Todd McKie

Artist-in-Residence

Boston-born Todd McKie grew up visiting the Gardner Museum. The painter, sculptor, and printmaker found inspiration in the lace collection in the Veronese Room and made dozens of white on black drawings during his residency in 2000. 

Some months later, McKie returned to work with students from the Tobin School. In the Tapestry Room, he talked about his time as an Artist-in-Residence and showed them the “lace” drawings he had been working on. The students also had the chance to look closely at several examples of lace from the collection and to talk with the Museum’s textile conservator about how the pieces were made, used, and preserved. Following the presentation, students sketched their own lace-inspired drawings in the Courtyard and galleries. McKie’s lace series grew and was presented in a 2003 solo exhibition at Victoria Munroe Fine Art Gallery in Boston titled Adventures in the Lace Trade. A corresponding catalogue was published that included the drawings and an interview with McKie.

Todd McKie is a painter, sculptor, and printmaker. Witty and playful, his work depicts images of heads, vessels, animals, and pictographs. McKie has exhibited at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University; the McMullen Museum at Boston College; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, Massachusetts; as well as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He is the recipient of two Massachusetts Artists Fellowships (1975 and 1989) and residencies at Centre d’Arte in Marnay-sur-Seine, France; the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina; and the Villa Montalvo (now the Montalvo Arts Center), in Saratoga, California.