Mikki Itzigsohn, Muse of the Tumbleweeds
A Los Angeles Bassist/Visual Artist Finds Creative Refreshment in Austin
Mikki Itzigsohn is a Los Angeles-born, Austin-relocated musician who paints, and a visual artist who writes and performs music with her creative partner and fiancé Elvis Kuehn. She describes their sound as “lounge-y, surf-y, noir instrumentals.” Their music is currently featured as theme scoring and interstitials for “This American Life,” a distinction that she calls “a huge honor.” These days, she’s also painting with acrylics on wood, and often portrays groups of women, including radical nuns, rocking keyboards along with acoustic and electric axes.
Wood chews up paintbrushes, but she loves the rugged and demanding medium and material. Not coincidentally, Mikki plays bass, both standup and electric. “I like to work with my hands. The same way I love roots music, I like painting on wood because it’s kind of a rugged surface with some resistance. Painting on canvas just felt too soft for me. I don’t even use gesso all the time as a primer. So it’s impossible to get too precious with it,” says Itzigsohn (pronounced “it-6-sun”). Her first show, “Songwriters: A Debut Solo Exhibition of Paintings,” opens February 15 at Austin’s iconic Yard Dog art space, with an opening reception Saturday, February 17 with live music from Los Angeles-based badass band known as Emily Rose & The Rounders. Itzigsohn’s exhibition will be in the gallery through March 30, and you may view the paintings here beginning February 15.
She’s always loved the visual arts, and she’s never hadda lesson. Itzigsohn shifted her storytelling from music to painting during the pandemic, when LA’s music venues, as well as venues worldwide, snapped shut as tightly as a prairie oyster. She and Kuehn moved from Los Angeles to the Lone Star state at the end of 2022, where every day she is discovering dynamic possibilities in both music performance and her daily painting practice. Witty depictions of musical women and flat areas of colors in unusual combinations characterize her current work. The local Texas fauna that the artist encounters when walking her dog, including tortoises, owls and other birds, often share the canvas with her human subjects. We caught up with her recently for the latest word before her gallery debut.
VT: Talk about music first. Where did your love of performing begin?
MI: In Los Angeles. I played in bands when I was in high school, and I worked at LA’s oldest record store, House of Records on Pico. From there, I went to McCabe’s Guitar Shop. I went from selling guitars to producing concerts. I bounced around the punk scene, and started my own band called the Small Wigs. I’ll never stop playing music and wanting to play and hear live music.
VT: Getting to experience live music is not easy here in Los Angeles, mostly because there’s no place to park.
MI: Yeah. I have to say, as a diehard live music fan I found myself becoming a bit uninspired in Los Angeles. Music is just less of an industry here. Live music leads the parade, and also the music scene in Austin is so informed by the dance community here! The two-step culture in Austin is awesome!
VT: The higher the hair, the closer to God.
MI: Amen! Totally. My love of live music is so refreshed by being here. I meet so many amazing artists, both in music and in the visual arts. It’s interactive and supportive, almost communal. Austin is less competitive than Los Angeles. I also love the swimming. We swim a lot here. It can be over 100 degrees for 100 days in a row.
VT: What was an important lesson you’ve learned in Texas?
MI: Don’t honk the horn when you’re driving. Everybody has guns!
VT: Drivers in LA are armed, too. Just not as fast on the draw. Talk more about storytelling. In any medium. What’s your story?
MI: It always has to do with roots, being real. Speaking your truth, needing to be heard and seen. I gravitate toward the organic, the imperfect. Folk art, and craft stuff, and handmade, home-made, outsider art.
VT: Prison-art, always a fave. You often paint women.
MI: That focus on women is not intentional, though. I want to use my voice to send a love-letter to the creative process itself. I grew up very shy. Sometimes I can say more without words, so finding a melodic turn or making a visual image says what I can’t verbalize easily. It’s a feeling more than a thought, maybe.
VT: How else do your two means of expression – music and painting – intersect?
MI: I’m very happy to say that I’m making lots of new friends who play music around town here in Austin, and some of them have asked me to do illustrations for them. Album art and show posters, stuff like that.
VT: So cool! What sort of person is your art for? Your art meaning both your painting and your music.
MI: One of my favorite things about art of all kinds is that it’s all open to interpretation. Your own experience sort of shapes what you see. Definitely does. I’d say that I create for anyone who need a push to get out there and live their truth. Perseverance. To keep going. To be fearless.
VT: Right. Like, I really love the two owls who are watching over the quartet of performing women in that blue painting. Like guardians. In the American South, an old folk belief is that hoot-owls carry messages from the land of the dead to the land of the living. That was an idea way before Harry Potter. Maybe as far back as Athena, who guarded classical Athens, and whose symbol is the owl.
MI: Yeah, I love owls, too! That’s something ELSE I love about Texas – there’s wildlife!
VT: But hey – LA is full of coyotes. Ask any cat-owner.
MI: Yes, that’s true. But here we have cardinals! What a beautiful red bird! And armadillos! And just amazing stargazing.
VT: Orale, and Tejano norteños, and TexMex food.
Si, si, si, fire up the grill, girl, you had me at carne guisada. Mikki Itzigsohn is not a newcomer to the unique world of Texas, where she calls her adopted hometown “…the blueberry in the tomato soup,” politically speaking. She established her performance credit as a bassist at SXSW with bands Benjamin Booker and Stone Darling, including a spot on “Austin City Limits,” and has lent her music licensing acumen to films including “Lucky,” “The Voyeurs,” and “Skin.”
What’s next for Mikki? “I hope to organize a gallery show in Marfa, Texas, and internationally. So, more painting, more art, more music, more star-gazing.” Oh, and BTW, she and Elvis are now formally engaged. Mazel tov!
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Photos of paintings courtesy of the artist.
WHEN IN AUSTIN: “Songwriters: A Debut Solo Exhibition of Paintings,” opens February 15 at Austin’s iconic Yard Dog art space, with an opening reception Saturday, February 17 with live music from Los Angeles-based badass band known as Emily Rose & The Rounders. Itzigsohn’s exhibition will be in the gallery through March 30, and you may view the paintings here beginning February 15.
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Mikki Itzigsohn, Muse of the Tumbleweeds
A Los Angeles Bassist/Visual Artist Finds Creative Refreshment in Austin