Fine Art Exhibition
“Fate and Magic: The Art of Maureen McCabe”
William Benton Museum of Art
Storrs, Connecticut
benton.uconn.edu
through December 14, 2025
Maureen McCabe taught art for 40 years at Connecticut College in New London, but now her retrospective, “Fate and Magic: The Art of Maureen McCabe,” is on view at another educational institution, the University of Connecticut’s William Benton Museum of Art. Through her assemblages and installations, this artist has returned repeatedly to the themes of fate and magic, creating playful yet carefully composed works that weave imagery from ancient and contemporary cultures, always informed by folklore, literature, spiritualism, and myth. Game boards, tarot cards, dice, birds, fortune tellers, and constellations populate McCabe’s works, prompting age-old questions about control over our power to shape our own destinies.
Much of McCabe’s art has the same sense of wonder, awe, and sleight of hand found in a magician’s performance, so the exhibition presents not only finished artworks from private collections and her studio, but also the magic paraphernalia she has acquired, including rapping hands, magic numbers, cups and balls, Ouija boards, and posters.
In the insightful essay she contributed to the show’s catalogue, Benton curator Amanda A. Douberley writes that McCabe “maps specific references on the back of each piece, pasting newspaper clippings and magazine articles, dedications, quotes, and other miscellany. She also includes a list of materials used, down to the brand of archival glue and the exact start and end dates for the work.”
Illustrated above is a superb example of McCabe’s vision. It shows Circe, an enchantress in Greek mythology, holding a potion that will turn her rival, Scylla, into a sea monster. McCabe’s femme fatale is drawn from J.W. Waterhouse’s painting “Circe Invidiosa” (1892), but — Douberley notes — “she has added beetle wings to the figure and placed her atop a chunk of malachite, the stone of transformation, which McCabe studded with azurite (healing) and oysters (transformation). On the back, McCabe identified the fish we see as a mackerel, a symbol of good luck, and the dried flower encased in glass as a snowdrop from the artist’s own garden. In addition to a photograph of a snowdrop in bloom, she pasted a clipping that provides a clue to knit these pieces together. It reads, ‘When Odysseus set out to rescue his crew, he protected himself with an antidote derived from the snowdrop flower. Myths often have some basis in fact as this same antidote is being studied today as a possible treatment for Alzheimer’s disease.’”
Douberley concludes perceptively, “A work that is fundamentally about transformation, this piece shows the artist’s shifting perspective, as she nears 80 years of age, alongside her long-standing interest in the relevance of ancient myths and folktales to contemporary culture.”
