Shelley Mouber is a Fayetteville, Arkansas artist who creates imaginative and wonderfully bright collage and mixed medium art work. Her studio is in Creative Spaces at Mount Sequoyah Center and she has curated several show at Mount Sequoyah Gallery. More of Shelley’s work can be found at her Instagram.

AAS: Shelley, did you grow up in Arkansas?

SM: I was born in San Francisco, moved to San Diego when I was 10. My senior year of high school I moved to Rogers, Arkansas but left again after high school. I returned to Arkansas in 1991 to attend The University of Arkansas. I have a degree in Sociology (1996) with a special focus on Extremists Behavior. My education has helped my social media career in watching behavioral patterns. After that I lived for years in Crested Butte, Breckenridge and Vail, Colorado in the late 90’s and returned to Fayetteville in 2004.

AAS: Were you exposed to art and artists growing up?

SM: My uncle was a renowned sculptor and installation artist. He took me to galleries and shows in the 70’s and early 80’s. It was QUITE the experience as a young child. As a teenager I spent a lot of time in his studio, and he taught me about using objects that were found around every day. He talked to me a lot about perspective and style, and I honestly didn’t understand much of what he told me until I was an actively working artist. He was a wonderful sounding board at the beginning of my career, a critical eye that pointed out things he was observing about my style. He unfortunately passed away quite tragically. He was installing work on the roof of a department store and fell off the roof. It was during the pandemic so it was devastating as I could not travel to Palm Springs to get his estate in order until months later. I will never forget his voice telling me I was an artist, and I disagreed. He was insistent that I accept that I was. Our family wasn’t accepting of art as a career, so it took me until I was in my mid 40’s to truly believe I was, in fact, an artist. I have some of his work in my studio, but his bigger pieces are on loan to museums in Northern California.

AAS: You use a lot of repurposed materials in your work. Is that because of your uncle?

SM: I guess I had the idea in the back of my mind everything my uncle had taught me about found objects. I began my career as an oil painter but after a divorce I was no longer able to afford materials. I had played around with collage, papier mâché and assemblage in the past and produced a few quality pieces. When my mom became ill, I was her caretaker, and I was spending a lot of time in medical facilities and acquired many magazines. I started creating images from the colors and textures I found while going through hundreds of magazines. I started sharing these creations on social media and to my surprise I was selling everything I made. My career was kicked into gear when I had my first solo show at Local Color Studio Gallery in Fayetteville. I sold everything but one piece!! The owner advised me that the smaller pieces went like hotcakes, so I pretty much stuck to 12” x 12” for a few years. When I started doing more commissions, I turned my focus to the larger pieces, and even a few commissions that were out of the box such as a bike helmet I carved and painted a few years ago. I also use repurposed materials now because I see so much that’s wasted. Paper, wrappers, labels and vintage cards etc. are my favorites to use.

AAS: One of your most recognizable works is Universal Collection. What inspired that piece?

SM: My most popular design is of a line of people. The people in my creative vision are ALL types of people. I try to be inclusive and expressive to show that diversity and inclusivity are absolutely necessary. Body positivity, LGBTQIA+, Equality and Diversity are my main subjects.
The original piece was commissioned by Interform Art’s Biennial in June of 2023. In July of 2023 I submitted the scan to a request for proposals by the City of Rogers and it was chosen for an installation in a new park in downtown Rogers. It was printed on aluminum composite material and then wrapped around a shipping container. It was absolutely amazing to see characters I made that were 18” high originally become 7’ tall! My favorite character is the teenage boy in a hoodie. I made him out of Laffy Taffy wrappers, and I think he’s so adorable. It will be on display until 2027 at 104 S. First Street in downtown Rogers, Arkansas.

AAS: One Way or Another is a marvelous use of materials and color. I may be reading too much into it, but I see a conflict of wanting to appear glamorous (the right side) while inside feeling more natural (left side). What are you wanting to say in this piece?

SM: This piece is really about the awkwardness of feeling 80 million things at once and how you appear to others. Are you this or that, or this? It doesn’t matter how one appears to another because one way or another we have to get through this life with all of our parts – seen and unseen and accept that.

AAS: You have described your process as a form of meditation. What do you mean by that?

SM: A form of meditation is what I have referred to as my painting process. I taught myself to deal with issues stemming from PTSD by repetitive patterns. It worked so well and with my first career in social work, I started teaching classes on emotional processing and it’s been really fun to see others benefit from something I feel so strongly about. Mental Health Awareness is crucial in our society. It has got to become destigmatized if we are going to get the spotlight on seeking help, normalizing therapy, and utilizing psychiatry.

