Rising Stars: Meet Jackie Niekamp

Today we’d like to introduce you to Jackie Niekamp.

Hi Jackie, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Growing up in Kansas City, I fell in love with visiting Hammerpress as a teenager and exploring printmaking as a medium. In 2006 I moved to Chicago to further my art education, where I attended and graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago with an emphasis in Printmaking and Fibers. While in Chicago, I worked in various printshops handling production printing and designing for apparel, gig posters, and fine art prints.

I received an opportunity to teach at an incredible non-profit arts program for youth called Marwen in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. It was there that I fell in love with teaching and knew that I wanted to pursue art education and making process-heavy media accessible to anyone who wanted to learn.

In 2012, my best friend and I packed up and headed west to Oakland, California. I set up a 6-arm silkscreen press in our apartment’s dining room and spent my evenings screenprinting for small businesses in the Bay Area.

After moving back to Kansas City, I have spent the past eight years teaching screenprinting and other visual art classes for Kansas City Young Audiences, Imagine That!, Print League KC and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. I truly love working with people of all ages and abilities to create something out of nothing and to share the excitement of learning art processes.

Starting Studio Judy is a long-time dream come true. My goal is to make screenprinting as accessible as possible by providing artists with the necessary tools they need to print their projects. Screenprinting is such a joyful and exciting process, but obtaining the setup to make a screen can be a barrier to some; my goal is to eliminate that barrier so that anyone who wants to screenprint can do so in their own studio or home with some help from Studio Judy!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Balancing a full-time job along with starting a small business has been a bit of a struggle. But, I’m extremely fortunate to be able to grow Studio Judy out of my house in Waldo. The Kansas City artist community has been incredibly supportive and I have had the pleasure of meeting new people and creating some really fun projects along the way.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
The heart of my motivation comes from being a Kansas City native. While in art school, the majority of my work centered around visual representations of childhood memories growing up in Kansas City and the Ozarks. I feel very fortunate to have grown up with a supportive family that constantly fuels inspiration for artwork by ways of ridiculous traditions and hilarious events. I feel as if I have an unlimited supply of stories that I can reach to gain inspiration from through my experiences with my family.

I specialize in screenprinting, printmaking, and sewing; I just enjoy the very labor-intensive process that goes into creating. I am fascinated with all of the little steps and learning along the way through mistakes and tweaking procedures to create a finalized product. This is also why I love teaching so much, because once you learn the basics of a process you can take that and expand it further into your own interests.

I am most proud of creating a screenprinting setup in the basement of my house. I have been infatuated with screenprinting since I was a teenager and I am proud of the fact that I have kept with it, learned the industry and ins-and-outs of the medium, and am able to experiment with my own equipment in my home studio.

What sets me apart from others is knowing what it is like to want to learn how to do something but not knowing where or how to start. Screenprinting is a skill with a lot of equipment and set up, but once you get past that, it is a very straightforward medium of just pushing ink through a screen. Truly one of my favorite parts about screenprinting is the set up; I love getting the artwork ready for transparency printing, coating screens with emulsion, burning screens on the exposure unit, and the magic of washing the screen out to reveal the stencil. I really love being able to collaborate with others and removing barriers to those who have that drive to learn. I have empathy for those who are just starting out and feel intimidated by the art world… everyone should have the opportunity to explore and grow and learn if they want to.

Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
My advice is to reach out to those who you admire and kindly ask if you can work with them. For years I worked multiple jobs for various artists (often for free), just trying to learn more about the industry and how to navigate the art world. I learned a lot from other people’s mistakes and was able to really decide on what I wanted to pursue since I was interested in so many different things when I was younger.

I think it is important to put in the time for all the work that isn’t glamorous, like scrubbing screens to reclaim them, cleaning out washout stations, folding hundreds of t-shirts, taking inventory of supplies, to really learn the entire scope of whatever you are interested in. Most days aren’t super exciting and photo-worthy, but it is important to learn the small things that add up into really making a business run smoothly.

Contact Info:

• Email: [email protected]
• Website: www.studiojudy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/studio_judy/

Image Credits:
Print League KC