https://www.instagram.com/_theexpedition
www.youtube.com/@madEcreative18
Events coming up from Mad.E!
Waste to Wonder Exhibition -
January 16 - February 26, 2026
COME SEE YOUR COLLAGE
MAKE YOUR COLLAGE : Closing show February 26, 2026 6:00pm -7:30pm
Artist Talk: February 5, 2026 - 6:00pm
Resource Depot WPB, FL
Taste of Africa
May 14, 2026 6-8pm
Sandy Crane Golf Club
Palm Beach Gardens, Florida
with: African Orphan Educational Foundation (AOEF)
How are you doing Mad.e?
Hi there, I'm doing great. How are you doing?
Pretty good. Your name is Madison, but you ask people to call you Mad.E. How did you come up with that?
Yeah, well, I mean, it could be a longer story, but, it's basically my name, Madison and my middle name letter (Elle). When I was younger, people would call me Maddy. So, I would spell it differently, but I like this kind of brand.
Mad.E, how is it that you ended up doing art? I mean, did you have an epiphany when you were young, or people, your family, your friends, the school told you that you were gifted, that you had something going, that you could take advantage, or how did it go?
I mean, there's many things I could say, but just playing off of your question here, actually, teachers, not every teacher, but there was one teacher specifically in my seventh grade class that told me I was wrong when I completed an art project. And me not even knowing I was an artist at that time, or really what an artist was, I stood up in class, and just asked a very calm question-I'm gonna go, I say, well, isn't this art? We were painting portraits, and my portrait kind of came out something like a Picasso, where it's like, more representational-real life type of thing. My Picasso-like portrait was apparently wrong to my teacher, and I questioned her. So that's just one of the times, but I definitely had an epiphany when I was visiting my aunts in Bolivia back in 2016. I had been painting when I was in school then, but I went to this amazing architectural tour out of all women who kind of remade rooms in this kind of abandoned warehouse, and there was a fashion show. But once I walked in through this mansion of a warehouse, I turned to my left, and the first room was a room that just had these massive paintings, and I walked into that room, and I turned, and I looked at my aunt, I don't know if I said it out loud. I just, I was like, I'm going, this is going to be me one day. And meaning, like, I'm going to show my large paintings, and it's still on its way, and I have a lifetime to do so.
That's great. Thanks for telling us this. And what happened after that? Did you go to some training, technical or formal training, like a Bachelor or MFA? What have you done about it?
I was one that always wanted to just travel the world. I actually used to want to work for National Geographic and be a photojournalist, going to other people's homes and getting to know them. I never really had some thought of going to school, and what I really wanted to do, all I wanted to do, again, was travel the world and get to know people. But, gratefully I was helped through school, and my family said, you can do what you want. So I actually started in industrial design. There I am drawing straight lines and circles after circle after circle and creating products. And I actually took my first trip out of the country (USA) to Cambodia in 2010, and when I came back, my whole world was rocked. Yeah, my culture shock surely came when I came back to the United States with so many material things.
So I kind of left industrial design because I questioned myself, why am I creating more products for the world when there's already so much of it? And I went into darkroom photography because I went back into the kind of travel the world, National Geographic thing, and I took a color theory course my third year, which was 2012-2013. And that color theory course, we started talking about color, and I started painting. And when we had critiques in class, I actually was unable to talk about my paintings. My teacher was like, all right, what do you have to say about it? And I literally couldn't think of any words. But then my classmates would start talking about it. And it just amazed me how literally every single word that came out of their mouth was every single thing that I put in the painting. I'm an abstract expressionist, so I don't just paint an apple and show you the apple. So that's where I kind of became a painter, recognizing that other people see what I painted, even though it's just a bunch of colors and lines and textures.
You have got an ongoing series of paintings called The color collection. How is that this came to your mind and how you started to realize it materially?
