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In addition to the determining influence of these overriding goals, Stern's art is also the product of her own intellectual life and educational experience. Her father directed her away from art school, believing that good art depended upon the development of the mind and writing skills. (5) He insisted that artists needed to be “smart.” As a result, she studied art history and anthropology. Her undergraduate honors thesis in anthropology at Wesleyan University was entitled “Art and its Ritual Context,” an entirely apt subject for the future artist. She was interested in why we make art at all, and she concluded that the purpose was to evoke the past, to stimulate and foster memory. This experience led her to abandon pursuing a career in museum work, a one-time goal fostered by her childhood visits to the anthropological museum at the University of Pennsylvania, just a few blocks from her home. She recalls the sense of awe and mystery that the experience engendered. Those visits, and her experience as a teenager in a low-level job at the Philadelphia Art Museum, brought her into contact with objects from different cultures and periods. This was followed by exposure to Pop art and San Francisco Bay Area Funk. Robert Arneson was an important influence at that time. She describes her teenage period pieces as “funny and sarcastic,” qualities that have carried into the present.
After college she wanted to make things rather than study them. Abandoning the cerebral approach to art, she became interested in how creativity functions beyond repositories of ideas. In other words, she decided to devote herself to finding ways to draw personally upon the power of art to make people feel . To arouse the subjective response that is frequently lost, or stifled, by an academic approach that reduces art to mere illustration of intellectual history. Melissa Stern came to see her creative task in terms of fashioning contemporary artifacts that have the power to connect to the past. And she now understands her role, the role of the artist, as modern day priestess or shaman. She and her fellow artists are then conveyers of a specific area of truth and knowledge that lies beyond and outside the rational world in which most of us in modern Western society function.
Finally, Melissa Stern consistently deploys pictorial means—style and working method—in the service of a fundamentally humanist art, of which the drawings are a significant part. She recycles her drawings in an ongoing process of experimentation and discovery, frequently introducing collage elements from Life magazine of the 1940s and 1950s, as the old becomes the new. The individual identity of each drawing, maintained over time and through various changes, is entirely analogous to the connection Stern seeks to reveal between the past and the present. The adult achieves greater sense of his or her place in the world by remembering how that awareness was first developed and negotiated as a child. It is interesting, if hardly surprising, that Stern's own childhood drawings and sculptures were, according to her account, very similar in expressive quality to her mature work. (6)