Artist Statement

Maggie Puckett is an artist based in Chicago, USA. Her work, which combines drawing, printmaking, hand papermaking, artist’s books, and ceramic sculpture, sits at the intersection of science, folklore, and feminism, often using as source material iconography from historical documents and objects pertaining to nature and agriculture based women’s labor and female fertility folktales. Many of her projects reference and subvert traditional myths and folktales through an ecofeminist lens, exploring relationships between humans, non-humans and the environment.

This October, Puckett will join as artist-in-residence The Arctic Circle 2024 Autumn Art and Science Expedition to Svalbard, Norway. She will live aboard an Arctic-class expedition ship and while producing “Future Folklore,” a mixed-media body of work at the intersection of science, folklore, and feminism. A response to climate change on the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, home of the Global Seed Vault, the work updates historical, patriarchal folklore around seasons, animals, and plants to meet the challenges of a warming planet.

As part of the Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links Exhibition: Conserving Cultural Connections with Seeds, a collection of artworks from her collaborative project, Seeds InService, has recently been interred indefinitely in a frozen mountain high in the Arctic Circle, next to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. The exhibition and deposit of art was funded by the Norwegian Research Council. Seeds InService is also the recipient of a MAKER Grant from Chicago Artists Coalition and Other People’s Pixels, and a matching grant with 3Arts Projects. In a month long residency in Caracas, Venezuela, Puckett collaborated with local artists and a member of the Yanomami tribe making paper from local fibers and an edition of artist’s books about a Yanomami creation myth.

Puckett has exhibited widely including at Smith College Museum of Art, EXPO Chicago, MCA Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, NY), Cambridge Art Association (Cambridge, MA), Paul Robeson Galleries, Rutgers University (NJ), and The Center for Book, Paper, and Print (Columbia College Chicago).

Her work is in the permanent collections of Smith College Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, UC Santa Barbara, Savannah College of Art and Design, Occidental College and St. Ambrose University. Born in Southern California, Maggie Puckett currently lives and works in Chicago. She holds a BS in Studio Art from New York University and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Columbia College Chicago.