MACAULAY WOODS—Artist
instagram: @macaulaywoodsstudi0 | macaulaywoods.com | Based in Massachusetts
EDUCATION
BFA, Multimedia Studies, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, 1994
with focus in film, video, and installation.
CURRENT WORK
Lazarus Ball (2024–2026)
A series of large-scale abstract and abstract-figurative paintings presented in four books (The Book of the Heart, The Book of the Dead, The Book of the Sky, The Book of the Night) that engage grief, war, surveillance, and corruption through gestural mark-making and biomorphic figures. Using the EgyptianBook of the Dead as a narrative framework, Woods recasts the journey of the soul in the Afterlife through contemporary systems of power and crisis. Together, the works enact narratives of mortality, displacement, witness, and resistance. Woods approaches action painting as catharsis, working with brayers and brushes in repetitive, rhythmic gestures. The series extends into animated sequences in which the biomorphic figures (sprites) enact emotional arcs across cinematic space. Sprites, beasts, demons, and bunnies inhabit dynamic biomorphic ecosystems playing out spontaneous narrative action within scripts of war.
Recent sub-series include:
2026 — The Book of the Night explores techno-fascist governance, surveillance, and eroded visibility through automatic drawing, free association, and abstract figures using a restricted palette of gold, white, and red on a black ground.
2025 — The Book of the Sky Surveillance, techno-fascism, and human vulnerability rendered through biomorphic figures navigating dystopian, multilayered abstract space. Shifting palettes and dynamic compositions map tension, observation, and resistance. Techniques range from gestural brushwork to thrown paint.
2025 — The Book of the Dead Sprites enact narratives of judgment, passage, testimony, ritual, and transformation. The series integrates hieroglyphic-like scrawls against fractured color fields. The work confronts the ongoing atrocities in Gaza and the global cost of institutional silence through the narrative of a contemporary journey of souls across a perilous landscape. The series is made through gestural brushwork and brayer work.
2024 — The Book of the Heart explores grief, repetition, motion, and endurance through action-driven abstraction across forty-seven large-format canvases using brayer work and velocity.
2023 — Helix Series Originating from ink sketches and automatic drawings created between 2014–2023, the series transforms pressure into gestural paintings using urgent brushwork and bold color.
INDEPENDENT PRACTICE
CALIFORNIA (2009–2023)
Photography, writing, poetry, and videography documenting current social and political movements, including Occupy, NO KXL, International Day of Women, and Make Banks Pay Day in Los Angeles. Co-created short-form videos The Appalachian Beekeeper and Two Crows Farm in North Carolina as Nantahala Films. Self-published a photo series about the Great Recession called Desert Stories. This body of work laid the conceptual foundation for the current painting practice, which continues to explore corruption, abuses of power, and political resistance through narrative-based abstraction.
SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2007 | 13 Paintings, Cambridge Commons, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
Curated by Kristen Mills
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2009 | NorthEast Prize Show, University Place Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Juried by Nicholas Baume, Chief Curator, ICA Boston
2008 | Blue, University Place Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Juried by Jen Mergel, Senior Curator, ICA Boston
2007–2008 | Red, University Place Gallery, Cambridge, MA
Juried by Jane Farver, Director, MIT List Visual Arts Center
2008 | Fire, Brickbottom Gallery, Somerville, MA
Curated by Pauline Lim
2007 | At Home With the Arts Annual Exhibition, Milton, MA
2007 | New Members Show, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2002 | Plateaus and Totems, Lexington Armory, Lexington, MA
1998, 1997 | SOWA Open Studios, Boston, MA
1995 | Emerging Artists Show, Viridian Artists, New York, NY
Juried by Lisa Dennison, Director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
1993 | Inversions, Gallery at the Piano Factory, Boston, MA
GRANTS & AWARDS
Boston Redevelopment Authority Artist Certification, 2002, 2008, 2026
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATIONS
Cambridge Art Association, Cambridge, MA, 2007–2009
Creative Continuum — Business and the Creative Process (Bentley College/MassArt joint program)—2007. Future Media Concepts, Avid Master Certificate in non-linear editing, 2003
SELECTED PUBLICATIONS & PRESS
2027 | The Observer & The Agitator — Rawhead Issue 04 (April 2027 publication)
2026 | *Wildscape Literary Journal*, May 2026 — Issue 06 (April 2026)
2007 | Online review, 13 Paintings exhibition, Harvard Square, Cambridge, MA
1993 | Bay Windows Magazine, review of Inversions exhibition in the Arts section.