Molly Marie Nuzzo

About the Artist

Molly Marie Nuzzo is a painter based in Baltimore, MD. Originally from southeast Michigan, she earned an MFA in painting from Eastern Michigan University. Her award winning work has been exhibited nationally. She currently serves as Professor of Studio Art at Montgomery College in Rockville, MD.

Artist's Statement

My  work uses portraiture to explore ideas of queer embodiment, by which I mean, the relationship between personal identity, the experience and limitations of the physical body, and appearance. I seek to ask questions about the interaction of embodiment with social experience and self-expression. My paintings are my personal investigations into socially constructed standards of gender presentation, body, gendered beauty, and bestowed legitimacy established by a hetero-normative society and culture. My continual interest in painting queer subjects, or queer bodies, is sparked and sustained by my own experiences and relationships with others whose identities fall outside these social norms. I view my representations not simply as appropriations of the physical body, but as honest and relatable portraits of people in my beloved community. As I engage in the painting process, the relationship between myself as an artist and my subject becomes pivotal. Through the course of close observation and response, I see myself both constructing and mediating the subject’s body, a kind of inter-embodiment in action through painting.