ANNE MARIE
Anne Marie
Anne-Marie taught school pupils in Germany for two years in Heidelberg. During that time, she rented a large room in a shared apartment overlooking Heidelberg Castle. The space soon evolved into a vibrant artist’s loft. She attempted to exhibit a few small paintings in local restaurants, but they were returned to her without comment.
In 1984, she followed a German postgraduate Harvard Law student whom she had met in Heidelberg to Cambridge.
In addition to being an artist and a writer, Anne-Marie has been an avid student and lifelong learner, earning three Master’s degrees. Her 1993 thesis on the sculptor Camille Claudel and the painter Suzanne Valadon heightened her feminist awareness. Her 2015 museum-studies capstone examined the role of Indigenous and minority artists on the global art scene. Her most recent MFA thesis, completed in January 2020, explored deeply personal themes and the tensions between 1970s feminist theory and contemporary queer theory as they relate to her artistic drive.
Through many detours and pauses—marriage, family, academic pursuits, and various teaching positions—Anne-Marie eventually reconnected with her younger self and with her original love of painting upon completing her MFA in 2020.
Her very first painting, an abstract oil landscape in vivid blues, purples, browns, and deep reds, now hangs on the wall of her Lowell studio, creating a bridge between her past and present.
As artist Carrie Moyer has said: “The amazing thing that happens in the studio is that you give yourself permission to invent something. You can work with something you can’t necessarily explain, and can use that space of un-knowing as a generative place.”