Event details 
Saturday, April 19, 2025
2 pm 

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission.

Artist Max Hooper Schneider discusses the work of Lucas Samaras and Meg Webster—both on long-term view at Dia Beacon—reflecting on the intersections of their practices as well as their combined influence on his own.

Max Hooper Schneider was born in Los Angeles in 1982. He graduated from Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 2011 with a master’s degree in landscape architecture. The foregrounding of material technologies and tactics of defamiliarization within the fields of biology, philosophy, landscape architecture, and varying subcultures continue to inform his polymathic practice. Hooper Schneider’s work explores and develops the aesthetics of succession, abandonment, and the uncanny through the creation of habitats and installations that materialize and dramatize nature in diverse ways. In his practice, nature is conceived as a process of ceaseless morphogenic modulation, a relentless onslaught in which bodies, as formed matters, are continuously created, transformed, and destroyed. The resultant work voids the difference between the natural and the artificial, challenges conventional systems of both scientific and artistic classification, upsets valuations of high and low culture, and suggests a worldview that strives to dislocate humans from their assumed position of centrality and superiority as knowers and actors in the world. Obsessive travel, documentation, and field work in distant regions, as well as the sacrificing of his own material compositions to environmental elements, remain integral to his codex of artistic procedures. He continues to experiment across institutions, venues, and outdoor sites locally and internationally and his work is held in major public and private collections around the world. Hooper Schneider lives in Los Angeles.