Marie Watt

Marie Watt (b. 1967, Seattle, Washington) is an American artist whose interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, and Iroquois proto-feminism. Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University, Connecticut, as well as degrees from Willamette University, Oregon, and the Institute of American Indian Arts, New Mexico. In 2016, Watt was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University, Oregon. Watt serves on the board for VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art), New York, and on the Native Advisory Committee at the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, of which she is a member of the Board of Trustees.

Catharine Clark Gallery presented Watt’s solo exhibition Marie Watt: Companion Species (Calling Back, Calling Forward) in 2022. In 2023, Watt’s work was exhibited at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas. Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt (on view February 4, 2022 – October 20, 2024), a traveling monographic survey exhibition drawn from the collection of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation and accompanied by a catalogue, continues to be exhibited at six total institutions in the United States. Watt’s work was included in the exhibition Indian Theater: Native Performance, Art, and Self-Determination since 1969, at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (2023). In 2023, her work was also featured in Converge45 in Portland, OR and in The Land Carries Our Ancestors at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Catharine Clark Gallery is scheduled to present a solo exhibition of Watt’s work in the fall (September 21 – November 16, 2024).

Watt’s work is held in many public collections, including the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Denver Art Museum, Colorado; Cantor Arts Center, Stanford, California; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, D.C.; Tia Collection, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Forge Project, Taghkanic, New York; Gochman Family Collection, New York, New York; Portland Art Museum, Oregon; Renwick Gallery, Washington D.C.; Seattle Art Museum, Washington; Tacoma Art Museum, Washington; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut, among others.

Watt recently exhibited at the Chazen Museum of Art at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; The Mackenzie Art Gallery, Saskatchewan, Canada; Stelo Arts, Oregon; The Buffalo History Museum, New York, and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.

Marie Watt lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She has exhibited with PDX Contemporary, Portland, Oregon; Marc Straus, New York, New York; and Kavi Gupta, Chicago, Illinois. She has exhibited with Catharine Clark Gallery since 2019 and has been represented by the gallery since 2022.