MAUREEN O'NEILL
BIOGRAPHY
Maureen O’Neill is a painter and pastel artist who lives in Tarboro, NC. She has exhibited throughout the Northeast and Southeast, as well as New Mexico. She serves as Director of Exhibitions and Educational Programming for the Barton College Art Galleries and is an Assistant Professor of Art in the Department of Art at Barton College. In her time at Barton, she has organized and exhibited artists-in-residence exhibitions and residencies in the Barton Art Galleries for over twelve years, developing programming that connects visiting artists with students and the wider community through exhibitions, workshops, lectures, and collaborative studio experiences.
In 2021, she received the Lincoln Financial Faculty Member of the Year Award. In addition to her teaching at Barton College, Maureen leads workshops in drawing meditation at the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh and Ghost Ranch Education and Retreat Center in Abiquiu, New Mexico. Her teaching and residency work emphasize contemplative practice, material exploration, sensory awareness, and creative process as pathways for connection and personal discovery.
Maureen grew up in Holyoke, Massachusetts. She received her B.F.A. in Painting from the University of Massachusetts Amherst and her M.F.A. in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island.
FIELD & FRAME EXHIBIT
ARTIST STATEMENT AND GALLERY
Solitude and space occupy my work.
I am drawn to liminal spaces — portals, thresholds, exits, altars — places that hold a sense of transition and quiet transformation. I am interested in how a holy or transcendent moment can exist within the ordinary rhythms of everyday life, and how the ordinary itself can become sacred through attention, memory, and presence.
In the studio, I search through spatial impressions and fragments of remembered experience. Pastel becomes a way of navigating these inner spaces — a process of returning to myself again through making. The work unfolds through searching, layering, and waiting, allowing images and spaces to slowly reveal themselves over time.
