Rhode Islanders You Should Know: Melanie Ducharme

One of my favorite things about Rhode Island is simply this: We all know each other. Whenever I’m telling someone from out-of-state what it’s like, I always say, the usual, great food, so many things to do, beautiful, and of course that when it comes to social circles, we’re basically one great big game of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon,” only we’re all Kevin Bacon. I doubt there is anyone in Rhode Island that you don’t know through some degree of separation. And I love it. This was what inspired this new column: The Rhode Islanders You Should Know, that examines Rhode Islanders that you probably know in one way or another, but you should become more acquainted with. 

First up is Melanie Ducharme. 

Let’s get her David Copperfield-esque back-story established first: Melanie was born and raised in Rhode Island. In fact, the farthest she’s ever strayed was for her undergraduate work at the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth. So, yeah, she’s a local through and through. Her current residence is Coventry, and she teaches in Providence.

Melanie’s an artist — one of my favorites in the state. Her work portrays women and womxn-identifying individuals with bright colors, pages ripped from magazines, and above all: women who don’t look like they belong in a Victoria’s Secret fashion show. But we’ll come back to that. 

She started out as a graphic design major and she says of her choice, “I had family members who were like, ‘What are you gonna do when you get out college?’” She initially had dreams of becoming a fashion designer, but realized that an inability to sew was going to be an issue. After trying her hand at graphic design for a few years, she returned to school to pursue teaching and now Melanie’s day job is as an art teacher at South Side Elementary Charter School in Providence. She has been teaching there for four years, but has worked as a substitute since 2014, which is when she also graduated with her Master of Arts in teaching from Rhode Island College. 

“The one good thing about teaching elementary school is that they’re really excited about art … you’re a rock star when you walk down the hallway.” Though, Melanie fully admits that being a teacher during the COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging, if only because of how different it is than being in the class. Typically, Melanie would arrange art supplies and instruct the kids together – but now she teaches over Zoom while the in-school children sit at their desks in their classrooms “It’s a lot different.” Melanie has to think about supplies and what can be facilitated at home as well as in the classroom. She explains: “Normally, the students would sit and share supplies, but they can’t do that. You have to rethink everything you do.” 

The pandemic has given Melanie a lot of time to devote to her art, too. “It’s inspired by pop art, popular culture, feminism, myself, other people,” she said. Melanie has shown her art throughout the state, too. She’s such an OG Rhode Islander that she even had shows at AS220 before they remodeled. “One of my pieces,” she laughs, “was by the bathroom.” 

Her work really focuses on the female figure, but Melanie’s goal is to be inclusive. Her work stems from a lot of what she does with her students, and knowing the information that they’re being fed by our society. “It’s a lot of things you see in the media, especially how women are represented. Not just grown women, but young women see this, and they don’t see themselves.” 

She thinks about this with the pieces she does, saying, “You don’t have to look a certain way to do anything. And I imagine how challenging that is for a young person to see that they don’t look the way a girl looks on the TV, or online, or even on social media now. Those girls can be a size zero, and not everybody is a size zero.” 

Back to Victoria’s Secret. Melanie also uses found objects in her work, sometimes literally ripping the pages from a magazine. She said: “My last show I did incorporated pieces from a Victoria’s Secret catalog. They get a lot of backlash, but they choose models who are typically white, and I can see someone seeing that and going, ‘Is this how I’m supposed to look?’ There are a lot of thoughts that go on in my mind about how to sketch a woman’s body.” Melanie’s figures have big hips, large breasts, small stomachs, big stomachs, really everything. She stresses that there’s nothing wrong with a size zero body – she just wants more bodies to be seen as “normal.”

Melanie’s art is about rebellion in the sense she wants everyone to feel like they have a right to see their own body portrayed in the media. She also digs deep with some of her pieces, posing questions, such as a floral background with the words, “ARE YOU OKAY?” painted on them. Her art gets down to what’s deeper than the surface – wanting to explore who we are, what we’re feeling, and bring it to a canvas.  

Melanie has also taken lessons from her own work and incorporated it into her classroom, though, keeping it age appropriate. Her goal is to make art more inclusive, and to give voices to those history may not have included. She said, “I just got a book recently about art history, and it was primarily about male artists, sans Frida Kahlo.” This is a universal problem, Melanie feels, but one she sees constantly in art. She continues to say: “If you’re a female artist, or a woman of color, good luck finding someone in a textbook that looks like you. Art history is the history of white dudes… If I’m showing my students art, I try to be conscious of that, what are these young people looking at?” 

Though Melanie’s students may still be too young to hear it, her advice to up and coming artists in Rhode Island is sound: “Love yourself, because no one is going to come love you for you. But have the confidence, have the perseverance, people will try to shit on you and make you feel like crap. Get used to rejection, it’ll happen. But there are the wins: you get a show, someone buys a painting. Be patient.” She also talks about how she draws inspiration from what’s around her, of course, the women who inspire her, but also walking around downtown Providence and engaging with murals and public pieces. She says, “The best inspiration comes from the stuff you can relate to. I can do art that speaks to me and might speak to other people.”

You can find out more about Melanie at melanieducharme.wordpress.com. She was also recently named the Artist-in-Residence for CIC Providence, and just began mentoring an artist through the group Creature Conserve. You can see some of Melanie’s work, as well as photos of her cats, at @melducharme on Instagram. 

Have a Rhode Islander in mind that you think everyone should know? Please reach out to our author on Instagram @caitlinmoments.