Yeah, absolutely. So, leading from that color theory course, that's kind of back in 2013 is when I started doing my research on green. And my research entails of talking to people in the public and asking them what they think, not necessarily what they feel, but what they think of when they see the color green or think of the color green. And people's responses are plants, nature, peace. And then there's one person in particular that I asked and he is like, money. And I go, whoa, there it is. There's the paradox. Because everybody even the way that he said it was like a little money. Money is a funny thing in this world. It's really like just a trade. Right. People fight for it. People. We want more and more and more. We hoard it or this or that. But really, it all comes from nature. So with the green painting, I was doing this play on nature versus money. And I had a silent performance where I'd also in my industrial design class built a chessboard and I gave away money on this performance. I had people play the game, but I put drawers on the side and I had one dollar hanging out of the drawer. And when people would play, they would see the dollar, so it's kind of like a brain game, test, just seeing how the public reacts to seeing money. And so if they pull that dollar, well, do you keep the dollar, do you put the dollar back, or do you open the drawer, do you put the dollar in the drawer, oh, what's in the drawer, if you open the drawer, well, in that performance back in 2014, I ended up putting a lot of money in the drawer and whoever found it would get to keep it. And it actually turned into a successful presentation, it was actually one of my classmates that got the money, put it in an envelope and messaged me saying, hey, I found this. I'll give it back to you, and I'm like, oh, you got it, I go, no, no, no, that's yours, because for me, it's all about nature, this is all we need, we just need some shelter and some food, which we grow from the ground, which our shelter comes from the ground as well. So that's a long description of what the green painting was all about. And kind of the red follows in a sense of what is red. That one I started when I was living in North Carolina, and moved there in 2020. And obviously 2020 was a hard time for all of us around the world. And I didn't necessarily go into the painting being like, oh, it's 2020, I'm going to paint all this intensity, it's just what I kind of gather from the world; what I listen to in terms of like, politics, too, or what's happening, and that, it took me about four years to finish that painting. It's definitely very dense and heavy. But also red is passion, right? So that's why I call it For Desire, For Desiree, because that's what red is. And that one certainly turned into more of like a political statement, because also when Roe v. Wade was being overturned, and there's many things that can happen in that painting when you turn it and observe it. And then yeah, and then the blue is kind of very similar, thinking of the whole collection is kind of based on what is blue, what is orange, what is purple.
But more in the rational sense, rather than the feelings, you said that.
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I really like to, being an abstract painter, I love the question, well, what is it? And, I look at the people and I'm like, well I guess you tell me and if you can't see anything in it, then that's okay. I'm not saying you don't understand it or whatnot, but it's certainly more, beyond, I was feeling this, so I painted it.
I would like you to go back to the Forever Green painting from The color collection: so, it was like asking people about what green and yellow stand for for them, what did it mean for them, and you end up talking about money and by researching about money and this artistic exercise of giving away money, you realize that behind or at the base of money is still the natural resources that we all live from, yeah, that we take advantage of, but we trade with it among other things, but it's not that you were expecting that type of answer, it was like very surprising for you, or how did it go?
Yeah, well, no, I mean, I have said this kind of, not necessarily a motto, but for a few years now, I read it at a bookstore, is expect the unexpected, so I didn't really, and I still do my best to go into things with not expecting anything, because the outcome is certainly always different. I feel like plans, we can all set plans, but there's always a way that the plan changes, so we need to be flexible, so I didn't really go in being like, okay, people are going to say nature, this is going to be about money, I personally wasn't even thinking about money when I was thinking of green, but I just saw that as like a great paradox, I guess something that I left out, like when I really started to first paint, I thought of this word paradox, and what paradoxes are, and it means like one of two things that are opposites, and like up and down, or something like that, I thought of like a corner. There's many ways we can kind of make a paradox, and so when, as I was doing my research, talking to human beings about this color, it was fascinating to me that most people were like nature, peace, plants. It was all like peaceful and welcoming, but then the person that said money said it with this like undertone, kind of like greed in a way and because we're all hustling, we're all striving, we're all on this like wheel to get more money, to get more money, to get more money so we can pay for our lives, but we gotta live.
Now, Mad.e, what can you tell me about The expedition, your collective art installation, what it's made of, how did you come out with that, and also if you can tell me about your experience in your studio at Norwood Art and Music at West Palm Beach?
