BIO Maggie Hazen is an LA and NY-based visual artist and intuitive collaborator working between collage, sculpture and experimental media. 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.
STATEMENT
Between ruin and renewal, my work cultivates the possibility of a world reborn from fractured remnants.
Emerging from the interplay of my individual studio practice and the synchronicities that arise through communal collaboration, my work navigates and reconfigures the systems, architectures, and landscapes that oppress, control, and confine. Rooted in the frameworks of magical realism, I conjure thresholds—conceptual and material mappings that chart pathways through our fraught panoptic landscapes toward alternative realities, new beginnings, and renewed freedoms. Mythological symbols, metaphor, and meticulous observation become tools to bend the rigid contours of power into fluid sites of possibility.
For over six years, my practice has unfolded at the intersection of carceral systems, natural landscapes, and the architectures that condition how we see—and what we are allowed to imagine. Through sustained collaborations inside U.S. prisons in New York—including the Columbia Secure Center for Girls, Brookwood Secure Center for Youth, Shawangunk Correctional Facility, and Bedford Hills Correctional Facility—I have witnessed firsthand how institutions that claim rehabilitation instead entrench violence, isolation, and structural dispossession. As the prison industrial complex continues to rise in scale, profit, and cultural reach, this work feels increasingly urgent.
Rather than waiting for these systems to collapse under their own weight, I choose to forecast. I imagine the prison already as a ruin: a future archaeological site where society might finally confront what it built. This vision has led me to seek out ruins—contemporary and ancient—standing inside the remnants of justice systems that once determined who was allowed to participate in the social world. In my installations and collage-based works, I reconfigure fragments of physical sites and prison interiors—printed photographs, digital and sculptural elements, found materials, and industrial remnants—into terrains where ruins become pathways toward architectures of transition, moving from what once confined toward what might liberate.
Through this collage-based process, I weave fragments into reimagined landscapes of space and power. Like mushrooms dissolving decay into fertile ground, like oysters filtering silt into clarity, I look to nature’s quiet alchemy as a guide. This work is transitional, interstitial, liminal—holding the breath before transformation. And with a little duct tape and some Elmer’s glue, the blueprints of another world begin to emerge not despite the brokenness of this one, but because of it.
