Photography Jane Feldman
Maggie Mailer
Maggie Mailer is a painter living and working in New York State. Her paintings focus on luminous, layered landscapes which shift between abstract and narrative modes. Mailer's work has been shown internationally, and can be seen in the collections of Rachel Maddow, Jimmy Buffett, and the Norman Mailer Center and Writers’ Colony in Provincetown, MA. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, A.R.T. Grant.
In 2009 she became the first Artist in Residence at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, MA. Her work has been featured in Art New England, with cover stories in The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times.
In 2002 Mailer founded the Storefront Artist Project in Pittsfield, MA, a residence program which served to establish a transparent boundary between the artist at work and the public sphere. The project received national attention on both coasts, is credited with the revival of the city of Pittsfield, and has been used as a model for the regeneration of other cities across the country.
The work Mailer developed during this period focused on themes of transparency and synchronicity. The series, called Timeline for a Transparent World, traces intersecting bodies of work begun in a storefront studio, where art-making functions as a continual public performance. As the timeline evolves, the works rely increasingly on transparent media, suggesting a permeable, dissolving boundary between inside and outside, between ideas, and parts of the self. The works include drawings on sheet-rock, canvas, sandpaper, and vellum; and paintings and fountains made of glycerin soap.
Mailer’s subsequent works evolve a series of fables in painted form where color, space and time become interchangeable.
Mailer was born in 1971 in New York. She studied Architecture and Fine Arts and received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University in 1993. She currently resides in New York State.