ON VIEW
April 18 – 16, 2025
May 8 – 17, 2025

OPENING RECEPTIONS
Friday, April 18, 5 – 7 pm
Thursday, May 8, 5 – 7 pm

Maureen Hsu

@maureenhsu232

Maureen Hsu is an artist and painter in Southern New Hampshire. Her paintings
explore connections between nature and enchantment in the contemporary. She’s a graduate of New Hampshire Institute of Art (NHIA) and the Institute of Art and Design at New England College (NEC) with a certificate in photography, a BFA in painting, and a minor in art history. Hsu has taught pre-college as part of NEC’s Art and Design elective faculty. Her paintings and photography have been exhibited locally in New England, including Viva Magenta at MECA&D; Buoy Art Gallery, Kittery, ME; Portland Symphony Orchestra; NHAA 2022-New Faces, Portsmouth, NH; MGNE- 2023, Ecology Exhibition; Launch Art Peterborough, NH, and more. Several of her pieces are in private collections, and her work was awarded Best in Show in the NHIA 2009 Continuing Education Exhibition. Hsu was commissioned to design art for a music CD, The Gottfried Project Presents a Mixed Bag, and was a key contributor in painting the Storr St. mural, a Concord, NH community art project. She received her MFA at Maine College of Art & Design in 2025, with a focus on painting.

My paintings are made in response to the experience of contemporary life. The unknown, lost, detached self reflects the feelings of disappearing nature and a noisy, artificial, chaotic world. Painting is the practice that reconnects me to an enchanted inner world and to nature. Part reaction, part resistance, and part adaptation, I paint in an enchanted search and drift working between abstraction and representation in suspension of the critical mind, finding my way instinctually. In dream-like focus nature presents itself in bright, subdued, and unrealistic colors, shapes, and marks, the analogous language and experience of poetic connections, disconnections, and strange enchantments. Be they small scale or up to 36 x 48 in., my paintings are the document and accumulations of a reflective journey to connect one back to the enchantment in the natural world, the everyday, and the self.



The MFA Thesis Exhibitions for the Class of 2025 incorporate a range of making practices unified by the overwhelming concerns these students have for their environment, their communities, their families, and their own wellbeing. With an emphasis on the personal, and at times the anecdotal, these 17 artists make a variety of contributions in the form of ceramics, drawings, paintings, photographs, poems, prints, sculptures, sound and video installations, and textiles. The nature of their work and research demonstrates the caliber and cultural relevance of Maine College of Art & Design’s Masters in Fine Arts in Studio Art program.