Biography
Huguette Despault May holds Bachelor’s and Masters degrees in Fine Arts from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts / Tufts University. Earlier, she had studied at the Schuler School of Fine Arts (a classical atelier in Baltimore) and also received an Associate of Arts in Photography with honors from Dundalk Community College, Baltimore, Maryland (now Community College of Baltimore County.)
In the 1990’s, May owned and operated Art & Image, a professional photography of art and digital photo restoration business. During this period, her pastel work appeared in the Annual Open Exhibition “For Pastels Only” at the National Arts Club in New York while a member of the Pastel Society of America. May’s photography was featured in Finding the Charm in Charm City (The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).
The artist moved from Maryland to Massachusetts in 1996, maintaining a studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts from 2005 - 2017, the last 10 years of which were at Hatch Street Studios, a 100-year-old mill building with ideal light and space for creating and exhibiting her large charcoal drawings. During this same period, she exhibited her work annually during New Bedford Open Studios for which she was also co-chair and organizer (2015). May also served as curator for the contemporary drawing exhibition “Affirming the Hand” at the Courtyard Gallery, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2005) while completing her MFA.
In 2015, May's Hawser Series of drawings and related photographs completed a 12-city two year tour of university galleries and museums in the mid-Atlantic and southeastern United States. May's “Paper Nest” series drawings and “Satellites” photographs were exhibited at Highfield Hall and Gardens, Falmouth, Massachusetts, 2015. In 2020, the new Hyatt Centric Los Olas in Fort Lauderdale, Florida opened, with each of its 245 guest rooms featuring one of two of May’s Hawser works as wall murals.
Drawings from May’s “Hawser” series of rope images have been juried into four volumes of Studio Visit Magazine, A Contemporary Exhibition in Print (The Open Studios Press, 2008/09/10), and were featured on the cover of Volume Six of the publication. More recently, her drawings were included in The Magic of Lines II: Line Illustrations by Global Artists (CYPI Press, 2016).
Her work is in the corporate collections of MediTech in Fall River, Massachusetts, the Ciba Vision Global headquarters in Duluth, Georgia as well as in private collections. Her work is in the collection of the New Bedford Whaling Museum, New Bedford, Massachusetts and was included in their exhibition “Thou Shalt Knot: Clifford W. Ashley”, 2017, and in “A City for the Arts: Masterworks of Greater New Bedford”, 2020-2021. In 2020, May served as guest curator for a major online art exhibition, “What Matters Most”, conceived and hosted by artist Lisa Kellner, in response to life adjustments imposed by the C-19 pandemic.
May lives in Nova Scotia, having moved from Massachusetts in 2017 to be closer to nature and to continue exploring the creation of art inspired by proximity to the Province’s extensive and diverse protected natural wilderness heritage.