Maren Hassinger

Maren Hassinger (born Maren Louise Jenkins in 1947) is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades.

Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials.

She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes.

Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake….

I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”

Trained in dance, Hassinger transitioned to making sculpture and visual art in college.

In 1947, Maren Louise Jenkins was born in Los Angeles, California, to Helen Mills Jenkins, a police officer and educator, and late father, Carey Kenneth Jenkins, an architect.

At an early age, she showed a gift for art and was exposed to both her mother's interest in flower arranging and her father's work at his drafting table.

In 1965, she enrolled at Bennington College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in sculpture in 1969.

She originally intended to study dance, which she had practiced since she was five years old, at Bennington.

Instead, she sought to incorporate aspects of dance into her sculptures.

During Hassinger's years at Bennington College, the institution was an all-women's college with mostly men serving as instructors, many of whom had New York gallery affiliations.

Hassinger believed the institutional connections and affiliations of the instructors were distant from the experiences of many students, and she rejected the formal strategies that were being taught.

In 1969, she moved to New York City to enroll in drafting courses and concurrently work as an art editor at a publishing company.

As an editor, she managed the inclusion of African-American images in textbooks, "...a position she has described as 'demeaning."

Jenkins married writer Peter Hassinger and returned to Los Angeles with her husband in 1970.

Maren Hassinger started her artistic experimentation in a Los Angeles junkyard in the early 1970s, where she came across bulks of industrial wire rope.

She found that the material could be used sculpturally and as a fiber that could be manipulated to resemble plant life.

It was during this period in the 1970s that Hassinger began to collaborate with the sculptor Senga Nengudi.

The two artists met when they were both working as CETA artists administered by Brockman Gallery.

While few of their works from the 1970s remain, Hassinger and Nengudi continue to collaborate, with Hassinger activating Nengudi's sculpture R.S.V.P.X as recently as 2014.

Hassinger was part of Los Angeles art collective Studio Z which included Nengudi, David Hammons, Ronn Davis, Duval Lewis, RoHo, Franklin Parker, Barbara McCullough, Houston Conwill, and Joe Ray (artist).

Southern fiction writer Walker Percy continued to influence her childhood connection between the natural and the manufactured world with his work, Wreath.

Many of Percy's novels, which Hassinger was reading at the time, are about navigating a modern world that was becoming removed from nature.

Another influence which struck her was the sculpture work of Eva Hesse.

Hassinger received her MFA in Fiber Arts from UCLA in 1973.

She was the director emeritus of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art for ten years.

She currently lives and works in New York City.

In an essay on Hassinger's practice, Maureen Megerian wrote:"'. . . Clement Greenberg's formalist approach dominated the art department, so instructors focused on the creation of abstract, Constructivist-inspired welded steel sculpture. Minimalism, then predominant in the New York art world, presented another model of formulaic, abstract art for students to follow. [Hassinger] ultimately rejected such strict formal strategies, although the discipline of these methods, especially such Minimalist devices as repetition and regular arrangement, provides her work with a rational underpinning that she consciously complicates and makes more emotionally engaging.'"She earned a Master of Fine Arts in fiber from UCLA in 1973.

Hassinger discovered the wire rope in a Los Angeles junkyard while a student in the graduate program.

This became a signature medium for her.

During an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973 Hassinger was introduced to Hesse's work and admired her obsessive exploration of forms and techniques, and ability to convey emotion through fiber methods.

Hassinger recalled: "'It was as if I was looking at somebody's spirit made manifest. . . it was an absolute gut level, wrenching experience. . . as if the sculpture were made flesh. . . later when I began to read about [Eva Hesse], it was as if she had managed somehow to put all the emotional truth of her life into that piece, and it communicated that way. . . It was a total true expression of life.'"

This federally funded program enabled Hassinger to create Twelve Trees #2 in 1979.

Incorporating both sculptural and performance work, Hassinger and Nengudi's collaborative sculptures have been considered ahead of their time due to their process of "combin[ing] sculpture, dance, theater, music and more with the collaborative spirit of community meetings and the avant-garde brio of Allan Kaprow's happenings."

Additionally, Hassinger utilizes movements of everyday life in her dance.

During the 1980s, the League of Allied Arts sponsored the musical Ain't Misbehavin honoring various Black artists.

The League of Allied Arts is the longest running Black women's arts nonprofit arts organization in the Los Angeles area.

The musical took place at the Aquarius Theatre in Hollywood and Hassinger was among the several honored artists.

From 1984-1985, Hassinger worked at the Studio Museum in Harlem as an artist-in-residence.