Christina Maile
Christina Maile · Source: New York Artists Circle · Rights retained by the original rights holders
- Medium
- Ink, Paper, Watercolor
- Practice
- Printmaking, Works on Paper
Christina Maile is a writer, printmaker, and landscape architect. Formerly a playwright, she –co-founded the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective - one of the first feminist theater groups in the USA. Their work is n… Full biography
Biography
Christina Maile is a writer, printmaker, and landscape architect. Formerly a playwright, she –co-founded the Westbeth Playwrights Feminist Collective - one of the first feminist theater groups in the USA. Their work is now in the collection of the New-York Historical Society.
Her landscape architectural designs have appeared in Garden Design Magazine, and Landscape Architecture Magazine. She was the Deputy Director of Manhattan Construction for the NYC Parks Dept overseeing major projects such as the Harlem Meer in Central Park, and Morningside Park.
For her printmaking and painting work, she received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and a Joan Mitchell Studio Grant. In 2018 she was awarded a Miriam Chaikin Foundation Grant for Writing. She is currently a member of the performance and writing group, Stories Around the Table. For 14 years she served on the Westbeth Artists Residents Council. Recently she was elected to the Westbeth Artist Housing Board of Directors.
Her visual work has been featured in literary journals, the International Print Center in New York City, numerous galleries, included in the Feminist Artists Collection at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, NY, and is represented in many private collections. During the pandemic, she has been using recycled wood from Carmine St Guitars to build houses for solitary bees. www.christinamaile.com.
Artist statement
My printmaking emerges from my career as a landscape architect, and my years as a feminist playwright and theater producer.
While writing and design allowed me to experiment in different ways with the dynamics of gender, identity, and nature , it was through printmaking that I found a way to examine in solitude, these ideas, especially within a specific cultural context.
As an artist of mixed West Indian and Dayak heritage, some of my work explores the complex iconography of the colonizing narrative especially its photographic imagery of women and children. Juxtaposing these images with artifacts of power, patriarchy, racism, and ignorance has become a way for me to both pictorially subvert the original message, and to externalize the responsibility of the artistic gaze .
And that responsibility has grown: to look at what is being seen. To be impious of my own experience. To use the grammar of provocation, metaphor, and archetype in order to find resonance with those who are unheard, and allegiance to the marginalized and the suppressed.
