50 Over 50: It Gets Better and Better - Monet Clark's Ecofeminist Animal Women

At 57, Monet Clark is making the best work of her life. She's deep in the process of creating performance-based photographic series and performance video works as animal-women hybrid characters. Think elaborately costumed figures posing in sweeping natural landscapes, tripod and interval timer capturing moments that are both wryly humorous and profoundly political.

Her work lives at an intersection between feminism, misogyny, animal rights, cultural biases which dismiss the mystic, and climate change. She's been playing with the same tropes of subverting the male gaze since her 20s, but over the years this has evolved into something more complex—a subversion of cultural biases reflective of misogyny itself, with methodologies that have reached a deeper well of profundity.

Here's what shaped her practice: 

chronic illness. ME/CFS and mast cell disease are increasingly challenging with age, but they've also profoundly deepened her artistic practice. Her disability experience, which began in her 20s, revealed a critical parallel—the out-of-balance health of her body mirrors the biosphere's struggle with climate change. This unique perspective, born from her lived experience as an aging, disabled ecofeminist artist, is the gift that informs her work.

She calls her practice Holistic Intersectionality. Her theories and art-making are rooted in her triracial ancestry and the decolonizing process she underwent with her mother as part of the back-to-nature subculture. Further shaping her work are the holistic, indigenous, and mystic disciplines she rigorously trained in to assist in her recovery from a life-threatening disability.

Through chronic illness, the transmutation of art is how she copes. Art as a platform to disseminate what she's learned and her ecofeminist theories. Art is the bastion of truth—it heals, reflects, provides us with a liminal space wherein momentary suspensions from our patterned thoughts and identities can be experienced, allowing us to align with new states of awareness. Art can reveal cultural biases and their impacts, and functions as a catalyst for change.

Her advice to aspiring artists? 

Look, it takes years to reach mastery. Beginning a creative discipline and critical thinking skills at any age will help balance the world, but don't expect to catch up to the wisdom and mastery of those focused on their practice for decades before.

Does age matter in art? 

Wisdom from practice. Younger artists can also have great wisdom, but in doing the work for years something else emerges.

She recently performed in the 3-day Art in Odd Places 2025: VOICE performance art festival presented by the City of West Hollywood. She's shown with Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), SFMOMA's Now Playing series, the Northern California Museum of Art in Chico, had a solo exhibition with Krowswork Gallery in Oakland, a 10-screen performance video installation collaboration with John Sanborn at SF Camerawork, and shown internationally in Chicago, Greece, Spain, Germany, Sweden, and more.

Her works have been featured in afterimage The Journal for Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, European Coeur et Art, and twice in Hyperallergic. In 2020 she curated virtual Invocation Democracy, A Political and Mystical Exhibition. In 2022 her collaboration FLYING BLIND: Raven Woman Monet Clark, Interviewed by Chicken Woman Linda Mary Montano with the performance art icon was hosted by NYC's virtual Interior Beauty Salon.

What would she tell her younger self? Nothing. "It's what I saw then, same art world for better or worse, same arduous art making for better or worse. If anything art making makes more sense to me now, so I might say 'It will make more sense later.'"

Keep going. It gets better and better.

Monet Clark is based in Oakland and Culver City, working on both sides of the camera in her semi-autobiographical feminist pieces. Her animal-women characters use advertising and Old Hollywood iconography to explore the relationships between internalized misogyny, mysticism, animal sentience, disability and recovery, and the repair of our global biosphere from climate change.

She lives for creative culture and stays fluent in what's happening in the art world, young and old artists alike. Art-world fluency enriches her life and she loves to see what's popping off.

Connect with Monet:

Website: monetclark.com Instagram: @monetclark

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