Between ruin and renewal, my work cultivates the possibility of a world reborn from the remnants of what was broken.
For over six years, I have navigated the United States prison system and fostered community collaborations with incarcerated individuals across various correctional facilities, including the Columbia Secure Center for Girls, the Brookwood Secure Center for Youth, the Shawangunk Correctional Facility, and the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility.
Emerging from the interplay of my individual studio practice and the synchronicities I encounter in my communal practice, I navigate and reconfigure the systems, architectures, and landscapes that oppress, control and confine. Rooted in the frameworks of magical realism, my work conjures thresholds—conceptual and material mappings that chart pathways through our fraught panoptic landscapes toward alternative realities, new beginnings, and renewed freedoms. Using mythological and metaphorical symbols, visualizations in my work disrupt and reimagine space, time, structures, and systems, bending the rigid contours of power into fluid sites of possibility both through play and detailed observation.
Through a collage-based approach, I weave the physical fragments of images and material—digital, sculptural, and found—into reimagined landscapes of space and power. Like mushrooms dissolving decay into fertile ground, like oysters purifying our tide, I look to nature’s quiet alchemy as my guide. This process—transitional, interstitial, liminal—holds the breath before transformation. With a little bit of duct tape and some Elmers glue the blueprints of this world emerge not despite its brokenness, but because of it.
BIO
Maggie Hazen is New York-based visual artist, activist, and experimental filmmaker from Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and performed at the Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Tolerance, CICA Museum, South Korea, Granoff Center at Brown University, Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, The Boston Young Contemporaries exhibition, and the Center for Photography at the University of California Riverside as part of Southern California’s Pacific Standard Time; among others.
Public works include Hidden in Plein Site, a billboard about carceral landscapes in the Catskill Mountains, Transmimic, a projection on the Manhattan Bridge, and Of Departed Delineations, a transformative memory commemorating the 1992 LA Riots. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues throughout the United States and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and Philadelphia.
Hazen has had fellowships, grants, and residencies from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum, Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm; Lighthouse Works Visual Artist Fellowship; Vermont Studio Center and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art in Switzerland; and many others.
She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, NYU, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, and as part of the Bard College Clemente courses in the humanities. She is a visiting artist-in-residence at Bard College in the Studio Arts program. She has studied at Brown University, MIT, and the European Graduate School. She holds a BFA from Biola University in California and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.
