S1E19: Greta Chapin-McGill | Thrifty Southwestern Fancy Tailgating

Artist Care and Feeding

Greta Chapin-McGill is a Black feminist artist who believes the narrative of her art is a living document, evolving in phases. The most important lesson she says she has learned has been "to get out of my own way and let the art lead me.” She is drawn to artists, male and female, whose sensibilities are able to look intimately at the feminine mystic.
“Women express openly among themselves and in every venue they inhabit emotion and spirituality," Greta says. To her, feminism means having the unparalleled physical strength literally to push humanity forward. "Feminism silently and most profoundly influences my work, she says. "Women are the species I know best.”
Reared in Washington, D.C., Greta has lived in New York, New Mexico, and Firenze, Italy.
“My work is abstractly real. The techniques are driven by classical art 'isms,' indigenous tribal art, and my own unique ancestral DNA. I spend time reading, studying, and collecting mentors to further my art," she says. Her great influences include Wilfredo Lam, Picasso, Matisse, Leon Berkowitz, Alma Thomas, and contemporary artists with whom she converses with about art, politics, and concepts of life, such as Lillian Burwell, the late Jack Whitten, Oliver Lee Jackson, Akili Anderson, Alonzo Davis, and Indigenous artist Patricia Michaels.
“I am driven to tell the story of my time through the eyes of a Black American woman, a feminist and global citizen,” Greta says.
Instagram: ChapinMcGill (where many of her works pictured are for sale—DM her!)
Facebook: Greta Chapin-McGill