Wednesday, April 16 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Margaret Curtis (b.1965, Bermuda) is a feminist artist whose exuberantly painted, multi-layered narrative paintings address power dynamics on both the individual and societal level. Using saturated color and compressed space to highlight the fictional realm in which her narratives unfold—a stage-set terrain of false fronts and facades, awash in anxiety—her large-scale oil paintings that explore everyday flexings of power. With every tool she can find—cheese graters, hand-carved stamps, cake-decorating tools—Curtis builds and scrapes viscous color into the forms she needs. Her struggle with the resistant substance of paint always leads to deeper meaning, and enriches the subject matter in unforeseen ways, inviting poetry into the act of layering paint on panel.

Curtis’s subject matter is feminist, personal, and political. She is drawn to imagery that has spent enough time in the world to have accumulated conflicting layers of meaning. For example, iconic emblems of American grit and progress now read as mawkish signs of exploitation and exceptionalism. She likes teasing the tangled messages apart, playing with their inherent contradictions and shifts. Tinkering with cultural gas lighting itself—the play between a seductive surface and the mechanics of power quietly working away underneath—hoping to expose something more relevant, direct, and honest.

An inaugural recipient of the 2021-2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, Curtis is a recent finalist for the Catherine Doctorow Prize for Contemporary Painting. She graduated Magna cum Laude from Duke University, received her BFA from The Atlanta College of Art, and attended the Yale/Norfolk Summer School of Music and Art. Her work first gained recognition in Marcia Tucker’s groundbreaking Bad Girls exhibition at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York, in 1994. Since then, Curtis has shown at P.P.O.W., The Brooklyn Museum, The Andy Warhol Museum, The Wexner Center, and The Mint Museum, among others. Recent solo exhibits include Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, Utah (2024), Tracey Morgan Gallery, Asheville, North Carolina (2023,2020), and The Florence Museum of Art, Florence, South Carolina (2022). Group exhibitions of note include Appalachia Now (2019), Rebel/Re-Belle: Exploring Gender, Agency, and Identity (2022), and Too Much is Just Right (2023) at the Asheville Art Museum, Asheville, North Carolina; Start Talking (2022) at the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina; and Re:Representation (2021) at Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, New Orleans, Lousianna.

Reviews and features of Curtis’ work have appeared in Art Forum, The New York Times, Harper’s, Oxford American, Art in America, Art News, Modern Painters, Interview, New Art Examiner, and other national publications. Her work is in permanent collections throughout the United States. Curtis splits her time between North Carolina and New Mexico, and is represented by Tracey Morgan Gallery in Asheville, North Carolina. margaretcurtisart.com