Today we’d like to introduce you to Micalah Locke
Hi Micalah, we’re thrilled to have a chance to learn your story today. So, before we get into specifics, maybe you can briefly walk us through how you got to where you are today?
For my entire life, I have been involved in the arts. My earliest exposure to visual arts was my grandfather, John Locke III. He was an artist and a professor for 29 years. Although I am a practicing visual artist now, my first love of the arts wasn’t visual art; it was dance. I started lessons around age eleven and eventually transitioned into performing in my high school color guard. I even wanted to pursue a career in dance at one point, but despite still performing, I drifted away from the idea of making it my career. About two years after my grandfather’s passing, when I was about seventeen, I started to take an interest in visual art again and enrolled in drawing and painting in school. I eventually applied and was accepted into the Studio art program at the University of South Carolina Beaufort
At the start of art school, I had the goal of focusing in animation and had an ambitious goal of one day being an animator for Pixar. The plan came to a crashing halt when I took my first prerequisite media class in my sophomore year. I was beyond excited when we got to the part of the course that covered animation. I quickly discovered animation was not for me.
In light of my discovery of what I no longer wanted to do, I needed to find a filler class in my schedule. I picked printmaking out of curiosity. We had dabbled in some print techniques in a drawing class, and I wanted to know more. I fell in love with the process and it has been my primary choice of medium for almost a decade.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
Upon graduating from the University of South Carolina Beaufort in 2018, I was on top of the world. I had won a couple of academic awards and had glowing reviews and commentary on my work from my professors, telling me they thought my work was at the graduate school level. I thought I had it all, and I was full of it. I was expecting opportunities to fall into my lap. After a handful of gallery and graduate school application rejections, I was feeling defeated until the spring of 2021 when I saw that Frothy Beard Brewery was doing a vendor market. I rushed to email them about a spot, but unfortunately, I missed the deadline. But they told me they would be happy to have me at the following month’s market. I remember prepping like crazy and also remembering I only made $20 that day, but that market was a spark. That spark led to more markets, and I started to feel like a professional artist. I was making money off my art and even had a small number of patrons. People who were excited to see me at markets around Charleston, showing me pictures of gallery walls in their homes that featured my art, and that they were excited to buy more. After a while, markets became slow for me. I was making less or not even making my vendor fee back. I would brainstorm piece ideas that I thought everyone would love and would sell quickly. All of a sudden, it wasn’t about making art and sharing it with the world, it was the profit. I think just making art that I wanted to make and not sell was hard for me for a while, and it was a challenge to overcome to make what I wanted and to accept the mentality that the right audience would find my work and appreciate it. I have done less markets in the past two years but I am not letting my art be inspired by what sells.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
The printmaking techniques I primarily specialize in are linocut, silkscreen, and intaglio. My current portfolio primarily consists of abstracted portraiture and the female body, and most of them are interpretations of stories. Some of these are my own, and some of them are from women in my life who felt compelled to share their stories with me I prefer a more analytical approach to my art rather than a literal interpretation. For me, it’s almost like story building, Whether it is the subject matter or the title that catches the viewer’s attention, I want that viewer to stop and take more than a glance. I want them to stop and think and explore the piece and put together the story.
Do you have any advice for those looking to network or find a mentor?
I was fortunate enough to attend art school, and that’s how I found a mentor. My mentor, Joanna Angell, was one of my professors at USCB. When we first met I was under the impression that she did not like me but after working with her more I realized we were very likeminded and sometimes likeminded people buttheads at first. She was an asset in my academic career, always pushing me to do my best and challenging me to take different approaches to my practice. Fun fact during my time at USCB, we had a limited quantity of professors teaching in the studio art department class and I took every single class Joanna taught except for advanced ceramics due to scheduling conflicts.
My thoughts on finding a mentor today in 2025 are a little conflicted. Not every artist has plans to go to school, partly due to the rising financial cost or because they may not deem it necessary. I grew up in what I like to call an in-between technology phase. The internet was still in its early days in my younger years of childhood, and by the time my teenage years hit, the internet was a huge hub of information, and social media had begun to rise. Inspiring artists have a plethora of resources to educate them on art and be self-taught, which I think is amazing but in my personal opinion, it can only go so far.
So my suggestion is to find community in the arts, and within that community, you can find a mentor. Art school, for me, was my community, and that’s how I found a mentor. I wasn’t only receiving guidance and feedback from my mentor, but I was also receiving it from my peers inside and outside of class.
It is a wonderful thing to have a community and meet with people to discuss and practice art, but I am aware that isn’t the case for all, and I will say the one good thing about this age of social media is that it can give people the opportunity to connect with people all over the world to create their arts community.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://micalahlocke.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/micalahlockeart/?hl=en
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/micalahlockeart
