Meet Heidi Schwegler | Artist & Director of a non-profit

We had the good fortune of connecting with Heidi Schwegler and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Heidi, we’d love to hear more about how you thought about starting your own business?
I woke up one morning in 2018 and suddenly realized that I had been in Portland, OR teaching for nearly 20 years! Feeling a sense of urgency, I knew it was time to mix things up, change the scenery and step away from higher ed. So in an extremely impulsive move (literally in the span of about 24 hours) my husband and I quit our careers and moved to the Mojave Desert.

We now live in a 1950 cinder block ranch on 2 acres in Yucca Mesa, which is right next to Joshua Tree, CA. The dirt roads are bumpy, the heat and the force of the winds are very real and the flora and fauna are doing everything they can to survive. It is a complete 180 from the Pacific Northwest and I absolutely love it here. Our location is rural so I knew that if I didn’t bring the people to me I would become a complete recluse, so I began writing the business plan for Yucca Valley Material Lab (YVML), an artist residency and workshop program that would be located in a Quonset hut that I had built on our property. Within 5 months of moving here, I was working with the first artist in residence.

The program offers residencies, internships, workshops and a variety of public events. Artist residencies last two weeks and include lodging, full access to the Lab, technical assistance and opportunities for community engagement. The range of workshops is vast and includes techniques such as neon, bronze foundry casting, glass casting and welding. YVML also has a reputation as being a venue for very special musicians and performers. We’ve recently hosted Senyawa from Indonesia, Les Filles de Illighadad from Niger and Marshall Trammell from the Bay area. The past twenty years of being an artist, instructor and administrator have all come together to bring me this magical life based in this gorgeous desert.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?
In 2009, after eleven years maintaining a studio practice and full-time teaching position, my studio was feeling claustrophobic, my connection to the work was distant and my community felt limited. I had a strong desire for expansion—to step out of the vacuum and engage in something new and unexpected. I suddenly hit on the notion that I needed to begin living my research, not reading about someone else’s thoughts and experiences. So I left. After 28,000 miles of travel and four residencies I became reacquainted with myself and discovered that I have an affinity for the ruin, non-sites and discarded objects.

Since 2018, my sculptural/installation work has been focused solely on my immediate surroundings: the Mojave Desert. A combination of the Santa Ana winds and the ‘stickiness’ of the surrounding flora (cholla cactus, Joshua trees, yuccas and creosote) renders this location as a sort of eddy. I wander and rescue haphazardly disused scraps: packing foam, plastic grocery bags, Amazon prime boxes, broken signs, crumpled chain-link, shredded tires. Plastic, metal, fiber, and rubber: these materials decay but never decompose. Back in the studio I resynthesize these sources into facsimiles with cast glass, gold, silver, wax, resulting in investigations of overlapping ideas of mortality, consumption and coping mechanisms, often finding in them beauty and disquieting humor. Most recently I have been casting large pieces of sun-baked packing foam into glass and I have been powder coating crushed chainlink fencing that inimitable color of our sunsets – a pinkish gray mauve.

Starting a program dedicated to uninhibited exploration of new techniques and processes satisfies my love and obsession for material and the Mojave Desert in turn has inspired my studio practice. It’s brutal, it’s beautiful, and every day allows me to see things again for the first time.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I love my friends dearly, but my style is more about efficiency and fast paced action, so I’d probably fit a weeks-worth of high desert experiences into three days!

Day One: eat an early breakfast at Crossroads in Joshua Tree and buy a pre-packed lunch at Roadrunner Grab+Go before heading to the park. One of my favorite things to do is to drive the main road that spans the length (about 80 miles) with a few stops here and there. I love Boy Scout Trail as it gives you open desert, panoramic views and boulders. After that we’d keep heading south, stopping one more time at the Cholla Garden. Once we’ve exited the park, we’d head down the east side of the Salton Sea and make our way to Bombay Beach. This would be a very long day, so we’d circle back to Yucca Valley for a late dinner at my place.

Day Two: an early visit to the Noah Purifoy Outdoor Museum, which is a 10-acre plot full of Purifoy’s outdoor sculptures. I’ve been countless times and always see something new with each visit, I find his work to be incredibly powerful. For the afternoon, I’d pre-schedule a tour at AZ West. As stated on their website: “For over 20 years these grounds and dwellings functioned as Andrea Zittel’s testing grounds for living – a place in which spaces, objects, and acts of living all intertwine into a single ongoing investigation into what it means to exist and participate in our culture today”. I never get tired of visiting that compound. Dinner would be at Red Dog Saloon in Pioneertown for some of the best rolled tacos in the desert.

Day 3: in the hopes that my friends’ visit crosses over onto a Saturday, we’d swing by Frontier for a coffee and then make a quick pit stop at the Sky Village Swap Meet. If we’re lucky, Bob’s Crystal Cave will be open for a tour. Bob Carr was the previous owner of the Swap Meet and made this tiny cavern out of spray foam, found objects. thousands of crystals and a water feature. He passed away in 2019 and without his presences it’s been in danger ever since, so I take every opportunity I can to visit. Later that morning we’d make the 1.5 hour drive through Wonder Valley to Amboy Crater which is a dormant cinder cone volcano estimated to be 79,000 years old. If it’s not too hot, the hike up to the top is other-worldly. After the crater we’d slowly head back, and stop at The Palms for a pint and a veggie burger with tater tots, which would be a great way to end our intense three-day tour as it is hands down my favorite bar in the desert!

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I absolutely would not be where I am today without the support of my husband Derek Monypeny. He is a musician and deeply understands the ups and downs of the creative process. He is also much more level headed and grounded than I which perfectly balances my impulsiveness and untethered energy.

Website: www.yuccavalleymaterial.org and www.heidischwegler.com

Instagram: @yuccavalleymaterial and @heidi_schwegler

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heidi-schwegler-a921788

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100043215614178

Image Credits
Image 1: Ian Byers-Gamber Image 2: Rose Cefalu Image 3: Stephen Funk Image 4: Rose Cefalu Image 5: Rose Cefalu Image 6: Rose Cefalu Image 7: Heidi Schwegler Image 8: Rose Cefalu