linn meyers: Works 2004-2018

linn meyers is best known for her intricate line-based paintings and drawings, and her large-scale installations. Her large projects require a great deal of endurance and involve drawing in a gallery space over the course of days, sometimes weeks or months, accumulating lines into dense and intricate compositions. The scale of these projects allows meyers to respond to the existing architectural features, magnifying the wholly committed performativity of her process. Anne Collins Goodyear notes, “The work encourages viewers to think about our relationship to place, space, and our imaginations.”

linn meyers sees her work as an act of resistance to the ever-increasing speed and scale of the world in which we are living. Her practice is dedicated to an unhurried, deliberate approach to image-making.

She makes paintings, drawings, prints, and large-scale, site-specific wall drawings. Systems of mark-making based on the grid—a structure that implies stability, organization, and uniformity—propel her compositions. The slippages and imperfection of human touch inevitably challenge the order and predictability of the grid. 

meyers earned her BFA from Cooper Union and MFA from California College of the Arts. Her works have been included in exhibitions and permanent collections in venues including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Drawing Center, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Baltimore Museum of Art, Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Amore Pacific Museum of Art in South Korea, and the British Museum, London, among others.

She has received numerous awards and fellowships, including a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award, the Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and several grants from the DC Commission on the Arts. She has been awarded residencies at The Hirshhorn Museum in Washington DC, Ballinglen Arts Foundation, Ireland, Hayama Residency in Japan, Iris Project in Los Angeles, The Bemis Center in Omaha NE, Millay Arts in Austerlitz, NY, The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, CA, Flying Horse Editions in FL, the Ucross Foundation, Wyoming, and The Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, NM.

She lives and works between Washington, DC and Los Angeles.