Artist: Megan Marlatt

The Painting Center presents Myths and Mummers, featuring new paintings and big head masks by Megan Marlatt in the Main Gallery.

Stemming from her creative research into European pre-Lenten carnival culture and its relation to the spring equinox, Marlatt’s new work addresses fluctuating seasons and the challenge of climate change. Utilizing figures of folklore like Jack Frost, or personifications of the seasons like Persephone, Marlatt’s paintings position these deities prominently into the landscape to narrate the story of transformation and loss.

Megan Marlatt was a recipient of a Fulbright Scholar Research Fellowship to Belgium in 2018, where she studied Belgian carnival culture and the painter James Ensor. She has won a Fellowship in Painting from the National Endowment for the Arts (1995), two Professional Artist Grants from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2013, 2006), one from the Virginia Commission on the Arts (1996), and one from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts (1985). She has participated in numerous national and international solo and group exhibitions. Since 2013, Marlatt has been the founder and director of the artist collective “The Big Head Brigade,” a group that builds and performs in large papier-mâché heads. She resides in Virginia and is Professor Emerita at the University of Virginia.