M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen (b. 1963, Rochester, New York) is an American artist known for her pursuits in painting that continue apace today.
From 1978 to 1982, Pettee Olsen studied dance under the tutelage of Marina Vronskaya, earning her an invitation to understudy for the corps de ballet of the American Ballet Theater. After a critical injury and upon seeing an exhibition of abstract paintings at the Albright Knox (AKG) Museum in Buffalo, New York, she relinquished her dance ambitions to enroll at the Rhode Island School of Design. At RISD, she began by sublimating her love of dance through painting. During her time at RISD, Painting department head Al Wunderlich introduced her to Susan Rothenberg, with whom she had a studio visit, and whose concerns with motion through the language of abstraction resonated with the young artist. This influenced her sense of being in dialogue with artists in New York.
After RISD, in 1997, Pettee Olsen moved to Manhattan, where she found work in the fine art printmaking world. In 1990, she became the founding curator, co-founding Oberon Press LTD, NYC, with her now husband. The press is well-regarded for lithography. She was twenty-four at its founding.
Beginning in 1995, and a graduate of Columbia University, she taught on an ad hoc basis before devoting herself entirely to painting with a focus on expansive, dislocated gestures in ambiguous space, a fusion of both expressive and conceptual concerns.
Painting is an extension of my slippery sense of the world, not an ‘understanding’ of it.
Striking yet confounding painting — that’s of interest to me.
— M. Pettee Olsen
M. Pettee Olsen in her studio, Columbia University, 1994, photography by Jennifer Zitron
Throughout the early 2000s, the artist spent time living and working between Connecticut and the Flatirons of the Rocky Mountains. In her pursuit of a range of full-bodied, extemporaneous, and finely detailed choreographed moves, disruptions of place find echoes in her work. In Colorado, she obtains a studio space that generously allows her to move back and forth between multiple, largely human-scaled paintings within long painting sessions, weaving visual threads between canvases. This method created ‘consistency within the contingencies of her wide-ranging vocabulary’, according to art historian Stephanie Grilli ( PhD Yale).
By 2010, Pettee Olsen began expanding her methods of paint application, pouring, spraying, and dripping paint onto the canvas surface, then partnering with the paintings, slowly spinning the substrate, using gravity’s effects as well as several other tools to add and subtract paint. By the mid-2010s, she increasingly imposed geometries, rectilinear and gradient bars she calls edits, redactions, and value scales, as well as other manner of obfuscating the painted surface. The effects range from lushly layered and bold to exquisitely fragile and powder-gritty. By this time, she had begun to layer her surfaces with luminous optically engineered paint, using large brushes she engineered by strapping and screwing them together. Additionally, her tool set includes the use of textured rubber, brayers, brushes, squeegees, studio-made aerosol paint, spray paint, and mono printing with everyday objects, among others.
In 2020, Pettee Olsen returns to her use of the broad paintbrush, increasingly focused on the essential quality of her moves and contrasting visual occlusions. The effects are paintings that flicker between surface and illusion — an irresolute quality anchored by the interplay between her subtly precise and vigorous hand. Her work reads as a sort of poetic presencing and continues in this vein today.
In her studio, M. Pettee Olsen (left) discusses her work with Susan Rothenberg (right). During this time, her paintings shift from figures in various stages of dislocation and dissolution to further abstracted gestures that replace illusions of the figure in space.
(Rhode Island School of Design, RISD VIEWS, staff photography, 1985,)
With over three decades dedicated to painting, Pettee Olsen has established herself as a significant contemporary voice. Career highlights have been featured in Artforum and Art News, with additional coverage in Westword (A Village Voice publication), The Denver Post, The Providence Journal, and Art New England. Recent residencies include Michael David, M. David & Co., Brooklyn, NY (2020) and a fellowship from the Ucross Foundation (2019). She has received numerous awards, including an Artist Grant from the Rhode Island School of Design for an installation spanning the RISD campus and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design. The artist has participated in museum and University shows at Columbia University (New York), The Rhode Island School of Design (Rhode Island), Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art + Denver Botanic Gardens (Colorado), The University of Central Florida (Florida) The University of Denver (Colorado), and Vassar College (New York). M. Pettee Olsen remains actively engaged in the contemporary art scene, with symposia, interviews, and podcasts centered on her work and aesthetic concerns. She lives and works in Upstate New York.