M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen (b. 1963, Rochester, New York) is an American abstract painter known for her highly charged and dislocated gestures in illusory space.
An immersive exposure to a range of the arts early on was formative for Pettee Olsen, from the Creative Workshop at the Memorial Art Gallery, to music at Eastman, to dance on Elton Street. Her intensive dance training earned her an invitation to understudy for the American Ballet Theater. Following a career-ending injury and a pivotal visit to the Albright Knox (AKG) Museum in Buffalo, New York, she abandoned her dance ambitions to pursue visual art at the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
At RISD (1982-1986), painting department head Al Wunderlich introduced Pettee Olsen to Susan Rothenberg, who visited the young artist’s studio. Their conversations of shared concerns with movement and psychologically evocative painting led Pettee Olsen to see herself in dialogue with painters in New York.
In 1987, Pettee Olsen moved to Manhattan, where she was introduced to a range of visual languages in the large-scale fine art printmaking world. Three years later, at the age of twenty-four, she became the founding curator at Oberon Press LTD, NYC, known for its fine art lithography, alongside the master printer, her now-husband, William Martin.
During her years pursuing a master’s degree at Columbia University (1995), Pettee Olsen was invited to teach painting on an ad hoc basis at there, in the Department of Art and Art Education, before devoting herself entirely to painting.
I’m increasingly interested in our slippery sense of perception — that middle way of seeing — where the mind flickers between viewing evocative movement in fantastic space and the gross-physical surface that places a viewer squarely in the room.
— M. Pettee Olsen
M. Pettee Olsen in her studio, Columbia University, 1994, photography by Jennifer Zitron
Throughout the early 2000s, Pettee Olsen spent time living and working between Connecticut and the Flatirons of the Rocky Mountains. In Colorado, her large studio afforded space to move back and forth between multiple, human-scaled paintings at a time, actively weaving her role-shifting visual threads between canvases. According to art historian Stephanie Grilli, this method created ‘consistency within the contingencies of her wide-ranging vocabulary’.
Artist M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen balks at constructions and templates that distance us from the totality of lived experience — that compartmentalize and shun nuance or ambiguity. She approaches her art as a kind of presencing in which she draws upon somatic intelligence and mark-making based in movement, which can be described as bodying forth. Her work reminds us that the essence of a painting lies in the relation of the painter and the surface they confront.
— Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian PhD, Yale
Bringing everything to bear from her life in art, she makes the emerging canvas her partner or fellow actor in extemporaneous but considered performance… of dissonance and harmony, of turbulence and stasis, hovering and moving through — so many different pairings that transform the material into the visionary.
By 2010, Pettee Olsen began expanding her methods of paint application, pouring, spraying, and dripping paint onto the canvas surface, then slowly spinning the substrate, harnessing gravity to effect, shifting the work on and off the wall, using several other tools to add and subtract paint. Her tool set included the use of textured rubber, brayers, brushes, squeegees, studio-made aerosol paint, spray paint, and mono printing with everyday objects. By the mid-2010s, Pettee Olsen increasingly imposed geometries, including rectilinear and gradient bars, she calls edits, redactions, and value scales, as well as other methods of disrupting the gestures embedded within the painting surface. The effects range from lushly layered and bold to exquisitely fragile and powder-gritty. By this time, she had begun to layer in luminous, optically designed paint, using large brushes she engineered by strapping and screwing them together. In 2020, spending more time in New York, Pettee Olsen began to increasingly focus on the essential quality of touch, layering, disrupted movement, and use of the quoted gesture.
Susan Rothenberg (right) visiting M. Pettee Olsen in her studio (left), Staff photography, Rhode Island School of Design.
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.