This week we welcome Meena Hasan.
Hasan received her B.A. in studio art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. She has participated in a number of group exhibitions including “Sheherezade’s Gift” at the Center for Book Arts, NYC; “Premio Terna 02” at the MAXXI Museum, Rome; the “Bosch Young Talent Show” at The Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands; “No Longer, Not Yet,” curated by Sean McCarthy, at Essex Flowers, NYC; and “Good Pictures,” curated by Austin Lee, at Deitch Projects, NYC. Currently, Meena is a full-time lecturer in painting at the School of Visual Arts at Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. She is represented by LAUNCH F18 in Tribeca and lives and works in Brooklyn.
“My artistic practice pursues a nuanced approach to issues of representation, subjectivity and personhood in order to articulate a South Asian American Diasporic experience and gaze. I construct my works with care through metaphorical engagement with material and process, developing a complex language of mark making that asks the viewer to participate in the works’ construction and becoming and that plays with the geometric stability of scale relationships.”
My works come out of a deep and rigorous research component focused on global textile traditions, including investigation into fractal patterning methods and specific formal textile symbols transformed through perpetuation over time across the globe, such as the Paisley shape, Batik’s methodologies and the Acanthus plant. The textile histories of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India constitute my personal art history, as the first visual languages I learned, as part of my DNA, and I use this influence to speak to my cultural heritage as a Bangladeshi American.
My practice is grounded in the desire to bridge the geographic, temporal and historical distance between NYC and Dhaka, Bangladesh in order to visualize and embody a heterogenous, non-linear and diasporic environment built out of metabolized constellations of global and local influence and desires. You can view more of Hasan’s work on her website and Instagram page.