Lou McCall is from New Mexico and knows it well. She has lived in Albuquerque, Silver City, Santa Fe, Las Cruces, Gallup, and the village of Monticello. Lou grew up, for the most part, in Farmington, NM, although while still young, her family moved to the progressive community of Columbus, Indiana. Although little Betty Lou did not know it at the time, her art teachers belonged to the infamous beat persuasion and had opened her eyes to the wonders of modern art.
In the mid-sixties, her family moved back to New Mexico. At age ten she began taking art lessons and learning to paint in oils. At 13 she sold her first work. After high school Lou moved to Albuquerque, with the intention of studying architecture. There she shared a studio with three other artists and painting soon became more important to her than attending university. It was here that she transitioned to working in watercolor, and in producing large-scale colored pencil drawings and acrylic paintings.
In 1978. Lou moved to Silver City, NM, a thriving Shambala with an art community that was a big part of its identity. She co-founded what was then known as the Silver City Arts Council. Then, at age 25 she decided to go back to school and attended a small art school in historic San Miguel de Allende, in Mexico. Delightful as she found it, after one year she returned to the states, applying to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
After a year at the Art Institute, she discovered the fine art of animation. While in Chicago she worked for several production houses specializing in commercial animation. She graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Art degree and went on to enroll in the MFA program in Filmmaking. Her graduate studies were cut short when Lou returned home to care for her dying parents.
After a year in Santa Fe, she returned to Silver City to pursue her painting. She had almost forgotten film making, but while there she finished a short black and white film which showed at the 25th Chicago International Film Festival.
In the years that followed Lou focused on her work as a painter. She began a series of images based on the pottery designs of the ancient Mimbrenos, a culture that vanished about a thousand years ago, leaving behind a legacy of distinctive images depicting their daily lives.
Then suddenly, in 1999, she was back into moving pictures, when she was offered a job teaching video production to at-risk minority youth in Gallup, New Mexico. Her students produced public service announcements and news stories that were aired across the state. The students won a number of awards, including two national MTV awards and a Nambe Award in New Mexico. Among the highlights of her Gallup experience was taking her students to the Taos Film Festival and Teen Media Conference.
In 2016 she moved with her partner to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, north of Taos. Two years later, Lou co-founded Questa Del Rio News, in Questa, NM and was its first editor. She stepped down in 2023 to focus on her own creative projects.
