Margaret Curtis

Collapse, oil and ash on panel Up now @traceymorgangallery #margaretcurtisart #contemporarypainting @joanmitchellfdn

American Cuck Q Clock, oil on panel, 60” x 48” @traceymorgangallery Using trompe l’oeil at a time when people refuse to believe what they see with their own eyes. #margaretcurtisart #politicalinsanity #gunculture #trucknuts #culturalcollapse @joanmitchellfdn

Pink Stripe, oil on panel, 48” x 72” #margaretcurtisart #traceymorgangallery #climatechange #contemporarypainting

Moonshiner/Dataminer 2026 Oil and ash on panel 5 x 4 feet There’s one week left of my show @post__times and I haven’t posted anything on this painting yet. The first reference to the ideas in this piece appear in a sketchbook from 4 years ago. I liked the visual of a mine (entrance, tunnel, flume) and a still (vat, coils, barrels, jugs) combined into some crazy Rube Goldberg-like perpetual motion machine of extraction and consumption. And I wanted to complicate and pull apart the iconography around the hillbilly and the prospector. Both were settlers laying claim to indigenous land through extreme violence. But unlike the other archetypes of American rugged individualism, the hillbilly has had at least 100 extra years of whitewashing. His violence has been softened—a squirrel hunting rifle, a skillet or rolling pin over the head—rag tag, bumbling, harmless, pathetic. I grew up in TN. My dad was a gemologist and we would sometimes hunt for garnets in the tailings of old talc mines in the region. I also remember playing around an old still we kids found at the end of buggy path on my grandfather’s farm in the mid-70’s. It had a bamboo “roof” above to hide it from planes, and the large metal vat had two huge axe marks left in it by the sheriff. It still smelled of fermented corn mash. The reality of these experiences was always in sharp contrast to their representation and commodification in the numerous tourist traps in the area. In this painting, the endless extraction and consumption cycles of a predatory economic system have been focused into a single point—the “consumer,” mined and fed himself. Fragmented, decaying. #margaretcurtisart #contemporarypainting

Margaret Curtis at Post Times, New York “’S” March 19 – May 17, 2026 Photos: images copyright and courtesy of the artist and Post Times, New York @post__times @margarcur

It’s been a week since the opening of The Forest was Rebuilt with Scrap and Ply at the Wiregrass Museum in Alabama. I’m so thrilled to be included in this timely and sensitive exhibition. And Katie Kehoe and I were making work about the same fire! April 18, 2026 - June 27, 2026 “The Forest was Rebuilt with Scrap and Ply brings together six artists based in the Southeast who explore beauty, awareness, grief, and resilience in response to intensifying natural disasters and environmental change. The exhibition takes its name from Margaret Curtis’s monumental painting, which presents a powerful vision of a present shaped by ecological disruption. As rising sea levels, stronger storms, and extreme weather increasingly affect our region, these artists reflect on what it means to live, adapt, and rebuild within vulnerable landscapes. Their works acknowledge both loss and possibility, recognizing that communities must develop thoughtful approaches to mitigation, repair, and long-term stewardship for the future. Through painting, sculpture, installation, and collaborative practice, the artists offer reflections that are at once poetic and practical. They consider how we respond to disaster, how we remember what has been altered or lost, and how creativity can imagine paths forward. Curated by Katie Hargrave and Meredith Laura Lynn, the exhibition brings together work by Margaret Curtis, Adda Farcus, Katie Kehoe, Cristina Molina & Jonathan Traviesa, and Christina Vogel. Together, these artists examine how we endure, rebuild, and care for the places we call home.” Thank you to everyone at @wiregrassmuseum for making this possible and to @katie_hargrave_ and @meredithlauralynn for your curatorial vision!

