Linn Meyers

Linn Meyers (born March 17, 1968) is an American, Washington, D.C.–based artist. Her work has been exhibited in the United States and abroad. She is known for her hand-drawn lines and tracings for site-specific installations.

Early life and travels
Meyers was born in Washington, D.C., where she lived until she was 17, at which time she moved to Paris, France. In 1986 she moved back to the U.S. to attend The Cooper Union in New York City, where she graduated in 1990 with a BFA. In 1991 Meyers moved to Oakland, California, to pursue an MFA at The California College of the Arts in Oakland California (now located in San Francisco.) After completing her master's degree (1993), Meyers returned to New York City. In 1997 she spent several months living and working in New Haven, Connecticut, before relocating to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lived for 4 years. Meyers returned to her native Washington, D.C in 2002.

Work
Meyers uses repetitive applications of line and color to draw on a variety of surfaces including paper, vellum, mylar, and gallery walls. "Her drawings tend to grow from themselves, each successive line determining the next." Each piece begins with a single mark – a line that traces a pre-determined framework of circles, or a simple singular gesture. This first stroke defines the direction in which the entire image will evolve – each line a direct response to the mark made just before. These marks amass to create an image, which is both still and moving, ordered and chaotic, both pointing toward perfection and also wholly imperfect.

Meyers' works "function like a map of sorts, charting time and space." At the core of the work is the artist's own relationship to time: learning how to move back and forth between natural time, measured time, and subjective time. Meyers has said, “my works are records of a defined period of time, and in that particular way they are not abstract. They are a form of realism and narrative.” “Indeed Meyers’ work does not erase the artist’s hand; by contrast it is the most direct result of her body movements in a given time period and thereby is a trace of that very personal experience.”

Installation
Meyers has been making large, site-specific wall drawings in museums and galleries since 2000. These projects require a great deal of endurance and involve drawing in the space over the course of days, sometimes weeks, accumulating lines into dense and intricate compositions. This scale allows Meyers to respond to architectural spaces and magnifies the wholly committed performativity of her process. On Meyers' exhibition for The Hammer Museum, Senior Curator Anne Ellegood wrote, “the sense of being present while viewing the work is also amplified at this larger scale, allowing viewers to experience the work not just visually but also physically. To see a wall drawing is to be surrounded by it and to feel oneself to be part of the work.” Many of Meyers’ wall drawings are created with an awareness of their ultimate impermanence.

As the 2018 halley k. harrisburg ’90 and Michael Rosenfeld Artist-in-Residence at Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Linn Meyers' newest site-specific installation is titled "Let’s Get Lost." In collaboration with an interactive sound installation, "Listening Glass," by Rebecca Bray, James Bigbee Garver, and Josh Knowles, the exhibition will open on September 27, 2018 and remain on view until September 29, 2019. “Her drawn piece will take cues from Listening Glass, using the sound project to inform the composition of her drawing, thus turning sound into drawn gesture.”

Exhibitions
Meyers has exhibited in venues that include the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C.; the Frick Museum, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art, Japan; the Mattress Factory, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., The Weatherspoon Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina; Paris Concret, Paris, France; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C, The Columbus Museum of Art, and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Awards
Meyers has received numerous awards, including a Pollock Krasner Award, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, A Santo Foundation Individual Artist Award, an Anonymous Was a Woman Award, and four DC Commission on the Arts Fellowships. She has been Artist in Residence at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art, The Millay Colony, The Tamarind Institute, The Bemis Institute, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and The Bowdowin College Museum of Art.

Videos

 * linn meyers in conversation with Jonathan Frederick Walz, director of curatorial affairs and curator of American art, The Columbus Museum at the National Gallery of Art
 * Bowdoin College Museum of Art
 * Hirshorn Museum and Sculpture Garden
 * Hammer Projects
 * Phillips Collection
 * San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art