Art alum Meier receives McKnight fellowship
calendar icon06 Jun 2013
Catherine Meier, of Duluth, Minn., who received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln Department of Art and Art History in 2005, has received the McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD).
Meier is one of four artists to receive the prestigious fellowship. Designed to identify and support outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists, the McKnight Artist Fellowships for Visual Artists provide recipients with $25,000 stipends, public recognition, professional encouragement from national visiting critics, an artist book and exhibition at the MCAD Gallery. The fellowships are funded by a generous grant from The McKnight Foundation and administered by MCAD. The 2013-14 McKnight fellows were selected from a group of 190 applicants by a panel of arts professionals of varying backgrounds whose careers intersect with the visual arts in different ways. This year’s jurors were Megan Hamilton, an arts writer and program manager at the Creative Alliance, a community-based non-profit arts organization in Baltimore; Gilbert Vicario, senior curator at the Des Moines Art Center; and Lynne Yamamoto, a practicing artist and associate professor of studio art at Smith College in Northampton, Mass.
Meier explores the meaning of “open space” in her large-scale graphite drawings, woodcuts and animations. Representing a state of mind as well as a state of being, these expansive landscapes are redolent of the artist’s own travels crossing the Great Plains of North America and the Mongolian Steppe where her experience of freedom and boundlessness also fueled feelings of fear and paranoia.
Meier has shown her work in gallery and museum settings in the Midwest, South, and Japan, at film festivals, and in the very landscapes that gave rise to her drawings. Last fall, she had an exhibition at the Great Plains Art Museum titled “Open Richness.” She received her Master of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. Her awards include two from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council.