MARY BETH MUSCARA

About the Artist

Biography- Mary Beth Muscara After working on the Baltimore City Mural Program in 1978 she lived in Mexico while studying painting and drawing at the Bellas Artes in San Miguel d'Allende. In 1989 she attended the School of Visual Arts in New York city for painting. Her work has been exhibited in galleries and non-profit spaces throughout the Baltimore-Washington, and mid-Atlantic region since 1983 including Maryland Art Place, Easton Academy of the Arts, the Anton Gallery, the New Jersey Center for Visual Arts, and the Gwinnett Fine Arts Center in Duluth, Georgia. Her fellowships include the Yaddo Residency, Saratoga Springs, NY, the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson VT, and the Hambidge Center for the Arts in Rabun Gap, GA. In 1991 she was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has received grants from the Marylnd State Arts Council, the City Arts Grant Award program, and most recently 2007, the Toby Foundation.

Artist's Statement

The routines of daily life and relating to the world, present the same challenge as my work – retreating into habitual territory, or remaining open. Habitual tendencies lead us to view our lives through narrow filters. To break through those filters and see what is simply there reveals the transitory nature of everything, including myself - the experience of unity in the relationship between the making of things, the maker of things, and the thing made. Asserting actuality or objecthood is to be in a constant state of questioning; what is real? I use elements of a domestic and natural landscape to refer to the different realms of our experience and the flimsy or precarious nature of the mental constructions we call reality.