Jane Maxwell

Floral Surf- figurative female surfer, mixed media and resin on panel

2020

In her provocative collagist works, Boston, Massachusetts-born contemporary mixed media artist Jane Maxwell explores body image and harmful ideas about conventional beauty as perpetuated by the media. 

Maxwell spent a lot of time during her childhood in her grandfather’s South Boston garment factory. She admired the fashion designers and delighted in the doll-size versions of the clothing that the designers would make for her. She loved the different textures and patterns she discovered on the facility's bolts of fabric. There, Maxwell’s love of fashion, design and pop culture was born. 

Maxwell works with images mined from vintage fashion magazines and newspapers, constructing layered, multifaceted paintings that are bound with melted beeswax and finished with high-gloss resin. The sometimes complex imagery in her art, which features text and graphic elements from ads and billboard signage, isn’t a nod to haute couture fashion. It is instead a comment on the fashion industry's unrealistic body portrayals and Maxwell’s complicated relationship with her own self-image. 

“Into my adulthood, my love for fashion grew, but I went through a period of deeply resenting the fashion industry for teasing me with clothes that I could neither fit into nor afford,” Maxwell has written.

Maxwell’s use of negative space to create silhouettes is the artist’s way of telling us what she thinks is missing in the fashion industry — input from women. Maxwell sees challenges in women’s quests to find accurate representation within their clothing choices, and she highlights this theme by utilizing repurposed marketing materials to create iconic silhouettes that project confidence and power.

Maxwell earned a BA in literature from Middlebury College. She studied mixed media at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at the deCordova Museum School in Lincoln, Massachusetts. Maxwell has been a guest college lecturer on the subject of body imagery, art and fashion, and was included in the 30th-anniversary edition of the noteworthy publication Who’s Who in American Art.

Maxwell’s first exhibit of note was in 2000 at Newburyport at the Newburyport Art Association’s Annual Juried Show where she won the Mixed Media Prize. Since then she has had dozens of exhibits across the United States as well as France and the United Kingdom.

On 1stDibs, find authentic Jane Maxwell paintings, mixed media works and other art.