Yeah, okay, I'll start with The expedition project. So about ten years ago, I was in my hometown of Vienna, Virginia, and I took a back road and I saw a bunch of junk on the side of the road outside of somebody's house. I decided to stop and looking around, and I looked under this blue tarp that was kind of like tower-like. I'm about 5'3", so the tower was probably, maybe like four and a half feet tall, maybe shorter than that, I don't know, but I looked under and I'm like, whoa, what is that? And it was years 1982 through 2016, the entire collection of National Geographic books in these beautiful maroon cases with gold etching. Wow. Yeah, and so I'm like looking around where nobody else is on the road, I'm like, am I supposed to take these? Like, how can I just leave it? So I ended up packing them in my car and I went up to the front door about to knock, but the gentleman, whose name is John, he just opened the door before I could even knock and said, I was wondering who was going to take those. And right then and there, I put out my hand to shake his hand and said, sir, I'm going to make a project with these one day. And just me knowing that I paint large, I had always thought that I would see how history works or repeats itself. I would make this massive collage like that's 10 foot by 10 foot or even larger, like on a wall, but I'm quite the traveler. So where am I going to be long enough to be able to make something like that? Or do I break it down into panels? It took me a handful of years to kind of come up with how I was going to organize this project, because there's certainly a lot of paper and I didn't want to just start and then be completely unorganized. So about eight years into it, I learned the song on the piano and singing a zombie by the Cranberries. And it's also when the wars here were really getting a little more dense and we're going through that cycle of life. But something dawned on me that this project isn't just made for me to go through and to look at history. It's made for everybody. So late November 2023, I decided that this project is made not just for me to create, it's made for the public. So I have been inviting people for a little over two years now to create their own collage and I supply everything. These like six inch by six inch squares. They choose one magazine and then they put their collage on that and then on that square and then they return it to me and I laminate it and I hang it from a structure that I'm still in the process of making because I'd like 1,000 of them to hang from one structure. So I hang it from the ceiling. And I've collected over two years, I've collected 400 people to be a part of this project so far. Yeah. In Virginia, North Carolina, here in South Florida. I've taken it to Chicago. I got a few people there. I'd love to take it to Colorado. And I'm going to Africa March 1st. The reason I'm heading to Africa is because I joined the board of African Orphan Educational Foundation. There's a woman I met two years ago. I went, I took a trip to Nicaragua back in August 2025. And when I returned back to the States again, it was kind of that same feeling I had when I came back from Cambodia. And I just know that there's something more that I'm here to do. So I called this woman, Kathy Cray, the founder of the African Orphan Educational Foundation. And she goes, Madison, I'm so glad you're calling me now because you're coming to Africa with us. And I go, OK. So so I joined the board of the foundation and I'm really excited to it's a really small team. So we don't just like send money over to Africa. We actually like go meet these folks and we kind of put them through school and not just for school, but we help them get careers. One is now like in law school. And this is happening in Uganda: very remote and like desolate places that don't even know anything outside of their their tribe. So I'm certainly excited to kind of get back into that world as well. I'm kind of balancing out my life because I'm certainly a painter and I create. But I'm an educator as well. There's so much more that I'm excited to even learn about myself, even though I probably know it on the inside. Now it's real life and it's like tangible.
How did it go at your studio in Northwood Art and Music, West Palm Beach? Where are you teaching?
Yeah, so I've kind of been a teacher on and off for some time. I started teaching autistic children. That was a handful of years ago. I always thought I'd be a professor of some sort. Whatever I've learned and gathered from my travels and all this. But more recently, I teach at the Armory Art Center down here in West Palm Beach. I teach folks, 50s, 60s, abstract painting. And my class is called Finding Your Voice Through Abstract Painting. Yeah, because I don't I'm not an artist that feels like I have to sit there and explain the work. That's why I paint, because I don't necessarily have the words.
