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Biography  

Patricia Olson was born in Minneapolis and earned a B.A. in studio art at Macalester College (1973), St. Paul, where she studied with painter Jerry Rudquist. She received an M.F.A. in Visual Studies from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (1998). She is a founding member of WARM, the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota (1975).

Recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition with catalog, The Buoyant Heart, at the Catherine G. Murphy Gallery, St. Catherine University (2007), and WARM: 12 Artists of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota at Weisman Art Museum, University of Minnesota (2006). This retrospective exhibition is documented in the book, WARM: A Feminist Art Collective in Minnesota by Joanna Inglot, published by the University of Minnesota Press. Her series The Mysteries, was included in The Villa of the Mysteries in Pompeii: Ancient Mystery, Modern Muse at the University Art Museum, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (2000), and featured in an accompanying book published by the Kelsey Museum of Archeology and University of Michigan Museum of Art.

In 1999, she received a Visual Arts Travel and Study Grant from the Jerome, General Mills and Dayton Hudson Foundations to travel to Pompeii, Italy, to view the ancient Roman fresco at the Villa of the Mysteries, the inspiration for her series of paintings, The Mysteries.

She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at St. Catherine University, St. Paul, where she also holds the Sister Mona Riley Endowed Chair in the Humanities (2008-2011). She has taught, with Elizabeth Erickson, a summer intensive course, the Women’s Art Institute, at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design for the past eleven years.

Patricia Olson Resumé


Self-portrait, 2010, oil on panel