Lucy Maki is an American artist currently living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her work is in the NM Museum of Art in Santa Fe, the Albuquerque Museum, the University of NM Art Museum and numerous private collections. Selected publications include: Southwest Contemporary’s 2022 Field Guide, Trend Magazine Spring 2015, and New American Paintings Western Edition Volumes #36 and #18.  Recent exhibitions include:  “12 NM Artists to Know Now, 2022” at Pie Projects in Santa Fe, a 2022 solo exhibition “Out of the Blue” at Exhibit 208 in Albuquerque,  and Arts Thrive 2023 at the Albuquerque Museum. Over the years, she has had 15 solo exhibitions, including one in NYC at Linda Durham Contemporary Art which was reviewed in the publication Art News.

Maki’s work ranges in scale from large mixed media shaped canvases to small constructions and collage paintings. Investigations of color, materiality, pattern, and space are central to the work’s visual appeal. The work evolves organically through a call and response process going beyond a presupposed schema. Meaning arises through the process of painting rather than determined beforehand. Works become puzzles, almost like representations of symbolic thought, to be interpreted as the painting progresses and is completed. Conceptual ideas may arise at the end, but are not the starting point. In Maki’s work, geometric imagery conveys a personal and felt exploration of the processes of illusion and perception as it relates to the nature of being. Behind the facade of a strong visual appeal, which is often associated with the decorative, there may lurk questions, comments, and wordplays regarding how one sees and interprets knowledge, reality, existence.