Susan Maakestad

'Overlook' - abstract landscape - color block - impressionism - stripes

2022

Memphis-based painter, Susan Maakestad is attracted to the spaces between things, the unnoticed marginal spaces in the urban landscape. Likewise, as a painter she likes painting in the unsettling place between abstraction and naturalism. Her prosaic subjects have included big box store parking lots; pedestrian crosswalks at urban intersections; webcam traffic footage of midwestern freeways; and the landscape as viewed through municipal security cameras. Her paintings are empty of human activity but filled with brilliant color and recollected light, uplifting the banal subject and granting it majesty. Merely recording the natural world does not interest her. She is moved by the internal logic of the paintings themselves, a world where things make sense somehow. Where everything lives and breathes in tension held together by beauty and paint. “Pavement dissolves. Is it concrete or is it grass? Is it land or is it water? Landscape as we know it is mutating, disappearing. Climate change has added anxiety, poignancy and grief to the traditional concerns of the landscape genre. I am committed to the transformation of the urban environment even as I long for the consolations of nature,” says Susan. Susan’s honors include a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, an ArtsAccelerator Grant from ArtsMemphis and direct purchase awards from the UrbanArt Commission in Memphis. In late 2021 she completed her first large-scale public art commission at Memphis International Airport. She has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has been included in “New American Paintings” and has been exhibited nationally. Public collections include the Tennessee State Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art and the City of Memphis. She earned an MFA from The University of Iowa and a B.A magna cum laude and M.A. from Central Washington University. Maakestad was Professor of Art at Memphis College of Art from 1997-2020