Discipline: Visual Art

Maren Hassinger

Discipline: Visual Art
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell Fellowships: 2001
Maren Hassinger is known for her sculpture and public art using natural and industrial materials. She works in sculpture, installation, performance, and video. She started her artistic experimentation in an L.A. junkyard in the early 1970s where she found wire rope and saw that the material could be used sculpturally and as a fiber, manipulating it to resemble plant life. Southern fiction writer Walker Percy continued to influence her childhood connection between natural and the manufactured world with his work, Wreath. Many of Percy's novels, which Hassinger was reading at the time, are about navigating a modern world that was becoming removed from nature. Another influence was the sculpture work of Eva Hesse. During an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973 Hassinger was introduced to Hesse's work and admired her obsessive exploration of forms and techniques, and ability to convey emotion through fiber methods. A subway station in New York City at 110th Street (IRT Lenox Avenue Line), includes a work by Hassinger installed during a 1998 renovation. It is called Message from Malcolm and consists of mosaic panels on the platform and main fare control area's street stairs that depict quotes and writings by Malcolm X written in script and surrounded by mosaic borders.

Studios

Heinz

Maren Hassinger worked in the Heinz studio.

The icehouse, built of fieldstone in 1914–1915, was a practical part of Marian MacDowell’s plan for a self-sufficient farm. Winter ice cut from a nearby pond was stored here for summer use on the property. Idle since 1940, it was a handsome but outdated farm building. In 1995, Mrs. Drue Heinz, a vice chairman…

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