Maggie Libby (they/them) is an artist and worker, rooted in a Maine-based studio practice. They explore the relationships between external and internal geographies; women's bodies, images, life stories; our relationship to local ground; spaces between artwork and viewer. They are passionate about creating inclusive women's histories and learning how to listen deeply. Their primary practice is drawing, a legacy from the atelier training of the New York Studio School. They also need to slide color across a surface, create transgressive interactions, invite participation, try unfamiliar mediums, and grow things from seed.
They received the William and Marguerite Zorach Fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Art, a fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center, and a Maine Arts Commission project grant for a guerilla installation of Where Are the Women? project at the Colby libraries. In addition to teaching a January Program Introduction to Figure Painting and participating in faculty shows while Visual Resources curator for the Art Department, their two Colby Museum of Art solo shows were the Regarding the Self (pregnancy series) and 2012's Hidden Histories: a project by Maggie Libby, which recreated the history of women at Colby through images, altered books, biographies, storyboards, and memorial walls, using source material from the college archives. As Curator of Digital Discovery and Engagement at Colby's Special Collections and Archives, they have a deep store of institutional knowledge on the college's visual histories as well as silences in the college archives. They steward several oral history projects to expand representation in the archives. Some of their muses include audre lorde, Nyssa Chow, Nancy Spero, Betye Saar, Emily Nelligan, Lois Dodd, and Louise Bourgeois.
Vimeo link to Pecha Kucha talk on Where are the Women, spring, 2013.