One of the typical measures of success for artists is the ability to quit their day jobs and focus full time on making art. Yet these roles are not always an impediment to an artist’s career. This exhibition illuminates how day jobs can spur creative growth by providing artists with unexpected new materials and methods, working knowledge of a specific industry that becomes an area of artistic interest or critique, or a predictable structure that opens space for unpredictable ideas. As artist and lawyer Ragen Moss states:

Typologies of thought are more interrelated than bulky categories like ‘lawyer’ or ‘artist’ allow. . . Creativity is not displaced by other manners of thinking; but rather, creativity runs alongside, with, into, and sometimes from other manners of thinking.

"Day Jobs", the first major exhibition to examine the overlooked impact of day jobs on the visual arts, is dedicated to demystifying artistic production and upending the stubborn myth of the artist sequestered in their studio, waiting for inspiration to strike. The exhibition will make clear that much of what has determined the course of modern and contemporary art history are unexpected moments spurred by pragmatic choices rather than dramatic epiphanies. Conceived as a corrective to the field of art history, the exhibition also encourages us to more openly acknowledge the precarious and generative ways that economic and creative pursuits are intertwined.

The exhibition will feature work produced in the United States after World War II by artists who have been employed in a host of part- and full-time roles: dishwasher, furniture maker, graphic designer, hairstylist, ICU nurse, lawyer, and nanny–and in several cases, as employees of large companies such as Ford Motors, H-E-B Grocery, and IKEA. The exhibition will include approximately 75 works in a broad range of media by emerging and established artists such as Emma Amos, Genesis Belanger, Larry Bell, Mark Bradford, Lenka Clayton, Marsha Cottrell, Jeffrey Gibson, Jay Lynn Gomez, Tishan Hsu, VLM (Virginia Lee Montgomery), Ragen Moss, Howardena Pindell, Chuck Ramirez, Robert Ryman, and Fred Wilson, among many others.

Organized by Veronica Roberts, Former Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, with Lynne Maphies, Former Curatorial Assistant, Blanton Museum of Art

Marsha Cottrell and Zoe Leonard are included in  "The Way We Are 3.0" at The Weserburg Museum für moderne Kunst, Bremen, Germany from 20 March 2021 - 23 January 2022. 

Marsha Cottell will deliver Mary Baldwin University’s 2020 Firestone Lecture in Contemporary Art on 16 March 2020 at 7 pm. 

In her work, Cottrell repurposes the functionality of an electrostatic office laser printer, computer, and screen, and inventively utilizes the tools’ capabilities to create luminous images in layers of carbon-black toner. Her seemingly alchemical process gives material form to an open-ended exploration of the tensions and interplay between nature and technology, body and machine, exterior and interior in images that evoke visionary or dreamlike states, nature, and the sublime.

The Contemporary Art Museum of Raleigh, NC is pleased to present a solo exhibition, entitled Black and Light, of new work by Marsha Cottrell this summer. 

The Morgan Library & Museum is pleased to present the group exhibtion, By Any Means: Modern and Contemporary Drawings from the Morgan, with works by Marsha Cottrell. The exhibition will be on view from 18 January through 12 May 2019. 

Contemporary approaches to drawing are often experimental and expansive. By absorbing and building upon the legacy of avant-garde experimentation in the first half of the twentieth century, artists from the 1950s to the present have pushed beyond the boundaries of traditional draftsmanship through their use of chance, unconventional materials, and new technologies. By Any Means brings together about twenty innovative works from the Morgan’s collection, including many recent acquisitions, by artists such as Marsha Cottrell, John Cage, Sol LeWitt, Vera Molnar, Robert Rauschenberg, Betye Saar, Gavin Turk, and Jack Whitten.

Van Doren Waxter is pleased to present a group exhibition with new works by Marsha Cottrell, 1 August - 30 August 2018. The group exhibition explores multidisciplinary approaches to depicting forms found in or related to the natural world. Featured historical and contemporary artists include Hilary Berseth, Marsha Cottrell, TM Davy, Jeronimo Elespe, Tom Fiars, Judy Fiskin, Joe Goode, Voliker Huller, Ellsworth Kelly, Cameron Martin, Douglas Melini, Valeska Soares, Hedda Sterne and Kevin Zucker. Spanning almost 60 years (1960-2018), works on view encompass painting, drawing, photography, and sculpture, and demonstrate pictorial strategies ranging from photographic to nearly abstract.

Marsha Cottrell's practice is centered around manipulation of the quotidian office computer and printer. Bridging drawing, printmaking, painting, and photography, Cottrell's process produces luminous images that allude to celestial bodies and interior landscapes. As in Untitled (9:49:46am) (2018), her works meld the sensuality of the corporeal with the enigma of the intangible. 

Van Doren Waxter is delighted to present a solo exhibition of new work by New York artist Marsha Cottrell. Titled Screen Life, the show will be on view from March 8-April 21, 2018 at the gallery’s 195 Chrystie Street location. The exhibition will feature three unique large-scale platinum prints and an array of intimately-scaled works created with a computer and electrostatic laser printer. 

Marsha Cottrell will be included in the group exhibition, NYPOP Emerging Curatorial Series IV: Worlding, at the Richmond Center for Visual Arts at Westrn Michican University.

Marsha Cottrell will be included in Heliotropes a group show curated by Matthew Nichols at Geary Contemporary, 9 June - 15 July 2016.

The word “heliotrope” names at least two particular things in the world: a popular garden plant that turns its purple flowers toward the sun; and a mirrored instrument once used by land surveyors to reflect sunlight across long distances.  As the title of a summer group show, the word is being creatively misread to encompass an array of visual motifs that address the sun and explore its numerous attributes.

Marsha Cottrell and Michael DeLucia will be included in Summer Exhibition at 11 Rivington, 8 June - 29 July 2016.