ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists
ARTMATTERS is an intimate, bi-weekly podcast featuring in-studio conversations between host Isaac Mann and professional
artists from around the world. Now in its second season with over 55 episodes, the show has become a vital resource for the
contemporary art community, exploring everything from technical practices and daily studio insights to career advice, creative
blocks, and the emotional realities of making art.
Host Isaac Mann brings both the perspective of a working artist and the curiosity of a thoughtful interviewer to each conversation,
creating a space where artists can discuss not just their techniques and influences, but also the vulnerable aspects of creative life-
hope, depression, expectation, success, and failure.
Whether exploring technical processes, relationship dynamics, or tips for a healthier practice, ARTMATTERS offers
both emerging and established artists a rare glimpse into the real experiences behind successful creative careers.
ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists
#76 with Margaret Curtis
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Welcome back to ARTMATTERS: The Podcast for Artists
Our guest today is Margaret Curtis, a feminist painter born in Bermuda whose vivid, densely layered canvases explore power dynamics at both the personal and societal level. Margaret is an inaugural recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Fellowship, and her work first gained national recognition in Marcia Tucker's landmark Bad Girls exhibition at the New Museum in New York in 1994. Since then she has shown at the Brooklyn Museum, the Andy Warhol Museum, and the Wexner Center, with recent solo shows at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and Post Times Gallery in New York City. Her work has been reviewed in the Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Harper's, and is held in permanent collections throughout the United States.
I sat down with Margaret in the last days of her exhibition entitled ‘S at Post Times in Lower Manhattan. I set up the mics and the cameras and Margaret spoke to me about endurance, dumb mark-making, her beloved Quinacridone gold and how she describes a day in her studio as 30,000 nonverbal decisions, and feeling practically broken by the end of it.
We talk Cricut, Frisket, Speedy Carve and Dibond as well as the cake decorating tools that she snatched up in a deliberate act of rebellion against her painting instructors - and originally kicked off this predilection for alternative mark-making, Margaret explains why she believes style is a market pressure, not something worth pursuing, and that each painting demands its own visual language. She also talks Jack Whitten, gives some great final advice, and tells me why painting has always been "her friendliest enemy.”
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If you have any questions you want answered, write in to artmatterspodcast@gmail.com
host: Isaac Mann
www.isaacmann.com
insta: @isaac.mann
guest: Margaret Curtis
www.margaretcurtisart.com
insta: @margarcur
Thank you as always to ARRN, the Detroit-based artist and instrumentalist, for the music.