Event details
Saturday, January 20, 2024
2 pm 

Dia Beacon
3 Beekman Street 
Beacon, New York

Free with museum admission; space is limited and offered on a first-come, first-served basis.

On the occasion of the exhibition Maren Hassinger, scholar Allie Tepper discusses the artist’s practice with a focus on Field (1983), currently on view at Dia Beacon. Hassinger will then join Tepper and Dia Curator Jordan Carter for a conversation. The program takes place in the galleries at Dia Beacon.

Maren Hassinger was born in Los Angeles in 1947. She received a BA in sculpture from Bennington College, Vermont, in 1969, and an MFA in fiber structure from the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1973. Often making use of both organic and mass-produced materials—including branches, plastic bags, newspapers, and wire rope—Hassinger’s work engages with the natural environment and its intersections with issues related to humanity. In the 1970s Hassinger was involved with Studio Z, a loose collective of artists that included Houston Conwill, David Hammons, and Senga Nengudi, among others. She has had solo exhibitions and projects at numerous institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago; Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; Baltimore Museum of Art; Boca Raton Museum of Art, Florida; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens; and Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, Atlanta. In 2021, the artist presented Maren Hassinger at Dia Bridgehampton, where she created a series of fabric panels printed with her work Circles of Bushes (1991) and two new bush sculptures on the outside grounds. Hassinger was a lecturer in the Department of Art at Stony Brook Southampton, New York, from 1992 to 1997; and served as Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, from 1997 to 2018. Hassinger lives in New York.

Allie Tepper is a curator and art historian. She is the Associate Curator at the Cooley Gallery at Reed College, Portland, where she is currently curating the forthcoming exhibition Las Vegas Ikebana: Maren Hassinger & Senga Nengudi (2024). She is also a guest curator at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling in Harlem, a visiting lecturer of art history at the University of Albany, and was previously the Assistant Director of Triple Canopy in New York. Tepper is the co-editor of the publication Side by Side: Collaborative Artistic Practices in the United States, 1960s–80s (2020). She has curated exhibitions and performance programs for the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; as well as for the Whitney Museum of American Art and SculptureCenter, both in New York. She received her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Tepper lives in New York.