Marisa McCarthy
Paintings
Jewelry
About
News
CV
Contact
©2025 Marisa McCarthy
About
Marisa McCarthy (b. Winchester, MA 2000) is a painter and jeweler living and working in Massachusetts. She received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and a BA in Environmental Studies from Tufts University in 2024. Her practice approaches art-making as ethnography, depicting family histories through painting and creating cultural objects and adornments. McCarthy’s work often deals with themes of hybrid identity and preservation, linking imagery across time and planes of reality. She is interested in cultural connections to the environment and the practice of archiving as ritual.
Through painting I create environments of belonging, where ontologies converge in a point of the American hybrid experience. My work connects figuration with personal archival imagery and memories. Rooted in my Spanish and Indian heritage, I portray experiences of cultural liminality. I depict close friends and family who identify with hybridity and experience what I call “interstitial” identity- ways of existing that are found between grains of sand, that fall between cracks, that are specific and singular, complex and overlooked. My models each experience this state of in-betweenness and un-belonging in relation to race, gender, or sexuality. I approach painting as a method of ethnography in which I negotiate preservation and erasure, activating history and allowing images to persist, transform, and synthesize.