Artist Statement

Practicing a holistic approach to art making, Maggie Puckett combines the disciplines of papermaker, printmaker, bookbinder, graphic designer, plant midwife, seed saver, and urban gardener. She grows fiber, medicinal, and food plants to sustain her interdisciplinary projects. Puckett believes a holistic approach to art can heal us from the socially and environmentally devastating effects of colonialism, capitalism, racism, and sexism, which have failed to protect diversity, violated natural laws of interdependent life, and triggered an age of extreme climate change. Ultimately, socially engaged artists must build sustainable and healing art practices. 

In 2022 Puckett was an artist in residence at KKV Grafik Studio and Sculpture Workshop Monumental in Malmö, Sweden, where she will produced her “Ecofeminist Seed Library: Resisting Patriarchy and Climate Collapse through Art and Ecological Biodiversity”. As part of the 2019 Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links Exhibition: Conserving Cultural Connections with Seeds, a collection of artworks from her collaborative project Seeds InService was interred in a frozen mountain high in the Arctic Circle, next to the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway. Seeds InService received 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 EXPO Chicago, MCA Chicago, Hyde Park Art Center, Johnson Museum of Art, 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). Upcoming exhibitions include Pulped Under Pressure, traveling to The Everhart Museum of Natural History, Science, & Art (Scranton, PA), Eleanor D. Wilson Museum, Hollins University (Roanoke, VA), A.D. Gallery, University of North Carolina Pembroke, Pembroke, NC. 

Her work is in the permanent collections of Dartmouth College, Occidental College, Savannah College of Art and Design, Smith College Museum of Art, St. Ambrose University, and UC Santa Barbara. 

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.