About the Illustrator

Maggie Mailer is an American artist whose work explores the overlap between play and diplomacy, within the context of painting. Her work borrows freely from art history, and employs the genre of landscape painting as a stage set in which to observe parallels between the creative process and the impact of human activity on the actual landscape. Recent works include This is Not a Picnic, a roving installation under the umbrella of Picnic Pavilion at The 58th International Venice Biennale, in which Mailer experimented with situating an unstretched painting as a picnic cloth within the cityscape of Venice, challenging the standard context for viewing artwork. Previous projects include founding The Storefront Artist Project, an ephemeral Artist Residency program in Pittsfield Massachusetts which ran from 2002 - 2012 and presented artists at work in real time as a continual public performance. The project is credited with jumpstarting the revival of the city of Pittsfield, and has been used as a model for the regeneration of other cities across the country. 

Mailer has created illustrations for the books, Lara’s First Christmas, by Alice O’Howell, and, In a Pickle, by Martinko, whose animated version won the Silver Award for both Best Animated Short, and Best Children’s Short, at the Independent Shorts Awards in November 2020.

Mailer’s work is represented by Ober Gallery in Kent, CT, and Gut Gallery in Dallas, Texas. She has received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, A.R.T. Grant. Her work has been featured in Art New England, with cover stories in The Boston Globe, and The Los Angeles Times.

Born in 1971 in New York, Mailer studied Architecture and Fine Arts and received a BA in English Literature from Columbia University in 1993.