Mickey Alice Kwapis is a specimen artist and preservation educator who has taught taxidermy workshops at the Harvard Museum of Natural History, the Houston Museum of Natural Science and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Cleveland.
Her taxidermy work won third place in the professional division at the National Taxidermy Championships and has been the subject of several short documentaries.
A condensed version of her conversation is below; the full interview can be found here.
A specimen artist
Mickey Alice Kwapis does not fit the “traditional” look of a taxidermist.
“If you saw me at the grocery store, you wouldn’t think, ‘Oh, that girl skins animals for a living,’” she says.
She also calls herself a “specimen artist.”
“I have a box of squirrels, I have a box of rats, I have a fox, some baby beavers, minks, lizards, pheasant chicks, ducklings, geese,” Kwapis says. “I have a big, big snake.
“Four baby emus, a sparrow, a starling, a bunch of pigeons.”
Kwapis believes that taxidermy is a sculpture made from a real animal.
“They say that art imitates life, but we also have life that has turned into death, that we then can turn into art,” she says.
Kwapis adds that it has been “very, very cool” to progress from skinning a squirrel under the lamplight at her friend’s kitchen table to teaching at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.
But she agrees that the taxidermy industry has been seen as a white male-dominated profession.
“Martha Maxwell exhibited her work at an expo in Philadelphia, where she built a full mountain inside of one of those fair buildings, and she filled it with her taxidermy animals that she had hunted and prepared herself,” Kwapis says. “And my favorite thing about her is that she made a little plaque that said ‘Woman’s work.’
“And she stuck it to the front of her exhibition.”
It’s all relative
Kwapis says her great-grandmother — also named Mickey — championed her work. She remembers that as a child, her great-grandmother had framed butterflies on the wall
of the guest room.
When some of them became detached from the glass, Kwapis was asked if she could fix the frame, which was created by her great-grandmother’s aunt nearly a century ago.
“So she actually got to come to one of my classes, and we spread butterflies together that matched the same color tones,” Kwapis says. “And then once they were dry, I snuck those butterflies into her frame, and I returned it to her.”
It was a great family connection for Kwapis, who got to see her renovation project every time she visited her great-grandmother. It also validated her career choice.
“What I’m doing right now is beyond my wildest dreams,” she says. “Taxidermy and specimen preservation are in my blood, whether I realized it when I started doing this or not.”
