Meet the Artist // Molly Must

Molly Must is a painter with a deep interest in public history. Her current work is experimental, combining found-paper collage with
oil painting in an exploration of graphic patterning and figurative imagery. Discarded gig posters from the streets of Kreuzberg are
base material of her current project.

Born and raised off-grid in the Appalachian Mountains, Must was brought up to understand the importance of wild land, and the
solace of imagination, stories and drawings. Her early career was marked by organizing community art projects and narrative
murals, premised on significant local histories. In recent years Must has been working independently, cultivating a studio practice
primarily rooted in representational oil painting.

Throughout her work Must explores questions about human relationships to land. In particular, she strives to better understand
her own relationship to her family’s land within the greater context of settler-colonialism and the paradoxes of territorial
stewardship, ritual inheritance, and legacies of power. She is interested in the exclusivity of mainstream public memory that
enables false notions of righteousness regarding national borders, and is often lost in ruminations about the future of land-based
solidarities. A meandering path of academic study underlies Must’s work.

Playing with new methodologies of paint and collage, Must is currently creating artworks that draw on cartographic symbolism and
allegorical figuration. By repurposing imagery and patterns found in street posters, Must engages complexities of color & form in
gleaning a visual framework of motifs that reflect her musings and anxieties about inherited geographies of everyday imperialism,
within the larger, wilder symbioses of the natural world.