Tuesday Night Lecture Series: RJ Messineo

As part of the Tuesday Night Lecture Series (TNLS), Boston University College of Fine Arts School of Visual Arts presents a lecture by artist RJ Messineo, organized by the MFA Painting program.

RJ Messineo makes paintings involving observation and abstraction. Concerned with the ways the personal is intertwined with larger systems of picture-making, the works implicate their body and combine references to landscape, the studio, windows, other paintings, music and texts. In the last six years, Messineo has developed an idiosyncratic device for making paintings that involves attaching thin wooden boards to the surfaces of their canvases with magnets. Over the course of working she shifts the panels around, adding, removing and interchanging them in a methodology of parts.

RJ Messineo (b. 1980, Hartford, CT) currently lives and works in Greenfield, MA. The artist received an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles (2009), and a BFA from Cornell University in Ithaca, NY (2002). Messineo is represented by CANADA, New York, NY, and Morán Morán, Los Angeles and has exhibited at venues such as: Pace Gallery, James Cohan Gallery, Thomas Erben Gallery, all in New York, NY; Ceysson & Bénétière, Koerich, Luxembourg; and Night Gallery, Artist Curated Projects, Redling Fine Art, REDCAT Gallery Los Angeles, CA. Messineo is a Shandaken: Paint School Fellow, and completed the Fire Island Artist Residency in 2014. Messineo’s work is included in the permanent collection of the Dallas Museum of Art.

Image: RJ Messineo, Council of Troubles, 2025. Oil, panels and rare earth magnets on canvas, 100 × 144 inches (254.00 × 365.76 cm).

More information: canadanewyork.com/artists/rj-messineo