Marguerite White was born in Boston in 1966 and raised in Newton. In 1988 she graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Textile Design. She spent the better part of the next decade working and living on commercial waterfronts in the US and Europe. Working on locations stretching from Nantucket to Vinalhaven ME, Coney Island, Amsterdam, Cologne and New Orleans, she both painted the waterfronts and was a housepainter on the waterfront. In 1999 she fled to the middle of Texas, where there was no waterfront. By 2002 Marguerite earned an MFA in Painting from the University of Texas in Austin, where she had, under the tutelage of a Dominican Shamanista, stopped painting altogether and started drawing on the walls. She currently lives in Newton, and teaches drawing and mixed media at Clark University and College of the Holy Cross. She maintains a studio in an abandoned fur vault and continues to draw on the walls.

a few words about my work...

Consider how the feel of a neighborhood can change suddenly and radically by music blasting from a passing car. This incongruity imposed on a known landscape has a jarring effect on one’s sense of time and place that leads to unpredictable associations and improbable points of reference. Analogously, I intend for my drawings to have the effect of an unusual story overheard in a public place, one that changes your relationship to a physical place by becoming another layer of its history.
I am, at heart, a storyteller. Working with chalk and shadow pictographs, an ephemeral form of graffiti, I create a layered narrative within a public space. I am compelled to tell stories that multiple people can relate to, hinging the story on their environment. For me, allowing the viewers to create their own paths through a story is of the utmost importance.
Many believe the process of making art somehow revolves around creating permanent ‘beauty’; but my work is not made to be sacrosanct. I do not create objects to be enshrined in a museum; my work hinges around the beauty of human interaction, the myriad reactions that can be provoked.