The Collection

Marie Watt is a Portland, Oregon–based artist whose sculpture, installation, and printmaking center on textiles — particularly wool blankets — as vessels of history, memory, and community. A member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians, Watt draws on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) protofeminism and Indigenous teachings, working across printmaking, painting, textiles, and sculpture in materials that range from reclaimed blankets and cornhusks to alabaster, slate, and bronze.

Watt holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a BS from Willamette University, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University, which was followed by an honorary doctorate from Willamette in 2016. She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center, and taught at Portland Community College from 1997 to 2004. Central to her practice is collaboration: her ongoing Blanket Stories series invites communities to contribute blankets carrying personal and historical significance, which she assembles into towering sculptural columns, and she regularly convenes sewing circles that turn collective, multigenerational labor into shared storytelling.

Watt's work has been the subject of major museum exhibitions including Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019 at the Whitney Museum of American Art (2019–2022), Spirit in the Land at the Nasher Museum of Art and the Pérez Art Museum Miami (2023–2024), and a dedicated survey, Land Stitches Water Sky, at the Carnegie Museum of Art (2024). Her commissions include a fourteen-foot column of international blankets for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation's Seattle campus, and in 2025 she was selected to collaborate with artist Nick Cave on a new installation for the Obama Presidential Center in Chicago.

Watt's honors include the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum, fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Ford Family Foundation, and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, and, more recently, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts and the 2025 Heinz Award. Her work is held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum's Renwick Gallery, the Seattle Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Portland Art Museum, and the Yale University Art Gallery, among others. She is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and Marc Straus Gallery in New York.