biography

Maureen McCabe (b. 1947, Quincy, MA) is an internationally recognized collage artist, whose playful yet carefully composed assemblages weave imagery from ancient and current cultures, together with aspects of folklore, literature, magic, myth, and the unexplained. McCabe’s art consists predominantly of drawn or inscribed images, often upon chalkboard slates, that are juxtaposed with artifacts, relics, jewels, feathers, and bits of popular culture. Despite their many elements, the assemblages are not random, but rather highly researched fragments of experience curated around a focused theme. With a nod toward Joseph Cornell and the Surrealists, McCabe creates constructions that have a poetic, dream-like quality in their ambiguous narratives and carefully posed and floating elements. This combination of the material evidence of the past with the mystery of the otherworldly has long been admired by followers of her oeuvre. McCabe has an extensive exhibition record over the past fifty years, with over 30 individual exhibitions in New York, Washington, D.C. and Chicago galleries. She has shown in museum exhibitions throughout the United States and Mexico, and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Bellevue Arts Museum (WA). McCabe received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art before teaching for four decades at Connecticut College, where she retired as the Cummings Endowed Chair in 2011. In addition to receiving numerous grants, she has had artist residencies at the American Academy of Rome; the Rockefeller Foundation at Bellagio, Italy; the Cité Internationale des Arts, Paris; as well as at Yaddo and MacDowell.