MARIE THIBEAULT: Artist Talk and Guided Walkthrough with Guest Mirabel Wigon

Saturday, April 4, 1-3pm

As part of The Radiant Rupture exhibition at Palos Verdes Art Center, Mirabel Wigon and Marie Thibeault discuss the range of works in the show, the language of painting, and the landscape as a subject. The conversation reflects a long-standing dialogue between the artists, developed over many years.

Mirabel Wigon is a California-based artist whose work of flowering plants reflects on the intermingling and entangling relationships in the natural world. Wigon’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions both regionally and nationally. Her work is a part of the UC Davis Health Collection and Provost Collection at CSULB. She is currently Assistant Professor of Art at California State University, Stanislaus, where she teaches drawing and painting.

Over more than four decades, Marie Thibeault’s studio practice has been devoted to examining landscapes shaped by environmental strain. Her large-scale paintings fuse a complex abstract vocabulary with references to sites transformed by climate-related trauma. These compositions suggest conditions of rupture and instability, yet are held in suspension within luminous, atmospheric fields of color. Thibeault paints to bear witness and to cultivate empathy, making visible our deep interconnectedness with the natural world. Her work, poised between rupture and resilience, evokes the fragile equilibrium that defines this moment.

Thibeault received her MFA from UC Berkeley and is Professor Emerita at California State University, Long Beach. Her works have been exhibited across the United States and abroad in cities such as London, Tokyo, Seoul, and Düsseldorf, and are in the public collections of the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, CA, and the Oakland Museum of California in Oakland, CA, among others. Thibeault’s work has been reviewed in multiple publications, including L.A. Weekly, the San Francisco Chronicle, Artillery Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, and Art in America.

See Marie’s PVAC exhibition online at theradiantrupture.org.