Andy Truscott speaks with Maia Palmer, a 2022 Individual Artist Fellow and the current artist exhibiting in the Mezzanine Gallery at the Carvel State of Building.

Maia Palmer was born in Wilmington, Delaware in 1980. She works primarily in acrylics and charcoal, and has also created community murals, digital works and figurative sculptures. Palmer earned a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. She has exhibited nationally as well as internationally in Spain, Germany, and China. Palmer has lived all around the globe, and is interested in capturing the unique spirit of each location that she experiences.

As a portrait artist, Palmer continues to use art to initiate communication – “my subject becomes my partner in conversation.”  Much of her work has been portraiture of others, including a pandemic quarantine series of coloring-book portraits made “to create community from a safe distance.” But her Fellowship drawings feature Palmer as “my own subject, exploring how my identity has been altered by living with chronic migraine.” This work gifted the artist with a new type of community: “It has been affirming to have positive feedback from others who have reached out to me as fellow sufferers.”

Her exhibit Making the Invisible, Visible, is currently on display at the Mezzanine Gallery at the Carvel State Office Building in Wilmington, DE until Friday, November 25. To learn more about it watch this brief video about her work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLbj7UKa4Lw

To learn more about Maia, to see her work, or to see when her next exhibits are, visit https://www.maiapalmer.com/.

In 2022, Palmer is also participating in the INTO LIGHT PROJECT, a national non-profit organization is dedicated to changing the conversation about drug addiction. By creating public exhibitions of original portraits and individual stories of people who have died from the disease of drug addiction in locations around the country, we provide communities with an opportunity to talk about the issue of stigma, the primary obstacle to getting support and treatment for those with SUD and their families. INTO LIGHT PROJECT is art activism in the purest sense. To learn more, or to submit your loved one to be featured visit, https://intolightproject.org/submit-application-delaware/