Maren Hassinger is a multidisciplinary artist whose career spans more than five decades, marked by a deep engagement with material, movement, and meaning. Born in Los Angeles in 1947, Hassinger first trained as a dancer before transitioning into the visual arts. She earned her MFA in Fiber from UCLA in 1973—a program she joined after being denied admission to the school’s sculpture department. Her background in dance, combined with her formal study of fiber arts, continues to inform the rhythm, tactility, and presence of her sculptural work.

Hassinger's journey began at Bennington College in 1965, where she originally applied to the dance program but was rejected. Instead, she studied sculpture with Isaac Witkin and drawing with Pat Adams, graduating with a BA in sculpture in 1969. Though she pivoted from her initial intention, dance remained central to her vision—eventually integrating its principles into her sculptural work.

In 1970, she returned to Los Angeles and enrolled at UCLA, again seeking to study sculpture. When that program declined her application, she was encouraged to join the newly founded Fiber Structure program—becoming its first MFA graduate in 1973. It was during this time that she discovered wire rope in a junkyard, beginning her signature exploration of industrial materials and their poetic potential.

Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Hassinger exhibited in alternative art spaces across Los Angeles alongside artists such as Houston Conwill, David Hammons, and Senga Nengudi. Her collaborations with Nengudi often activated sculptures through dance and performance. In the mid-1980s, she moved to New York City to join the Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program, where she continued to explore outdoor environments as both medium and metaphor.

Hassinger’s practice blurs the boundaries between sculpture, installation, and performance. She shares this hybrid space with peers like Senga Nengudi, who also emerged from the Los Angeles art scene in the 1970s. Both artists have backgrounds in dance, and both use unconventional materials to explore transformation and embodiment. Nengudi’s iconic R.S.V.P. series, made from stretched pantyhose, mirrors Hassinger’s interest in fluid form and the tension between the bodily and the architectural. While Nengudi speaks to elasticity, femininity, and constraint, Hassinger evokes themes of resilience, memory, and interconnection using wire and paper.

Hassinger challenges dominant narratives in art history, specifically that which is in relation to Black womanhood, minimalism, and spatial politics. As a Black woman artist working at the intersection of identity, environment, and abstraction, Hassinger’s practice draws connections between the body, the natural world, and the socio-political landscape. Her work operates simultaneously on personal and universal levels, embodying themes of resilience, transformation, and interconnectedness. She rejects monumentality in favor of gesture and vulnerability, asserting the power of so-called “feminine” materials and methods. For Hassinger, the act of making is both a form of resistance and a meditative practice. Her work invites viewers to slow down and consider the labor—both visible and invisible—embedded in each piece.

Hassinger’s creative journey emerged not from a single, fixed vision but from a fusion of necessity and curiosity. In the 1970s, she began experimenting with unconventional materials—most notably wire rope, a utilitarian material typically found in industrial settings. The choice was initially pragmatic, a response to limited access to traditional art supplies, but it would become central to her artistic language. Under her hands, the rigid steel became unexpectedly fluid: coiled, twisted, and wrapped into organic forms. These sculptures may appear delicate or ethereal, but their creation involves a labor-intensive, physical process—each strand requiring days of repetition and refinement.

This intense physicality is evident in Cascade (2025), a work that marks a shift in Hassinger’s material approach. Departing from her earlier use of metal, Cascade is made entirely from strips of The New York Times, which are torn, twisted, and tied into long tendrils. These paper forms hang over 13 feet from the ceiling in a vertical arrangement. Though the material is ephemeral, the piece retains Hassinger’s signature sense of gesture and grace. Here, weaving becomes both a meditative act and a political gesture—inviting viewers to reflect on how identity is shaped by the narratives we inherit, absorb, and internalize.

This tension between fragility and strength, industrial and organic, natural and human made, is a hallmark of Hassinger’s work. In Showers (2023), originally commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago and reimagined for this exhibition, she returns to wire rope. Dense metallic strands cascade downward like rainfall, hair, or seaweed. The influence of her dance training is palpable: the sculpture seems to move, even in stillness. “They resemble living, breathing things,” Hassinger has said of such works. Their fluid forms, shaped by an arduous process of uncoiling and arranging, evoke the rhythms of wind and water through industrial matter.

In works like Cascade and Showers, Hassinger continues to interweave personal and collective histories, balancing stillness with motion, fragility with strength. Whether it’s the soft rustle of newspaper or the heavy arc of steel, she shows us how even the most ordinary materials can hold extraordinary meaning when guided by intention and care.

Maren Hassinger's work exemplifies a profound dialogue between materiality, memory, and movement, inviting us to reconsider the boundaries between the physical and the metaphysical, the personal and the collective. Through her intricate sculptures and installations, Hassinger challenges the conventions of abstraction, incorporating elements of dance, nature, and social history into a rich, layered practice. Whether it’s the ethereal fluidity of wire rope or the delicate rustling of newspaper, each piece is a testament to the transformative power of material, labor, and intention. In the act of creation, Hassinger not only resists dominant artistic and cultural narratives but also weaves new ones—ones that honor resilience, interconnectedness, and the quiet strength that emerges from vulnerability. Her work stands as a meditation on both the fragility and endurance of life, offering a space for reflection, connection, and a deeper understanding of the invisible forces that shape our world.