In Memoriam: Louise Heublein McCagg

We hold this space in the memory and honor of Louise Heublein McCagg—artist, feminist, mother, and dear member of the A.I.R. community.

Louise led a long, enriching life driven by her deep love of life itself. Born in 1936 in Hartford, Connecticut, Louise’s interests in the arts led her to New York City to attend Barnard College, where she graduated from in 1959 with a B.A. in English Literature while studying printing and painting at the Art Students League in New York. It was at this time that she met and married her husband, William Ogden McCagg, Jr.

The McCaggs then relocated to East Lansing, Michigan, where Bill began his tenured position at Michigan State University as a professor of East European history and where Louise earned her M.F.A. in Sculpture in 1971 while raising their daughters. For the first decade or so after receiving her M.F.A., Louise built a geodesic dome to serve as her studio and was an active participant in the East Lansing arts community. Bill’s work at the university took the McCaggs across Eastern Europe, namely Budapest, over the course of several stints and sabbaticals. It was here that Louise also found community and developed lifelong friendships with Hungarian and Eastern European intellectuals and experimental artists, to the point that she helped some relocate to the United States. The importance of these friendships and collaborations endured throughout her life and culminated in Louise representing the Hungarian Pavilion at the 2009 Venice Biennale.

The McCaggs returned from Europe to New York City in the mid-1980s. It was at this time that Louise first came to A.I.R. Throughout her life, Louise supported several causes in the Civil Rights movement through her artistic works and progressive spirit. As she said herself, “As an artist of a generation that saw feminist art proliferate, my work is classical in method and contemporary in its political and social inquiry.” Not one to shy away from challenges, Louise confronted difficult materials and techniques with a consistent, dedicated exploration founded in her compassion. She blended her personal experiences and relationships with a controlled, rigid, figurative sculptural style. Throughout her life she created casts of faces of those close to her and transformed them into scalable works and books, developing a visual language that  is intimate, corporeal, and points to not only the autobiographical but to the universal.

In the 1980s, she cast small-sized, aluminum sculptures that were used by Louise as a site of experimentation through which she could explore movements and positions of the body. During the 1990s, Louise developed a unique technique to cast sculptures on paper that gradually reduced the size of the original figure but maintained all its recognizable features. The particularity of her method resides in generating a figure that is both alien to us, and so rooted in humanity that it brings out the commonality between diverse cultures—the body.

In addition to sculpture, Louise developed several series of drawings. One was composed of studies drawn prior to the execution of sculptures—full of color and detail—in order to analyze future volumes. Louise also developed a more personal series of drawings from the later years of her life that express her feelings of disorientation and uncertainty, the consequence of Parkinson’s disease, and reinforce the sense of cultural disorientation that spans throughout her creations.

In her art book Altered States (2004), Louise includes the inscription, “Adversity introduces us to ourselves.” Despite her struggle with Parkinson’s, Louise continued to work in her studio almost every day. Her creative inertia, unwavering spirit, and refusal to stop working is a testament to her adoration of life, inspiring her life’s oeuvre and touching the lives of many.

To donate to A.I.R.’s fund in Louise’s memory, please click here.