Joetta Maue is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, drawing, and textiles. Her practice examines labor, care, and embodied experience through sustained material inquiry, attending to the ways domestic life holds broader questions of time, visibility, and cultural value.

Rooted in long-term observation and process, Maue’s work traces subtle exchanges between bodies, materials, and environments. Light, fabric, gesture, and repetition become tools for considering how meaning accumulates through everyday acts of maintenance, caregiving, and presence. Across media, she is interested in what is held, worn, mended, and passed down—both materially and emotionally.

Maue’s work has been exhibited at museums, universities, and nonprofit institutions throughout the United States and Europe, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Emerson Contemporary, the Griffin Museum of Photography, and the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles. Her work has been reviewed in The Boston Globe and published internationally in books and journals focused on contemporary art, photography, and textile practice.

She has been awarded residencies at Millay Arts, Monson Arts, Penland School of Craft, and Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, where she also served in a leadership role as Textiles Coordinator. Maue teaches in graduate and undergraduate programs in the Boston area and lives and works in Massachusetts.

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Contact the artist for inquiries.

joettamaue@gmail.com

Selected press excerpts:

Joetta Maue’s installation “Changing Skins” fills a sheltering corner behind the gallery wall; it’s a little den of safety. She has covered a wall with photographs of her children’s skin – fingers, backs, necks, and bellies. The same images printed on veils in front of a window and hanging from the ceiling, suggest how ethereal and fleeting time is, how quickly a child grows. There’s a pink shag rug on the floor, and stuffed animals in a corner. Larger photos of two children – a back, a chest – hang against the wallpaper of bodily details.

All that skin brings to mind the public outrage that arose in reaction to photographer Sally Mann’s Immediate Family in the 1990s. When they were little, Mann’s children spent summers naked – just as she had before them – out on their land. She took pictures. Her book set off a volcanic response; people felt she had eroticized her children… What if Sally Mann was simply seeing her children through a mother’s eyes? Before skin is about sex, it’s about touch, and in “Changing Skin” Joetta viscerally communicates a mother’s intimate familiarity with her children’s bodies. Life is about contact. Children need it. We all do.

CATE MCQUAID, Boston Globe Art Critic, The opposite of the male gaze, "Motherhood as Muse" at Concord Art turns a loving eye on what patriarchy fears

At first glance, Joetta Maue’s intricate drawings look like galaxies. But on closer inspection, they’re revealed as scenes of detritus—remains of paper, thread, and dust left on the studio floor. The everyday and the celestial merge and blend. Abstracted, Maue’s mark-making feels simultaneously intentional and organic. Delicate strokes of colored pencil swirl and emerge from rich matte black paper, suggesting mini universes, spider’s webs, and spaces unseen. Maue is a multifaceted artist with a sustained investigation into the beauty of ordinary things.

Persephone Allen, Art Spiel, Backscatter: Light Studies and Everyday Alchemy at OVERLAP

Joetta Maue’s wall-sized, multi-media installation “What Moves”… a soothing ensemble of earth-toned photographs, drawings, and embroidery devoted to tracking the sun as it moves through everyday landscapes. Absent of people, their presence is felt everywhere. An emphasis on textures, from fine hair to crumpled bedding, creates a sense of comfort and nostalgia. Maue’s images simulate the oscillations of light and time, inviting viewers to slow their pace and be present in the moment.

Elin Spring. Photography writer and curator, What will you remember Photographic Journal, Exposure: What makes it great

Maue’s frank exploration of the messy emotions of day to day life is documented in a language of feelings, passions and sentiments that we all understand and speak. This is the crux of her work…The commonality and drama of human experience is there for us all to see if we choose to take the time to observe .

Kathleen O'Hara, curator and writer, Self-Fabricated Catalogue

Looking to the work of … Joetta Maue… the materiality and history of the vintage handkerchief renders it a mediating object, one that enables an affective engagement with and intervention on an unwritten archive of women’s labours, pleasures, and communication…Maue’s “reclaimed linens” directly engage with the handkerchief as a receptacle for bodily fluids, which both policed the boundaries of the self and demonstrated human porousness, infused with mess and sentiment…Her work focuses on the memories infused in cloths, but the history of the handkerchief is one of literal infusion, functioning as a container not simply for feeling, but also for bodily fluids. Joetta Maue’s finely wrought works are almost uncomfortably intimate, and force a consideration of the presence of bodies and the impressions left by touch. Using “reclaimed linens,” Maue renders figures who might have touched these surfaces, both invoking her own embodied labour in the density of her stitches and the physical traces of other women’s bodies in these linens…Maue thus gestures towards the limits of cross-temporal connection through material objects.

Mariah Gruner, Critic and Historian, Material Culture Review, Materiality, Affect, and the Archive: The Possibility of Feminist Nostalgia in Contemporary Handkerchief Embroidery

Joetta Maue offers definitive proof that the statement [There’s a lot of beauty in ordinary things. Isn’t that the point] itself holds true through her imaginative pieces. Joetta believes in the power and beauty of the ordinary, and she combines photography, drawing and stitch to help us all see what she sees.

Mary Carson, Arts writer

Artists are known for delving into the roots of human emotion, and Joetta Maue is no exception. In fact, she thrives on depicting conflicting emotions and contradictions.

Kimberley Nicoletti, journalist