Margaret Weber

Margaret Weber is a Jersey City printmaker and collage artist. From 05/02/13 - 06/09/13, she will show her body of work called “Dark Passage” in the Special Project Rooms.

Margaret was an early pioneer to Jersey City, having arrived from New York City in the early 70's. She received her B.A. and M.A. from Jersey City State College and became an art teacher, teaching art in the public schools for 29 years while making art– first in a corner of a room, and eventually in a floor-through print shop and studio in the once neglected brownstone she owns and restored to its 1865 Italianate grandeur.

Margaret has shown her work throughout NY and NJ. She received a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Visual Artist/Teacher Award and Grant and her work is represented in the Permanent Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; Johnson and Johnson, Rutgers University Library and in private collections.

Margaret’s “Dark Passage” mixed-media narrative works are skillfully crafted and compelling. Using the same copper plate to create her series, and marked with a heavy gestural hand- many in swirls and spirals, she carefully chooses imagery and materials that pessimistically speak about the current state of human interaction with the natural world. Margaret believes we are in denial of climate change and the destruction of our natural habitat, and the world is awash in plastic. According to Margaret, "'The Dark Passage' series depicts a reversal of an expected hierarchy. A bird flies across an unnatural landscape in possession of a human skull." Margaret wonders if nature will carry on despite human destruction.

Perhaps for Margaret, the process of making these related works on paper is a metaphor for a potentially positive answer to this question. 

Margaret's art-making process begins with an image or thought which is allowed to take shape on a copper plate matrix and generate different solutions as it progresses. What results is a beautiful picture of an ugly reality. Her hope is that the image might move one to feel, think and/or act in a responsible way.