source: micaedu

Maren Hassinger, Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at MICA, has mounted many solo exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group shows. Her work is included in more than 34 catalogs and in the public collections of AT&T and Pittsburgh Airport. She is an Anonymous Was A Woman and International Association of Art Critics awards recipient, and has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and ARTnews, and has received grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Under Hassinger’s direction, the Rinehart School of Sculpture has become the center of innovation in the evolving medium of multidimensional art. A native of Los Angeles, Hassinger holds degrees from the University of California, Los Angeles, and Bennington College in Bennington, Vermont.
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source: marenhassinger

The Los Angeles native has mounted many solo exhibitions and participated in more than 120 group shows. Her work is included in more than 34 catalogs and in the public collections of AT&T and Pittsburgh Airport. The Anonymous Was A Woman and International Association of Art Critics awards recipient has performed at the Museum of Modern Art, been reviewed in Art in America, The New York Times, and ARTnews, and received grants from the Gottlieb Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pollock-Krasner Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Maren Hassinger has been Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, one of the oldest programs of its type in America since 1997. The Rinehart School of Sculpture is at the center of innovation in this evolving medium, where students work in a wide range of mediums and approaches – from stone-carving and metals casting to installations and time-based art such as video and performance.
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source: installationmag

Maren Hassinger performing in Senga Nengudi’s RSVP (1975–77/2012) at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, November 17, 2012. Courtesy the artists and Contemporary Arts Museum Houston.
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source: timesquotidian

Performance artist, dancer, and sculptor Maren Hassinger is currently represented in the Hammer Museum’s contribution to the citywide Pacific Standard Time exhibitions, Now Dig This! Art & Black Los Angeles 1960-1980 opening October 2. With artists as renowned as David Hammons, Raymond Saunders and Bette Saar, to lesser known artists, the exhibition showcases 140 works by 35 artists who formed an important creative community and left a vital legacy to the arts of Los Angeles. Although Hassinger has lived in New York City and Baltimore where she is director of sculpture at Maryland Institute College of Art, for the exhibition she has recreated River consisting of a serpentine thirty foot long galvanized chain intertwined with rope that was first exhibited in her native Los Angeles in 1972. Installed near the entrance to the main galleries at the Hammer housing the major portion of the exhibit, River in its new incarnation and context now primarily addresses issues of black identity, specifically in its oversized use of the symbols of slavery. The title could easily refer to rivers like the Mississippi that facilitated the slave trade. Or, like a slithering venomous snake the chains of racial oppression wind their way through the landscape to leave a legacy of pain and rage. Conversely, it also suggests the river as the means to travel north to freedom and the ensuing transformative power of expression that has characterized much historical African American music, dance, and visual art.

That shift in artistic values allowed for a rediscovery of autobiography and social issues and hastened the interrogation of sexual, individual and racial identities so prevalent in the art of the 80’s and 90’s. The rationalistic, analytical basis of Formalism had yielded what Maurice Berger described as “the passive static art of viewing” to become rather a “phenomenological journey, a passage of tactile and visual discovery rooted in strategies of performance and theatricality.” For Hassinger whose dance and performance pieces focused on a consideration of the temporalities and theatricalities of entire sites and the dissolution of framing devices that impede direct communication with the spectator, a renewed humanism and engagement with materials resulted. The departure from traditional aesthetic concerns and the immersion of the natural into the social and cultural seen in choreographed performances like Ten Minutes (1977) in which tree branches were symbolic of the natural world, informed the use of the industrial materials like steel, concrete, plaster, infusing them with opposing qualities like fragility, growth, dance-like movement recalling shamanistic rituals. Conventional binaries and hierarchies that neatly separated industry from a thoroughly sanctified nature were challenged, suggesting that as nature is artificially reproduced—genetic engineering, theme parks, suburbia, etc. – and our infringement upon it intensifies, those changes bear examination. Given the strong emphasis on unorthodox sculptural materials coupled with the emergent environmental issues at the time, one would have most likely experienced the 1972 version of River as a highly experimental challenge to the sculptural status quo as well as a poetic addressing of the devastation of nature by industry in its symbolic transmogrification of water into steel and rope. Subsequent installations like Heaven 1985, a room of preserved and scented rose leaves covering the gallery walls or Blanket of Branches (1986) a ceiling mounted suspended web of bare intertwining branches, challenged traditional sculptural aesthetics aswell as requirements for permanency in traditional art valuation with their ephemerality. No longer substituting the illusions of the natural found in conventional landscape representation, these pieces initiated a contact with the landscape based not on separation and alienation but on a tactile and visually beautiful appreciation. Performances like Pink Trash (1980) in which Hassinger, clad in a suit fashioned from bright pink plastic garbage bags, carefully replaced trash that she had collected on site in several New York parks and then painted rose petal pink, had underscored but ultimately attempted to harmonize the rift between civilization and the natural environment via an art gesture. Further, her gallery installations like Perimeter (1990), a room sized open picture frame constructed of cut twigs and branches that delineated a corner of the white gallery, reversed the usual perceptual model of traditional landscape painting. Instead of designating a portion of nature for our pleasurable gaze, “nature” enclosed the viewer and space within the frame, directing attention to the artifice of viewing the environment in order to interrogate the boundaries that separate humans from the natural world. The work of this twenty year period continuously subverted expectations for representation, materials, proper art contexts, disarming and disrupting many of their associations with power, privilege, or repression. Our attitudes—positive and negative– toward the natural world rely on how culture frames the experience and Hassinger has continued to explore that dynamic for over forty years.