Bachelor of Creative Arts, UNC Charlotte (1977)
Master of Fine Arts, Washington University, St. Louis (1979)
Hometown: Valdese, NC
In early life, Margaret McAdams understood that art is her center. The uniquely experimental, proposal-based Bachelor of Creative Arts (BCA) program at UNC Charlotte in the mid-70s gave her focus and confidence during her development.
"My associations and interactions with faculty-advisors and peers about research, learning, aesthetics, production of art, self- evaluation, and critique in the BCA program made me into the professor and art maker that I am," she says. "For 40 years, I have remained in touch with my closest BCA friends and several faculty."
Exposed to many media at UNC Charlotte, she chose to focus on painting and photography in undergraduate school, then pursued a Master of Fine Arts in Multi-Media and Painting at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. There, her work shifted from traditional forms to temporal objects and site-specific environments.
In the early 1980s, Margaret was exhibitions director in the art department at Western Michigan University and served as assistant professor of art at UNC Charlotte from 1987 to 1990. In 1990, she began her more than 20-year career at Ohio University-Chillicothe and received the OU Regional Campus Outstanding Professor Award in 2006. She retired from full-time teaching in 2012 and now splits her time between her native North Carolina and Ohio, where she continues to teach part-time.
"Each year, to my students, I emphasized the most important thing I heard in Rowe Recital Hall on my first day as a BCA student at UNC Charlotte: 'You are responsible for your education.' I heard it, believed it, and am driven by it to this day. That responsibility includes seeking out and utilizing resources, including finding the people who can give guidance and support."
Margaret's artworks have been in more than three hundred juried and invitational shows throughout the United States and in Spain, England, Germany, France, Hungary, and Russia. She has received 12 grants and fellowships, including an Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship in Photography and an artist’s residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris. Her works have received awards in more than 20 juried exhibitions. Since beginning to work in clay in 2002, she has received awards in 13 exhibitions for her ceramic sculptures. Most recently she completed an outdoor ceramics commission for the Dublin Arts Council's "Riverboxes" in Dublin, Ohio.
Margaret was named the 2017 Distinguished Alumna in the Department of Art & Art History.