{"id":95698,"date":"2025-08-20T01:54:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-20T01:54:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/95698\/"},"modified":"2025-08-20T01:54:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-20T01:54:10","slug":"maren-hassinger-to-receive-her-largest-retrospective-to-date-next-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/95698\/","title":{"rendered":"Maren Hassinger to Receive Her Largest Retrospective to Date Next Year"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive<\/a> in California will mount a retrospective for interdisciplinary artist Maren Hassinger<\/a>, opening next June.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cOne impetus is based on the need and desire to amplify, via the museum\u2019s platform, an artist that needs to be more recognized, like Maren, effect a change in art history,\u201d Margot Norton<\/a>, BAMPFA\u2019s chief curator and the exhibition\u2019s cocurator, told ARTnews in a phone interview. \u201cBut I also think a lot about what emerging artists are doing and how many artists are working in ways that I felt like they needed to know Maren\u2019s work. I feel like her work resonates so much in the present moment.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\tRelated Articles<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n

\n\tBilled as her most comprehensive retrospective to date, the exhibition will bring together work from across her five-decade career, including her early pieces from the 1970s made from wire rope and tree branches; later large-scale pieces, some of which are being recreated for the exhibition; and performances and workshops, some of which will be staged at BAMPFA, with others represented via photo and video documentation.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIn order to present this picture of what Maren does, we wanted to illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of the practice and the varying forms that she has created,\u201d said Norton, who is co-organizing the exhibition BAMPFA senior curator Anthony Graham. The aim of the exhibition is to show \u201cthis dual nature of Maren as a performer and as a sculptor, and she\u2019s talked about how her work in movement affects her work in sculpture and vice versa.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"An<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaren Hassinger, Leaning, 1980.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Susan Inglett Gallery, New York\/The Museum of Modern Art, New York<\/p>\n

\n\tIn an email to ARTnews, Hassinger wrote, \u201cCreativity means you start with nothing, just nothing, and you make something. It\u2019s a challenge\u00a0and it\u2019s an adventure. It\u2019s not what a lot of people want to spend their life doing, but I think it\u2019s really important to make something\u00a0that no one has ever seen. It means everything to me to have this\u00a0opportunity at BAMPFA to look at my entire past in one place, and to talk with people. I\u2019m happy to be showing in a place close to students, where people are serious about looking and learning.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tNorton said her interest in Hassinger\u2019s work dates back over 20 years, and that she has since encountered Hassinger\u2019s art in major shows such as 2011\u2019s \u201cNow Dig This!\u201d at the Hammer Museum and 2022\u2019s \u201cJust Above Midtown: 1974 to the Present\u201d at the Museum of Modern Art. \u201cI was just so struck by them in terms of how they hold space,\u201d she said. \u201cThrough her manipulations of these materials, she\u2019s able to infuse the spaces with this palpable energy, [and] how they affected my body as I navigated through them. These encounters made me realize there was so much more to discover about Maren.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition\u2019s title, \u201cLiving Moving Growing,\u201d Norton said, reflects Hassinger\u2019s interdisciplinary approach to art-making, with \u201cher performance and movement practice existing so simultaneously to her sculptural practice,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019re thinking about the exhibition also as reflecting this idea. Maren\u2019s work often takes readily available objects and thinks through them in order to transform them so they appear to be natural\u2014or living, moving, and growing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaren Hassinger, Love (Square), 2008\/2018.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Susan Inglett Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

\n\tThe exhibition will be loosely chronological, with some site-specific works, like Love (2008), consisting of inflated plastic bags filled with love notes, interrupting that chronology. The exhibition will also be a chance to see works that no longer exist, as some of Hassinger\u2019s early large-scale works \u201cwere destroyed in the past, mostly due to storage concerns,\u201d Norton said. Other works, which involve tree branches and were recreated for each presentation, will be staged in partnership with University of California Botanical Garden, which will help source the organic materials.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe retrospective will also include workshops and performances throughout its run. One of these will be a reconceived version of Women\u2019s Work (2006), which involved participants working with the artist to knot and twist newspapers. That work prompted Hassinger to continue hosting those workshops more informally in the nearly 20 years since; Norton recently participated in one version of that at the Columbus Museum of Art, as part of Hassinger\u2019s two-person show with her longtime collaborator Senga Nengudi. At BAMPFA, Norton said she plans to conduct several workshops that will go toward making the work, which itself will evolve during the course of its six-month run. \u00a0<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"A<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tMaren Hassinger with participants creating Sign of the Times, at Susan Inglett Gallery, New York, 2023.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCourtesy Susan Inglett Gallery, New York<\/p>\n

\n\tHassinger\u2019s approach to art-making, \u201cwhere she\u2019s not necessarily thinking about the finished product because the process, is so important,\u201d Norton said, adding that the show will provide a view into how she creates \u201ca sense of impermanence and a capacity for simple acts of maintenance and care for one another and for the world. These are themes that feel essential right now.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tShe added, \u201cIt\u2019s incredible how she\u2019s able to take the everyday things from her surroundings and then instill them with a quality that makes them feel simultaneously intimate and monumental.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive in California will mount a retrospective for interdisciplinary artist Maren…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":95699,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[228,226,227,64688,229,88,64689,64690],"class_list":["post-95698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-berkeley-art-museum-and-pacific-film-archive","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-maren-hassinger","tag-margot-norton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=95698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95698\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/95699"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=95698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=95698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=95698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}