Alumna Bea Modisett (’07) Interviewed in Maake Magazine

Montserrat alumna Beatrice Modisett (’07) has been included in issue 14 of Maake Magazine – an independent, artist-run print publication and project space featuring contemporary artists and artist-run projects. This issue was curated by Kaveri Raina. The online version is now available and print will be out this winter.

Modisett and Raina previously held a talk together to support Modisett’s 2020 solo exhibition at Montserrat, “Feeding Sugar to the Stump.”

From Maake:

Geography matters deeply to Ridgewood-based Beatrice Modisett, who moved between Washington, D.C., where she was born, and the rocky New England island where her parents worked growing up. That’s why she’s just as comfortable with city life as she is in the wilderness upstate now. “It is also apparent in my use of mark making and the way I arrange space,” Modisett tells Maake in her Issue 14 interview.

“I am interested in the space between creation and destruction, convergence and collapse,” her Artist Statement says. “I consider this to be a hopeful space.” That ethos transfers into her procress, creating and destroying her drawings in cycling layers, “resulting in a surface built from thousands of gestures of loss and repair.”

Modisett hand-crafts her charcoal and wood ash, but the objects she makes marks on are still personal. “I rarely order materials online or go to an art supply store,” she said. “My surface for the last two years has been a smooth grey paper that I found stashed in a corner of Materials for the Arts in February 2020 before the start of a residency at Wave Hill.” When that residency swiftly concluded due to the pandemic, that paper became her most intimate sensory experience.

Per her spirit of liminality, Modisett’s a restless soul. For example, she saved up to skip town and ride the California Zephyr (goals!) at age 25. She just spent five days working alone in the woods, but now she’s back in the studio, building gnarly dimensionality out from her work’s frames.

You can read Modisett’s whole interview with Maake here.

You can follow her work on Instagram at @beatrice.modisett