All photographs are courtesy of the artist except where otherwise noted.
DISGUISE THE LIMIT
curated by John Yau
M. David & Co. at Art Cake
September 2025
photocredit for Disguise the Limit, by Denise Sfraga
Pettee Olsen creates lightscapes of dissonance and harmony, of turbulence and stasis, hovering and moving through — so many different pairings that transforms the material into the visionary.
— Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian, Yale PhD, catalog: M. Pettee Olsen Selelcted paintings from 2019-2024
SHIFT- PAINTINGS by M. PETTEE OLSEN
curated by Meg Hitchcock
Garrison Art Center
April 13 – May 4, 2024
photography credit for SHIFT by Monica Church
Sweeping brushstrokes are at once spontaneous and choreographed, suggesting a painter who confidently engages her whole body in the creative process…
— In Their Studios – Meg Hitchcock
IMPLODING MEANING
curated by Monica Church
Vassar College, The Palmer Gallery
January, 2023
photography credit for IMPLODING MEANING, by Monica Church
… Another particularly striking painting is M. Pettee Olsen’s “Red Turn (with Value Scale),” … Embodying the abstractness of “Imploding Meaning.”
— Ganesh Pillai
ELEMENTAL FICTIONS
curated by Jessica Nissen and Lowell Boyers
The Coral Door, West Village, NYC
June 9- July 21, 2022
MADE IN COLORADO
Juried by curators Olga Viso and Cameron Keith Gainer
University of Denver, multi-site exhibition
June 7 – August 10, 2018
Her gestures recall the vocabulary of Abstract Expressionism, but she works with refraction, dissimilar actions and strategies, as well color bars and floaters that partake of boundlessness, and sensation. With reconfiguring planes and light-reflective media, the paintings resist any coherent reading and are insistently perceptually interactive…
— Stephanie Grilli, Art Historian, Phd Yale
RELAY — PAINTINGS
by MARGARET PETTEE OLSEN
Curated by Stephanie Grilli, art historian
808 Projects
November 2018- December, 2019
photography credit for RELAY, by Wes Magyar
Women in Abstraction
William Havu Gallery
July 2019
…her paintings feature the illusion of depth, which she conveys with geometric elements – specifically, sets of bars that seem to float right at the picture plane and therefore push back into imagined space…
— Michale Paglia, art writer, Westword (A Village Voice publication)
Coalesce | Group Exhibition
Goodwin F | A
November 2018
