Art in small spaces

San Marcos assemblage artist Joan Nagel creates big worlds in tiny spaces. Her miniature rooms look like small stages, each intricately-detailed, inviting the viewer to get close, to examine each item, and to be part of the story.

Assemblage is a type of 3-D mixed media style of art that involves organizing and composing a group of mismatched, recycled, often discarded objects into a whole and unified space. In this way, Nagel tells stories by bringing pieces and fragments together to give them a new home and meaning.

For Nagel, the impulse to create goes all the way back to her childhood, when she would build homes and dioramas for her dolls out of boxes, fabric scraps and random household objects. As she grew up, she realized each piece, or room, told a story, one that grew more complex with each found item she added.

Miss Kitty and Her Three Little Kittens

“I look for unusual objects that speak to me,” Nagel said. “I might find an antique doll or something, and then I find another object that relates to it in some way, so it’s like a story unfolds.”

Nagel finds objects for her assemblage in a variety of places, including estate sales and places like Wimberley Market Days. Some of the pieces, however, find their way to her.

Like her piece, Madame Clare, which was constructed from an old telephone shelf, an antique doll a friend found in a Paris flea market, and various odds and ends she had stored in her garage.

A Room of My Own

“People give me stuff because they know the kind of work I do,” she said. “I’m kind of always looking for stuff. I also look at little things that can be made into other things. I’m always looking at how you can turn objects into other things.”

Nagel goes more in depth to her process on her website, talkingobjects.art, a domain she shares with her husband, Tracy Weinberg, a fellow assemblage and collage artist. She chose the name talkingobjects because of the way the found items iseem to speak to her, to entice her – and her audience – into the story the work hopes to tell.

With this love for creativity and storytelling, perhaps it’s not surprising that Nagel utitized her artistic skills as an educator. For a decade, Nagel taught as an art teacher for three San Marcos elementary schools. Before that, she spent another 10 years as a literature teacher. After retiring, Nagel and two fellow teacher/artist friends ran summer art camps for students from kindergarten through fifth grade. She and her husband also conduct cross-curricular teacher workshops in order to help educators incorporate art and creativity in their lesson plans.

“We were able to have a room full of teachers, doing some of the projects that we did with the kids,” Nagel said. “We covered science, math, social studies and literature, showing how you can tie some of those things into the classroom.”

During her teaching career, Nagel said that oftentimes she felt students taught her more than she taught them by reminding her to be playful and experimental in her approach to creativity, to embrace the existence of happy accidents rather than focusing on perceived mistakes.

“One of my favorite grades to teach was second grade,” Nagel said. “I admired those kids because they had the guts to just try anything. They would just go for it. They had more courage than some older people might. The kids would quote me and say, ‘there are no mistakes. Everything you do is going to be okay. You can turn a mistake into a strength.”

Nagel explained that as her students grew up, they became more intimidated and judgemental of their abilities. Because of this, Nagel believes passionately about the importance of the arts in education as a way to foster critical thinking and problem solving, as well as boosting self-esteem and communication through creativity and play.

“Play, play, play,” Nagel said, fervently. “You’ve got to let kids play. My hope is that all schools have art, and that it starts with kindergarten.”

Beyond her dedication to the arts in the classroom, Nagel also participates in sharing art with the community. As the Arts Committee Chair for the Price Center, Nagel is responsible for curating and hanging artist submissions for gallery shows. In March, right before the quarantine, the Price Center hosted an exhibit for International Women’s Day. Over 70 artists – Nagel included – submitted pieces for display.

“The women’s show was mind-blowing,” Nagel said. “It was exhilarating.”

During the shut down, Price Center volunteers took the opportunity to renovate the gallery space, opening up more opportunities for local artists to show their work, as well as giving the public a venue for seeing new art.

“People are getting exposed to art,” Nagel said. “I think the Price Center has just really taken off. It looks so good. It’s really exciting when new people come in.”

A Room Full of Buddhas. Photos submitted by Joan Nagel

Currently, several of Nagel’s pieces can be seen in the Price Center’s assemblage exhibit, “Old Things, New Meanings,” a five-person pop-up show that will run through the end of the month. Other pieces are Nagel’s works are on display and for sale in The Walker’s Gallery at the San Marcos Activity Center, as well as at the San Marcos Art Center, located on The Square.