“Burning Bridges I” by Margaret Curtis, a ten-color lithograph, 22”x30”, printed and published by Obee Editions in 2026. See this print, a reminder that the act of “burning bridges” can be at once intimate, symbolic, and broadly reflective of the turning points that shape the world around us, this weekend at booth A1 at the Brooklyn Fine Art Print Fair @powerhouse_arts . Get tickets at link in bio. Early collector sale 10% now through the end of the fair. Start or grow your collection at our website shop link in bio. @margarcur #fineart #printmaking #artcollector #printfair #bfapf #obeeeditions #lithography

THANK YOU @plasternyc and @galeriemagazine for including Margaret Curtis’s exhibition in your April round up! So many great shows on this list, be sure to click the link in bio to read about them all! /must-see-solo-gallery-shows-april-2026/

@margarcur at @post__times exhibition walkthrough ✨ On view through May 17 🎨 Margaret Curtis: ’S 🗓 Mar 19–May 17, 2026 📍 Post Times Margaret Curtis’s exhibition ’S at Post Times features new paintings and works on paper depicting constructed landscapes made from plywood billboards, neon signage, scaffolding, and symbolic American imagery. Curtis incorporates ash collected after the 2022 Hermit’s Peak Fire in northern New Mexico, connecting environmental change with ideas of national identity, collapse, and cultural myth-making across layered, large-scale compositions. #art #MargaretCurtis #PostTimes

THANK YOU @sephsees and @hyperallergic for including Margaret Curtis’s exhibition in your April round up! Such a thoughtful reflection on the show. And so many great shows on this list, be sure to click the link to read about them all! /15-shows-to-see-in-new-york-city-this-april/

I’m so excited to have opened my first solo in NYC since leaving the city two decades ago. ‘S runs through May 17th at Post Times Gallery, 29 Henry Street. The show is divided into two parts. The front room contains large scale, highly layered oil paintings which explore cultural collapse. Remnants of American archetypes flake and decay along a sunset frontier of endlessly parcelled, allotted, and privatized land. The cowboy, prospector, self made man, etc. are variations of the same rugged individual—alone in the world, averse to collective action, desperately seeking the loophole and eager to replace ruination with a fresh start. Overhanging the contradictory and shifting messaging of the signage is a mawkish innocence, a “there’s nothing to see here” wholesomeness of the settler which now reads as national tragedy. The show’s title, ‘S, seeks ownership of this very American mess. In the back room, I’ve brought the climate catastrophe inside. Three gouache, ink, and graphite drawings depict burning bridges. Over the fireplace is a large-scale gouache drawing of a plaster and lathe wall crumbling and ablaze. The French toile-like wallpaper is made from 8 rubber stamps I carved of some of my favorite trees along a mountain trail in New Mexico that I have been hiking since the early 1990’s. That forest burned to the ground in 2022, in the largest fire in NM history. Those rubber stamps, carved years before the fire, are now a type of documentation of climate change and forest loss. (I also ground ash from that fire into oil paint used in the large oil paintings) Tremendous thanks and gratitude to Broc Blegen @post__times for understanding the work and having such a great gallery. Thanks to everyone who came out to the opening!! Tremendous thanks to everyone at @joanmitchellfoundation for making this work possible and everyone @joanmitchellcenter for getting me over the finish line. That includes all you beautiful residents!! And thank you SO much to @denniskardon and @dagcentral for writing so beautifully about the show on your walls. (Sorry about the bad IG crops, esp of Moonshiner/Dataminer) #climatecrisis #americana #frontier #whiteness #endofempire

Installation views and artwork images are now viewable on the website at . The exhibition is open Thursday - Sunday, 12-6pm, through May 17. Margaret Curtis’s paintings depict sprawling landscapes populated by larger-than-life figures assembled from scraps of neon signs and plywood billboards. Familiar American tropes—a sheriff star, cowboy hats and boots, guns, the striped legs of Uncle Sam, oil pipes—appear as towering constructions dominating the landscape, pieced together and held aloft by rickety wood scaffolding. The images operate as facades, both literally and figuratively, revealing the fragile architecture upon which ideas of gender politics and national identity are constructed. Margaret Curtis (b. 1965, Hamilton, Bermuda) received her BA from Duke University and her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art. She also attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art. Solo exhibitions include P·P·O·W, New York (1996, 1999, 2003), the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, and Tracey Morgan Gallery. Group exhibitions include the New Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Drawing Center, and the Andy Warhol Museum. Her work has been reviewed in Artforum, The New York Times, Harper’s, Art in America, and Modern Painters. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship. Curtis lives and works in Tryon, North Carolina, and Las Vegas, New Mexico. @margarcur