William Maxen

Region: MFA Annual

 My work explores the duality and ambivalences of the mixed-race experience. It pulls from past experiences, both personal and historical, to bring to light my connections with memory, environment, and belonging. Dynamics of intimacy emerge in my work as the painted figures simultaneously interrupt, obstruct, bridge, appear, and erase traditional lines of demarcation between race and color, time and dimension, and subject and viewer.

As a person of color born and raised by a white, single mother in the inner city and later the suburbs of Connecticut, I make work that allows me to confront racial realities that I have otherwise refused to acknowledge: my legibility and Blackness, my contentious relationship to my sense of inheritance, the past, and interactions within particular spaces. My practice is informed by these experiences, as well as my experience as a football player. I incorporate the physicality and the acute understanding of space that sports provide and consider how it translates into painting, both conceptually and materially.