M. (Margaret) Pettee Olsen, (b. 1963 – Rochester, New York), was raised in Brighton, where her father was the area’s first physician trained in neurology—a later influence in the artist’s work. Pettee Olsen received an MA from Columbia University and a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her paintings have been described as ”mutable perceptual events” by art historian Stephanie Grilli, Yale PhD.
Informed by abstract traditions, Pettee Olsen ventures into new territory in painting using optically sophisticated paint and a sensibility that taps the tone and tenor of our times. She is known for her large-scale paintings of dislocated and layered gestures in illusory space. Career highlights have been published in Artforum and Art News. The press has also received the artist positively in Westword — A Village Voice publication, The Denver Post, The Providence Journal, and Art New England. Pettee Olsen has been in residence with Michael David, M. David & Co., Brooklyn, NY, (2020) is a fellow of the Ucross Foundation (2019), and has received numerous awards, including an Artist Grant from the Rhode Island School of Design for an installation bordering RISD proper and the Museum of the Rhode Island School of Design.
With early creative roots in dance, Pettee Olsen was invited by the American Ballet Theater to be an understudy with the corps de ballet when she pivoted her focus to painting. After RISD, Pettee Olsen moved to New York, where she began work assisting large-scale projects, often toggling between printing presses that specialized in different printmaking methods, from serigraphy to lithography. By age twenty-four, after several years assisting at Petersburg Press Gallery in New York, she became the founding curator of Oberon Press Ltd NYC, known for its fine art limited edition lithography. Soon after, Pettee Olsen turned her focus entirely to painting.
M. Pettee Olsen has cultivated over three decades of a career in painting, driven by long-time interests — shifts in perception and highly keyed psychological states at play with categorical thinking.
