Window Dressing XXVIII: Megan Hildebrandt
Exhibition Dates: June. 26 – July. 3rd, 2023 (visible 24 hours/day)
Artist Reception: Friday, June.30, 7-9pm
Megan Hildebrandt received her BFA from the Stamps School of Art & Design in 2006, and her MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida in 2012. Hildebrandt has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: The Painting Center, New American Paintings, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Arlington Arts Center, HEREarts Center, Latitude 53, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, the LIVESTRONG Foundation, Hyde Park Art Center, The Torpedo Factory, and Collar Works. In 2018, Hildebrandt received an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the Aesthetics of Health Course she developed for Interlochen Arts Academy. In early 2023 she moderated a panel entitled “Motherhood, Making and Mental Health” at The Contemporary Austin. An artist, educator, and arts-in-health advocate, Hildebrandt currently lives and works in Austin, Texas.
“I am a cancer survivor and mother of two young children. These life events have greatly impacted my creative practice. Confronting my own mortality at age 25 and then experiencing the fragility and strength of birth, I have become obsessed with tracking time- documenting the small, routine moments of life that loop and repeat. I want to give the viewer intimate, personal moments that capture the both fleeting and endless seconds of being alive. My work explores autobiography, the passage of time, illness narrative and recovery from trauma via figurative and abstract drawings, animations, and paintings. I attempt to recover time lost to cancer treatment, and to track the development of a new self and my young children. My works serve as touchstones to mark a life both interrupted and reinvigorated.
Since the birth of my second child in 2019, I have begun creating a body of work about the horrific number of school mass shootings that have increasingly occurred over the course of my own lifetime. These works, when taken in alongside my illustrations of daily family life, are now a daily reality for which I must account for in my documentation of daily life”.
