Discipline: Visual Art – painting

Margaux Williamson

Discipline: Visual Art – painting
Region: Toronto, CANADA
MacDowell Fellowships: 2018, 2022

Margaux Williamson is a painter from Toronto, born in Pittsburgh. Her work focuses on how story and abstraction can be tied to documentary and realism and has been covered by Frieze, Art Forum, Vogue, The New York Times, The Believer, and others. A retrospective of her work opened at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2021 and will travel to three other museums until 2023. Her latest work was presented in November 2022 at White Cube’s Hong Kong gallery.

She has published a book of paintings, I Could See Everything, which took the form of an exhibition catalogue for a made-up museum located in the far north, published by Coach House Press and curated by Ann Marie Peña. She also has written movie reviews and manifesto pamphlets and has collaborated with friends in production and performance. Her feature-length, no budget art video, Teenager Hamlet, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and can be found on UbuWeb.

At MacDowell in 2018 she developed text studies for her painting series "Rock and Tree," these works became part of her McMichael touring exhibition. During her 2022 residency, she reviewed and rearranged the companion writing for her recent show at White Cube, read books, worked on a few collaborations, and sorted through notes and thoughts for new works to be undertaken after the residency.

Studios

Star

Margaux Williamson worked in the Star studio.

Funded by Alpha Chi Omega, a national fraternity founded in 1885, Star Studio — built in 1911–1912 — was the first studio given to the residency by an outside organization. To this day, Alpha Chi sorority pledges learn the story of Star Studio and its role in supporting American arts and letters. Beginning as a nicely proportioned…

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