Matthew Cusick, 1970 ~ Paints with Maps

Matthew Cusick, American painter, was born in New York City and graduated from The Cooper Union with a BFA in 1993. His work has been exhibited internationally since 1996, including New York City gallery shows at Andrew Kreps, Kent, and Pavel Zoubok. Cusick was the recipient of a NYFA painting fellowship in 2006 and The Bemis Center for Contemporary Art residency fellowship in 2008. He has been a visiting artist and lecturer at The Cooper Union and at University of Nevada, Las Vegas. His work is held in numerous public and private collections including the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art and the Progressive Art Collection.

Cusick lets his work be guided by his various materials: maps, atlases, encyclopedias and school textbooks. “I like to catalog, archive, and arrange information and then dismantle, manipulate, and reconfigure it. I use maps as a surrogate for paint and as a way to expand the limits of representational painting. Through a process of cutting up and reassembling fragments of maps from different places and times, I am attempting a more complete representation of an existence, one that incorporates the geographical and historical timelines of that existence within the matrix of its image”.