Erin Labonte, Artist, Teacher, Mother on Work-Work-Life Balance

 Over the last two-plus years I have interviewed many artists who came to full-time art after careers, sometimes in teaching, often teaching art. So when I met Erin LaBonte in Algoma last year, and learned she was going to start teaching full-time at Kewaunee high school and middle school, we agreed to catch up in the spring and see if she managed to keep creating her own art in addition to teaching.

LaBonte and her husband, Don Krumpos, operate Yonder, a gallery, studio and event space on Algoma's Steele Street. They both have experience with balancing work that pays with the art they love. He is a graphic designer with major corporate clients in the Twin Cities. She taught art at Silver Lake College in Manitowoc until Covid closed it in 2020. After that she taught as an adjunct at the UWGB campuses in Manitowoc and Sheboygan, a challenging commute for a mother of a now three-year old son.

Erin LaBonte at Yonder

“I had art teachers tell me that I wouldn’t make art any more once I started teaching,” she said. When she saw an opening for an art teacher in Kewaunee shortly before the school year started, she applied and got the job immediately. A 15-minute drive, it left her more time for art and family than commuting to Sheboygan.

She aims to get to the studio to create two evenings a week, and mostly succeeds.

“Although sometimes I am just too pooped,” she said. “I am fortunate that my husband is an artist too and knows it is important to me to make art.”

She is also conscious of the need to protect her time.

“I am at a point in my life where I don’t have to be a superstar teacher. I may work on design for a play but I won’t pick up coaching and overextend myself so I don’t have time to be an artist and a mom.”

She enjoys teaching and finds that her high school students are not so different from the college classed she used to teach. Next year the school will offer college credit courses in drawing and photography through UWGB.

Early in the school year she applied for a grant to buy photography equipment and got seven Canon Rebel digital cameras — sophisticated but reasonably priced. With nine students in her class she just about has enough equipment when she brings her own camera for them to use. She also got a few tripods and a couple of card readers and a Canon printer.

“So now we can print the student work and everyone in the faculty and administration can see what the students are accomplishing. I have been teaching most of my classes similar to what I did at college, and the students are for the most part getting it and making good work, I don’t get to lecture as much and talk art history as I would at college level because I don't have the attention span of the students and I am with them for 50 minutes rather than two and a half hours.”

She has become confident in her teaching high school and middle school students — a required teacher ed course in behavior management helped — and feels rapport developing with the students. Some of her advanced students spend study halls hanging out in the studio.

“I was like that in high school so it was nice to see my students do it with me.”

One of her students, Abby Ostermeier, a junior, had show at Lady Bug Gallery in Algoma, and several galleries featured work of students from Algoma, Kewaunee and Luxemburg for Youth Art Month in March.

“We got to highlight some of them in Yonder,” she said. “It was cool to integrate our space and our art work with what I am doing in school.”

In addition to showing student work, the gallery did a benefit exhibit in November and a puppet show.

“Part of what I do is facilitating art, making sure art happens,” LeBonte added. She and her husband collaborate on applying for grants and projects — they have done outdoor paintings including the mural on Bayside Bargains in Sturgeon Bay and a Wisconsin Sea Grant mural, with artist/science teacher Jody Henseler, hanging on the front of Sturgeon Bay’s city hall.

Mural work is done in the summer when she is off from teaching.

“I don’t mind having the full-time gig. I feel better knowing we have health insurance and those things that come with it, that consistency. Even when Don is doing design work, it is it not always consistent,” she said.

“We are figuring out where we need to put more energy and how we need to work so we are balanced financially and so we can be creative.”

Margaret Lockwood's Pursuit of Abstraction

By Tom Groenfeldt

Margaret Lockwood, whose gallery is on Michigan and 2nd Avenue in Sturgeon Bay, is looking forward to a good year of painting, after a slow start. She’s been steadily at work since completing a commission for a woman in Dallas whose parents have bought her work over the years.

“I had three canvases primed and ready to go and I was just waiting for the energy to come. They were close to the size the woman in Dallas wanted, but not exactly, so Allin stretched a canvas for me. Then once I did her painting I was back in the groove and I could go on and do the other three canvases that were waiting for me.”

Lockwood said she much prefers large canvases, often larger than 40 x 40 inches.

“I paint some smaller canvases, but I don’t love doing them,” she said. “It’s my big painting niche,” she added of work’s place in the Door County art world.

“I think I am going to get a lot of painting done because I am in the mood. I found an article from about 2000, a little after I got here (Door County) in ’94. They interviewed me and Joe Lopez and Franne Dickinson because we were doing work that was outside what everybody else was doing.”

Landscapes have long been the predominant subject of Door County painters — Lockwood was probably among the first to do abstract paintings and has encouraged others, particularly women painters, to be bold in their approach to art— to think outside the lighthouse.

“I thought that was so interesting because how many years later, just look. I mean, we have this wonderful great art community. It was good then, but now it’s really good. It’s a really good place to buy art and it really good place to be an artist.”

Margaret Lockwood with her paintings

The degree of abstraction can vary in her work. She has been working on a sketch book from a Miller Museum pandemic project, The Sketchbook Challenge, which handed out small blank books for artists to fill with anything they want — words, pictures, graphics — and then turn in when they have  filled the volume. The results may become an exhibit when the pandemic subsides.

Lockwood paged through some tight designs, a sketch of what she imagined the virus might look like, an American flag in black, white and brown, and some images to commemorate the death of George Floyd, including some “I can’t breathe” quotes repeated on the page, things she put on paper shortly before the Sturgeon Bay march for Black Lives Matter.

“I’m not done, and we can’t turn it in until it is finished.” She doesn’t know what the museum plans to do with them, but she has seen on Facebook that at least one participant has already finished. Most of the pictures she has seen for the books are influenced by what is going on now.

She and her husband, Allin Walker, founded Woodwalk Gallery in Egg Harbor in 1994, which began in the old schoolhouse in Juddville which is now Tony Staroska and Rebecca Carlton’s Juddville Clay Studio and Gallery.

Lockwood and Walker bought the Egg Harbor Woodwalk Gallery property of 11 acres in 2004 to accommodate what became a list of more than 60 artists. They sold it to Jillaine Burton and her husband, Andrew Seefeldt, in 2015.

With the move to Sturgeon Bay and the new Lockwood Gallery they simplified the business — now Lockwood is the only painter exhibiting although her gallery also carries pottery by Prisca Benson-Fittsher, Reneé Schwaller, Bob Davis and Rebecca Bodmer, sculpture by Dan Bresnahan and jewelry by Angela Lensch.

The gallery is open Thursday through Sunday, by appointment, or by calling her — she is usually around. With less foot traffic than in previous years, she looks forward to having more time to paint.