in a mural,” and so it began!
Xavier: And from a thematic standpoint, it works really well considering the mural is all about bringing disparate parts together and different people working together. On our end, the idea is to make the mural tangible to the community and actually incorporate the community in whatever we can. It’s still in the conceptual phase, but we’re working on the part of the mural that the community will help create whether that’s through ceramic tiles or embedded objects.
When you talk about embedded objects, will you use objects that you already have, or do you plan to go around Evanston looking for more stuff?
Edwige: We’d like to find new objects and have people bring things in. Open Studio is going to have a few more workshops where they will ask people to bring stuff in.
Xavier: Yeah, that would be our ideal. It’s another thing that is a big learning curve for us – how do you actually get the things on the wall? We're on the discovery process for all of that, but that is the initial idea so we'll see how it plays out. And…whether the concept is story/word based, or symbol based, or actual objects in the wall, whatever way we can get the community participating and actually embedded into the wall is the goal.
You’ve described creating your Heads collection as being a conversation. How do you see that concept showing up in this project?
Xavier: The creative process is actually very interesting because some of the same creative process that we have with each other – which is just talking it out – is the same, because we are working the concept and the idea out not only between ourselves and Oscar, but also with the Open Studio team, and then the broader community.
Edwige: Yeah, it’s a conversation between many different elements.
Xavier: The mural process is a little bit similar to our Heads project because we sort of develop the Heads over time together. It's not like you just do it and done. It's a constant process that involves conversation between us and almost conversations between the heads…and in the same way, the mural is like that, but on a larger scale between artists. We have this larger general idea of what we want to communicate, and we all ask, “how do we communicate it?” They come in with this idea, we come in with that idea. And it's been really wonderful how it's all blended.
Have you ever done a mural project like this before?
Xavier: No, actually, that's why when they asked us, we said no at first! {laughs}. We said we needed somebody to collaborate with who has done this before and that’s when we decided to partner with Oscar.
Oscar was actually my sister’s student. I love how this all came together. My sister is a really amazing art teacher, and she was teaching high school art in South Bend where Oscar lived. He was one of her students, and she really influenced him and is the one who encouraged him to move here (to Chicago), so when they asked us to do the mural, we were like, “no, we can participate, but we've never done anything like that so we would need some help.
Edwige: I did murals, but not exterior murals. They were inside of people’s houses, and not at the scale that this mural will be.
Xavier: Yeah, Edwige is a decorative painter, so we were confident we could do it alongside someone else so that’s why we’re really excited to work with Oscar.
Is there anything else you're working on outside of the mural that you would be excited for people to know about?
Xavier: There's a really wonderful new gallery called 6311 Arts on Clark. Edwige is having a show there in May for her students. It’s another really wonderful gallery. They only feature artists within a six mile radius of their gallery so they're really great at trying to get the community involved. So that’s something we’ll start working on soon after the Open Studio show closes.
You can check out Xavier and Edwige’s work at Gallery 901 from March 7th-31st.
Then, get in on the action by signing up for one of our upcoming community mural workshops!