Meditations on Nature and Community:
Maren Hassinger in Conversation with Hallie Ringle
Tuesday, October 9, 2018
6 to 8pm
Maren Hassinger, Pink Trash, 1982. [Image Description: A woman wearing pink kneels in a grassy field with trees. She holds a pink duffel bag and is holding pink pieces of paper. Scattered around the grass are pieces of trash that are also painted pink.]
Artist Maren Hassinger and Studio Museum in Harlem Assistant Curator Hallie Ringle discussed the artist’s public art project Monuments installed at Marcus Garvey Park, while addressing the question, what is expected of artists in these times? Hassinger's works Pink Trash (1982) and Love (2008) are included in Sedimentations: Assemblage as Social Repair.
Bios
Maren Hassinger was born in Los Angeles in 1947. After studying dance and sculpture at Bennington College, she completed her MFA in Fiber Structure at UCLA. While in Los Angeles, she began making sculptures with bent, twisted and frayed wire rope and creating and participating in numerous performances in Los Angeles.
Now based in New York City, Hassinger uses every day disposable and recycled materials—plastic bags, paper, and cardboard—to consider our relationship to nature and each other. We live in a time of inequality and vanishing resources, so Hassinger considers the precarious fate of people and nature. These issues inspire her work, which includes video, performance, installation, and objects.
Hassinger has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including grants from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Gottlieb Foundation, Anonymous was a Woman, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Women’s Caucus for the Arts. She recently retired as Director of the Rinehart School of Graduate Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore after a twenty year tenure.
In 2015, Hassinger had a major retrospective at Spelman College Museum of Art in Atlanta, Georgia with a catalogue featuring 20 works that were recreated for the exhibition. In 2016, she and her daughter Ava Hassinger presented an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia as Matriarch. Hassinger’s work was included in We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-85, a major exhibition of feminist artwork at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 2017. She recently closed exhibitions at Art + Practice, Los Angeles and with the Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC. Hassinger is currently the subject of a solo show at the Baltimore Museum of Art. She lives and works in New York, New York.
Hallie Ringle is the Hugh Kaul Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Birmingham Museum of Art. Until recently she was Assistant Curator at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Her recent exhibitions include Firelei Báez: Joy Out of Fire;Maren Hassinger: Monuments;We Go as They: Artists in Residence 2016–17;Derrick Adams: Patrick Kelly, the Journey;Rico Gatson: Icons 2007–2017;Video Studio: Meeting Points;Palatable: Food and Contemporary Art;Salon Style; and Concealed: Selections from the Permanent Collection. Recent co-curated exhibitions include Fictions; Regarding the Figure;Richard Hunt: Framed and Extended;and Marc Andre Robinson: Twice Told. She has a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA from the University of Texas at Austin.