Patricia Olson

Describe what you do for work and how your experience with it has been.

I'm Associate Professor in the Department of Art and Art History at St. Catherine University. I am also the Director of the Women's Art Institute. Teaching and working with enthusiastic students is a great privilege.

How did you get your job?

Before I became an academic, I ran my own graphic design company for over 20 years, the Cats Pajamas, in St. Paul. I decided to go back to school for an MFA degree so I could teach at the college level. When I applied for the job at St. Kate's, I had a brand-new degree and 20 years of experience in the design business.

2025 Cut/Paste Publication Feature

To celebrate her sixtieth birthday, Patricia Olson ’98, MFA, painted a self-portrait in the style of an iconic Max Beckmann work, dressed in a tuxedo with one hand squarely on her hip, the other holding a cigar. “I’d been looking at that painting for years and it had always annoyed me—he’s got so much confidence about his place in the world,” says Olson, now seventy-three. “I feel like my work is a dialogue with Western art history, and that painting was a pretty straightforward challenge, trying to bring women and women’s bodies into that imagery.”

This challenge has been a clear through line for Olson—both as an artist and as one of the founders of the Women’s Art Registry of Minnesota (WARM), the feminist artists collective that ran an influential First Avenue gallery from 1976 to 1991.

“Looking back, it’s hard to imagine how intense those days were,” Olson says, as she recounts the clearly lopsided statistics that inspired her work: “From 1960 to 1969, only four of the seventy-two solo shows at Walker Art Center showcased women. And at Minneapolis Institute of Art, out of 350 shows between 1953 and 1967, only four percent showed the work of a woman artist.” WARM’s work helped right the balance by showcasing and providing professional opportunities for women artists. Just as important, she says, was the community of support and collegial encouragement it created among women in the arts, a legacy that has lived on through the Women’s Art Institute summer program, directed by Olson for many years.

“I don’t think it’s art if you make it and stick it in a closet,” Olson says. “It needs a response. But it’s hard to create art in a vacuum when there’s no one to bounce ideas off of. For me, meeting this bunch of women artists with rich inner lives that they took seriously was very important for the development of my work.”

A 1973 studio art major at Macalester College, Olson ran her own graphic design business for more than twenty years before growing disenchanted by the shift to digital publishing. “I think the computer’s a really wonderful tool,” she says. “But the lack of tactility made me start to wonder what else I could do.” She found the answer at MCAD—beginning an MFA in visual studies in her forties that inspired her to stretch herself creatively. “Unlike other programs where it’s only about design or painting or sculpture or printmaking, MCAD encouraged an integration of disciplines and approaches,” she says. “I’d never formally studied design, so that was my original plan. Once I got to MCAD, I felt really envious of the painters because they seemed to be having a lot of fun. I have MCAD to thank for bringing me back to my painting.”

As part of her MFA thesis project, Olson created one of her best known works The Mysteries, a seven-part series of life-size paintings inspired by an ancient Roman fresco at Pompeii. “It depicts a woman undergoing some sort of ritual initiation. When I came upon this fresco in my study, I thought, ‘This is what I’m yearning for.’ I want to be initiated into something. I want to be part of something bigger.” The cycle was remounted in 2021 at St. Catherine University, where Olson taught for more than twenty years.

Now retired, Olson is reluctant to make any claims about what it takes to create a career in art. “I’ve come to really appreciate that earning my living in the adjacent fields of teaching and design afforded me the freedom to make what I want to make,” she says. “I’ve always been a little leery of the word ‘career,’ because what I’ve always wanted, and what I think I’ve been able to engender, is a life in art. That distinction is important to me.”