Our first artist is Katrina Majkut. She is a visual artist and writer living and working in Brooklyn, New York. Majkut has a Bachelors of Science in Business Administration from Babson College. She also has a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. She has been featured in multiple publications including the Huffington Post, VICE Communication’s Broadly, Mic Media, Hyperallergic. Her art catalogues has been featured in several library collections, including the National Museum of Women in the Arts. In Majkuts own work, “my work aims to touch upon socially constructed, gendered identities and their subsequent inequalities”. Majkut explores feminine narratives in aesthetics, media, history, and personal experiences. Her most recent paintings focuses on weddings and marriage traditions. Majkut uses her art work to empower women to understand how social traditions affect social and civil rights.
The artworks featured in our gallery relate to marriage traditions. Each painting has taken her roughly about a couple weeks to complete. All the featured artworks of Majkut in the gallery are oil and spray paintings. All her paintings have a mixture of organic and geometric shapes. Organic shapes can be shown on Crowned, with the bushes and flowers in the background of the painting. As well as in Bridal Shower: Center of Attention there is a lot of geometric shapes.There’s a lot of shade and depth in the center of each painting. The paintings have a mixture of primary, secondary and tertiary colors. However, in Crowned, After, and Inheritance there are neutral colors to symbolize the mood Majkut is expressing about marriage traditions.
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Katrina Majkut creates art with the intention of creating social awareness and change. Her artwork that is featured on our gallery reflects that intention and she says “I can’t imagine making art without a message or simply art for art’s sake.” Her artworks push boundaries on traditions. Majkuts goal is to modernize time-honored rituals and represent modern lifestyles, values and feminist goals. She hopes that her artwork inspires activism and empowerment to women or any viewers. Her paintings also demonstrate domestic stereotypes, limited narratives, and exclusionary practices.It aims to examine the nature of our customs, their affect, and create a productive conversation surrounding identity politics and the hidden social influences that hold society back.
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On her painting ,Crowned, there is a woman in her wedding dress showing her garter on her leg. This wedding tradition is when the groom removes the garter from the bride’s leg while a crowd watches. This is a common wedding tradition, which according to Majkut is an outdated tradition and is extremely sexist. The painting After has a wedding dress that has been put away collecting dust hanging from a torn up wall. Finally, in the painting Bridal Shower: Center of Attention, there is a clear representation of the bride opening up presents and all of them happen to be house essentials. In a bridal shower the guests are supposed to bring gifts for the bride and what she might enjoy. In this painting Majkuts message is that a woman's role is not to stay at home all day to cook, sew, iron, and clean. Instead of living her full potential she is being stereotyped into a sexist society.