Welcome listeners to 5 Questions: A Critical Mass for the Visual Arts Podcast in which we ask 5 questions of our interviewees aimed at positioning and contextualizing their respective bodies of work within the St. Louis artworld. This episode, we’re talking with Margaret Keller whose Public Works Project Riverbend just opened beneath the St. Louis Arch last week.
Margaret Keller works in related series in various media, including installation, drawing, digital prints, painting and silkscreen, as she examines the relationships between nature, contemporary culture and technology. She has a degree in drawing from the University of Missouri-Columbia and a M.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis in painting and printmaking. She studied the history of garden design at London University and also did post-graduate studies at Webster University in electronic media and was a visiting artist at the University of Arizona. In 2002 and 2003, Keller was a Visiting Associate Professor at Washington University in St. Louis and also taught the Summer Program in Florence, Italy, which included the Venice Biennale.
As Professor of Art at St. Louis Community College – Meramec and gallery co-director of the Meramec Gallery of Contemporary Art in St. Louis, she curated Everywhere and Elsewhere, showing regional and NYC painters in October 2015 and January 2016. Regarding Nature, Disseminate and 3 x 3 are among approximately fifty exhibitions she has curated at the gallery.
Exhibits include Quadratfuß-NX2-Annex Art /Berlin, Cedarhurst Museum, The Arkansas Art Center Museum, The Contemporary Art Workshop in Chicago, The Maryland Federation of Art Gallery in Annapolis, The Crisp Museum at Southeast Missouri State University, The Wichita Art Museum, The Neville Museum in Green Bay, The Tweed Museum in Duluth, The Riverside Museum and The Brea Cultural Center in California, The Roanoke Museum of Fine Arts, and The Butler Institute of American Art in Ohio, among others. Upcoming in 2019, Keller will exhibit at The William and Florence Schmidt Art Center Museum, Illinois. Margaret is the winner of the 2018 Public Works Project with her work Riverbend, which opened September 22 at the Gateway Arch in Ely Luther Smith Square.
In addition to teaching drawing, design, painting and art history, she also focuses on the curatorial and critical aspects of contemporary art. See Delicious Line – June 2018, All the Art magazine issues Winter 2016 and Fall 2105 along with June 2016 temporaryartreview.com for her writing. Her art reviews have also appeared in ArtReview.com, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Art In America, the New Art Examiner and Review magazine. Keller’s artwork is featured in numerous reviews including Surveillance Series in Winter 2018 All the Art and in temporaryartreview.com and Studio Visit, Volume 30, page 100-101.
5 Questions is a program by Critical Mass for the Visual Arts – a nonprofit, self-formed visual arts collaborative dedicated to promoting, enhancing and initiating contemporary visual art in the St. Louis region.
This Episode:
with Margaret Keller and Joe Kohlburn
Editor- Sarah Hammond
Producer- Brett Williams
Critical Mass for the Visual Arts 