My words are the strokes on the canvas. I try to encourage, encourage that. And the Northwood question is a funny question for me at this moment, because I was actually just, I guess, let go from the space last week. I've been there for the past four years and I certainly, yes, I'm grateful for the opportunity to be able to just put my large canvas up on the wall. So April 20th, 2022, is when I walked over to Northwood and there was a garage where Maximo Caminero is painting right now. That's where I started painting. He had another studio and the space was open. So that's actually where I finished my red painting. Number two of The color collection. I started to put on shows. There's people that, other artists that are showing up. When I got there, there was about two other artists, David Savick and this guy named Cole, and Miguel Hurtado. He had a painting up there, but he was mostly painting at Maximo's. But he's always a part of the space. And Taylor Korma. And then some more artists started showing up. And then all of a sudden there's like eight artists in that one space. And then there's like 12 and then there's like 30 people part of the group meetings. It gets kind of out of hand when there's too many heads in the kitchen. People fall off. People come in. But I feel like I've always been one that is creating that community there and setting up shows. Switching things around and cleaning rooms. And there's new spaces that were opened. So there's Maximo Caminero's now studio that I had to leave because he came in and I helped clean out the back two spaces along with some others. And then more artists started to show up. And I was in the back space just for a little bit and then decided to kind of I call it the cubby hole up in the main warehouse of Northwood. Yeah, up in the front just to show my work and continue to. I've recognized being an artist or a painter and being, I guess, financially successful without having to work so many jobs and hustle because this label as the starving artist, being an artist, you don't just paint and paint and paint and paint. You have to take some time to talk to people and shake hands with people and market yourself.
And because when people want to invest in you or invest in a painting, they are investing in you as the artist, not just the painting. And that's something that I have learned, I guess, over the couple of years. And it has kind of come to turn into a success financially, slowly but surely. I sure think selling my number one of The color collection of nine, I personally didn't think I was going to sell that until the whole collection was finished. But I'm, I'm actually it's a year, one year to this day that I sold the painting. So, woohoo! Celebrating, I guess, with this interview.
Yeah, yeah. What a great coincidence. And now is the time to ask you about what are you listening or what you have listened throughout your life that has stuck with you.
Well, I am a jazzy cat, I would say. That's kind of what my soul sings. You know, a little fun fact about me. I carry harmonicas in my pocket, like, every single day for the past, like, 15 years, basically. So, I love jazz harmonica, like Toots Thielemans. I practice and listen to him. Great singer, kind of bossa nova jazz gal. Her name is Melody Gardot. She has such a beautiful voice and her story is amazing as well. But, of course, like Nina Simone and Pat Metheny, who's coming into concert here in Florida this coming year. hope I get to see him. I'm really into all sorts of music, but if we're talking about my soul music, I guess that's the one.
And regarding readings, what are you reading or what have you read throughout your life that you have liked so much?
I recognize that books that I really am able to retain my attention to are more so like educational books, like textbooks. I love things on nutrition, body awareness, or not just awareness, but kind of really getting into more of like the scientific. I believe in maybe some other life or something I must have been a scientist because being an artist is actually being a scientist. But other books that I've been looking at more recently are Reflection on Color by Carlos Cruz-Diez. Actually, he's a Venezuelan artist. And Remarks on color is actually one of my favorites to kind of flip through and just to kind of ponder this theory of color because that's what my paintings are typically based off of.
What about movies, series, documentaries? What have you been watching or what you follow or what you have watched continuously throughout your life? It could be also TV programs from the past, whatever.
So TV has always been kind of like a tough thing for me. Typically, I mean, like a fast answer, I love Jeopardy. Jeopardy. But my brain, I try to get my brain to answer that question as quick as they can. But sometimes it's maybe 3% out of the quickness that they can. But I love kind of like French noir films or kind of more so like animated. There's this one film called The Triplets of Bellevue, but there's no talking in it, but it's music. It's not a musical, but it's kind of animation. It's not a cartoon. Those are kind of the films, like Motorcycle diaries. It's one of my favorite, or Pan's Labyrinth, like things like that. Some silly ones if I just turn on the TV. I've probably seen like almost every Chicago PD episode. So, stuff like that. It ranges. I'm not the biggest person to watch TV. If I have the TV on, it's for background, and it's like kind of like a comfort thing because sometimes I don't want to do music. So I actually like work and walk around if the TV is on.
Okay, thank you for your answers. And before I leave you to go, I want you to leave a message to the readers that made it to this point. It could be whatever is in your mind.
I would say always listen to yourself and follow through with what your heart is telling you because that's always the right answer.
Thank you, Mad.e.
It was great. Yeah, thank you so much.
Forever Green painting.
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