AAS: Eye See Three is such a fun piece. The eyes and swirls and again your use of color make this a delightful piece.

SM: One of my absolute favorite pieces! I had just learned how to wool felt a few months before by my studio neighbor the legendary Donna Mulhollan. The painting was post-relationship break up and it was extremely cathartic to do the spirals over and over. As I said earlier it is soothing and helps me process feelings with the repetitive patterns. I am obsessed with eyeballs and spirals so I felted the eyeballs and made it so each eye is looking in a different direction. This piece was selected for a group exhibition with the Laguna Art Gallery in Laguna Beach, California in 2023.

AAS: You’ve done some fun portraits and Audrey and Bob (one love) Marley are two I really love. Tell me about them.

SM: Audrey was my first piece of a series I call the “Golden Collection”. Bob (one love) Marley, Ziggy Stardust, Dolly Parton and Jerry Garcia are the others. My next one will be Johnny Cash because it’s been requested by so many of my followers. I refer to it as the “Golden Collection” for a couple of reasons. They are all portraits of individuals who are iconic, they have something about them that makes them golden; the musicians are all gold record selling artists and Audrey is obviously just golden in a lot of cinematic hearts. The last thing is they have all sold in remarkable ways. For example, Dolly was purchased by a previous collector but when I tried to arrange shipping the collector said “No, I love your work and wanted to support your ability to continue to create. Please keep and sell it again.” I was so pleasantly surprised! When I make these portraits, I post the photo on social media that I am going to use as inspiration to create the portrait. My next project was Bob Marley. It was so exciting for me and quite the project. Learning to make his dreads with wool using a method of cold-water felting was so laborious. I do love that I used a bit of silver in the black and brown wool, but I laugh at his beard because it was so minimal in the photo and I struggled with getting the right amount.
Audrey is my favorite (Jerry is 2nd) because of the monochromatic palette. In the collage I used only photo clippings of skin that were shot in b/w. The black and the pink and the silk earring I sewed into the canvas helped the b/w skin lend itself to the classic chic of Hepburn. If you’d like to see part of the process of creating her, you can find a few videos on this link: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZTF1spvCc/.
I am very proud of that piece and the collector who purchased it later purchased Dolly. They live in a beautiful home together in a particularly lovely part of Fayetteville and I do have visitation privileges. I really do, ha!

AAS: You have a studio at Mount Sequoyah and are very active in art scene in Northwest Arkansas. What is it like working where there are so many artists to interact with?

SM: I love Mount Sequoyah. It’s a magical place. The area has an energy you just don’t find in too many places. It’s a very large campus and I am located in a building that houses four artists. Funny enough three of the four of us are Community Art Leaders in different ways. It makes for a fun small environment when we collaborate on events. Last year Donna Mulhollan and I held a very successful Halloween Concert with tons of artists and 19 local performers. Packed house was an understatement. There are also artists spread about in studios that are solitary. Those usually house writers, or other creatives that desire solitude. Sequoyah Hall is the largest building on campus and houses 60+ artists. It’s fun to visit with my friends in their various studios and I always love when they stop by, unannounced or not!!
Sequoyah Hall is also where Mt. Sequoyah’s Gallery is located. Every month there is a different show, sometimes solo and oftentimes group or themed shows of Creative Spaces artists. Creative Spaces is an entity of Mount Sequoyah Center. It is the umbrella of creatives that have studios on the mountain. I am the social media manager for Creative Spaces, so I often have conversations with the incoming groups and featured artists. This year I approached the Director of Creative Spaces, one of my favorite people I have ever worked for, Rachel Burkevich, about curating a show (that led to three shows.) I knew exactly who I just HAD to feature. A mutual friend introduced me to an artist from Rogers that I immediately felt was absolutely under-recognized, not only by the NWA art community but also of his own accord. As I got to know this young man and started videoing his process and communicating with him regularly, we found so many similarities in our background stories of our lives and why we chose to create, why we both gravitated to found and recycled objects and our shared grief of losing our mothers around the same time. His collection fascinated me and when he told me the background stories to some of his largest pieces, I was absolutely stupefied by the profoundness and vulnerability in what I was looking at. I urge anyone unfamiliar with Christian Perry and his art to take a look and read his stories. I have never ever seen anything like his work other than the obvious inspiration he derives from H.R. Geiger’s work. I curated another show by artist Megan Rose, a surrealist artist from Bella Vista. At the ripe old age of 22 her color usage and portraitures will blow you away. Please check these two amazing creatives out on Instagram. Their handle are @shopmeganrose and @canvas_assassin.