Bio

Macaulay Woods is a contemporary American painter exploring action, narrative and fractured color fields through large-scale abstract painting. Her work is built for movement, for how images shift and narratives unfold across space. Working with brayers and brushes, her canvases hold multiple timelines, gestures suspended mid-action, and stories unfolding simultaneously.

Her recent body of work, Lazarus Ball (2024–2026), grapples with corruption, authoritarianism, and the censorship of free speech online to silence dissent.

In the Spells of the Netherworld subseries, biomorphic forms move through dense, shifting color fields navigating isolation, war, surveillance and grief in ecosystems under pressure.

Drawing on the Egyptian Book of the Dead to examine contemporary themes of corruption and moral reckoning, the series unfolds across four interconnected volumes: Book of the Heart, Book of the Dead, Book of the Sky, and Book of the Night.

In this work, blocks of paint become characters, lines and dots come alive; forms flicker, collide, dissolve, and reassemble.

Macaulay holds a BFA in Multimedia Studies from Massachusetts College of Art, 1994 and has exhibited at University Place Gallery, Kathryn Schultz Gallery, Gallery at the Piano Factory, the Lexington Armory, SOWA Open Studios, and Brickbottom Gallery, among other venues.

Instagram @macaulaywoodsstudi0

Photo by Andrea D. Guerra, 1996, San Francisco, CA