Ohio artist with LD combines dance, performance, art to show her style of visual learning

From The Cleveland Jewish News:

Former competitive figure skater Meghann Snow gave up her skates for ballet shoes made of bubble wrap, Scotch tape and masking tape.

Wearing her unusual shoes, Beachwood native Snow will bring her original performance art pieces that blend dance, painting and her own method of visual learning to the Ingenuity art and technology festival, running Sept. 24-26.

“Growing up with a learning disability in academia, I couldn’t do (school work) for the life of me,” says Snow, 27. “But in ballet and figure skating, if you showed me something visually, I could do it.”

That physical mimicry inspired Snow to create “Stretching X Two” and “Dance Drawing.” In both performance pieces, she uses her body to imitate the lines and actions of a painter. In “Dance Drawing,” her partner, artist Frank Castanien, draws lines she repeats through dance (with the tape and bubble wrap shoes scraping like ice skates, she notes.) In “Stretching X Two,” Castanien stretches a painter’s canvas while Snow mimics the motions. Both pieces incorporate improvisation, as Snow must re-interpret whatever Castanien draws or does.

Snow, who has lived in New York City for the past five years, performs her art in New York galleries and has appeared at Jennifer Muller/The Works Hatch Festival for emerging choreographers and the Surreal Estate artists collective. She also teaches as an artist-in-residence at Hillsborough County Community College (HCCC) in Tampa, Fla., and as project coordinator of the residency program at AICAD/ New York Studio Residency Program (where Castanien was her student).
Becoming a professional performance artist wasn’t always in Snow’s plans. “I actually have a lot of anxiety about performing,” she admits. “There’s something secretive about being an artist – you keep the process hidden, then you show the final product at a gallery. The idea of confronting your audience is nerve-wracking.”

As a child, Snow, the daughter of Myra and Louis of Beachwood, was focused solely on figure skating, representing the Garfield Skating Club, and training on a pre-Olympic track. A diagnosis of juvenile rheumatoid arthritis and the growing cost and time demand led Snow to quit skating at age 15. But she found new inspiration in ballet, training at Cleveland City Dance.

“I’m where I am today because of my mom,” Snow says. “She saw I was having problems, and she put me into the arts.”

Snow studied with the Ohio Ballet, hoping for a position with the company. However, when the then senior at Beachwood High School returned from a March of the Living student trip to Europe and Israel, there were no open slots with the ballet.

Snow kept on dancing at the University of Akron, but by sophomore year, she says, she needed a new inspiration. She discovered abstract painting and soon was itching to transfer to the art department, much to the concern of her mother. Myrna Snow, herself a calligrapher and graphic artist who studied at Cleveland Institute of Art, worried that an art degree wouldn’t help her daughter find a career. But after years of intense physical training and struggling academically, when Snow found painting “suddenly everything made sense.”

Snow “basically drove to New York right after I graduated,” she says. She pursued her MFA at Parsons New School of Design, where her mentor, sculptor Jackie Bruckner, encouraged her to branch out into performance art. Snow’s thesis, on the intersection of painting and dance, led to the development of “Dance Drawing.”

This past year, Snow almost had her 15 minutes of fame as a contestant on the Bravo reality competition TV series “Work of Art: The Next Great Artist.”

“It was an awesome experience,” she says of auditioning and interviewing for the show, which ultimately didn’t cast her. “You learn a lot about yourself when you have to answer questions” explaining your work.

Although New York is her new home, Snow still feels strong ties to Cleveland, she says. Her family, including brothers Warren and Aaron and grandparents Millicent and Alex Rosenberg, are here. She fondly remembers growing up at Temple Emanu El, (“Reform, but it would be Conservative by New York standards,” she quips) where she was a teaching assistant as a teen. That experience led to her teaching Hebrew for three years to 4th-grade students at Congregation Rodeph Shalom on New York’s Upper West Side.

Snow is excited about performing for a hometown crowd at Ingenuity, and then returning in January for a solo show at Legation, A Gallery in the 78th St. Studios. She’s even looked for jobs in Cleveland so she could move back home, but has found “there’s not an outlet. Cleveland is really difficult for people my age. For me to get a teaching job in the arts – a lot of colleges don’t want to give jobs to younger professionals.”

After Ingenuity, Snow will immediately jet back to Tampa to perform a new piece developed with students at HCCC. “Being as active as I was a kid, my routines now are just as intense,” she says. “I’m very focused and determined.”