Tufted Joy

What happens when you mix the cozy craft of rug tufting with the wild imagination of a painter? Picture a mid-century lounge chair sprouting patchwork fur, a bench shaped like a two-headed cat, cubed poufs sided with masklike faces, or a tapestry of a grinning tiger in profile on a mossy green background, surrounded by a striped, shaggy border. These are the work of Portland, Oregon–based multimedia artist Melissa Monroe. In her home studio, repurposed from a 1960s church classroom space, Monroe conjures a menagerie of textile creatures and objects that are as likely to sprawl across a floor as to hang on a wall.

Entirely self-taught, Monroe has been a working artist since 2013, mainly painting, though no medium has been off-limits. She also builds furniture-inspired sculptures, dabbles in ceramics, and makes masks from papier mâché, with which she performs at gallery show openings and in videos posted to her vibrant social media pages. In tufting she found a way for these pursuits to coexist. “The idea of it seemed so magical,” she recalls, “like painting with yarn.”

In 2020 an affordable tufting gun hit the market. Before long, cheery rugs and wall hangings in geometric patterns and fluffy emoji-like designs were all over RugTok (TikTok for rugs and tufting, naturally) and Etsy shops galore. But when Monroe spotted a lusciously drippy rainbow stair runner by tufting genius Trish Andersen, she “felt a rush” of inspiration. “I immediately saw all these things that I wanted to do with it that no one else was doing yet.” Monroe had taken an upholstery class and saw a throughline of possibility between tufting and three-dimensional, functional objects.

While the world stood still in pandemic isolation, Monroe’s art exploded into motion. With tufting gun in hand, she began creating vibrant, tactile sculptures that caught the eye of galleries and art fairs across the country. “Tufting very quickly took over my entire art practice,” she recalls. “Galleries wanted to show it, especially 3D objects. I’d started with rugs for people’s spaces, but it evolved into building masks and incorporating furniture-building techniques.”

Monroe shows her work frequently in Portland galleries, Seattle’s AMcE Creative Arts and Lynn Hanson galleries, and the Seattle Art Fair, as well as HeyThere Projects in Joshua Tree, California, and Mortal Machine in New Orleans.

Art (and Love) in a Coffee Shop

Monroe’s first hint that she could be an artist came in 2012, when she was in her mid-20s, a married mom of three working in a coffee shop to help make ends meet. A muralist was painting a wall in the café, and watching him work and talking with him “blew my mind,” she says. “He didn’t have a plan, he was just layering paint and color. It was so casual, and I just could not wrap my head around it. People paint like this? And this is your job?”

Monroe went home that night, scrounged house paint and glass from her contractor husband’s projects plus craft supplies from an old job at Michael’s, and threw them together in an emotional outburst of art. “Making art helped me release a lot of anger that I didn’t realize I had,” she reflects. Her first marriage ended not long after.

She soon earned enough to become a full-time artist, selling her work on eBay to buyers as far-flung as Greece and France. She also kept in touch with the muralist, a local painter named Jesse Reno—and they are still together, 11 years on.