1947-present
Works in the Collection
Biography
Maren Hassinger (née Jenkins) was born in Los Angeles, California in 1947. In 1965, she attended Bennington College in Vermont. Having studied dance throughout her childhood, she attempted to major in dance at Bennington but was rejected, finding instead a home in the sculpture department. She graduated with a BFA in 1969 and returned to LA to study sculpture at UCLA. She was again denied but found her place as the first MFA student in UCLA’s Fiber Sculpture program.
During the 1970s, Hassinger began collaborating with sculptor Senga Nengudi. Though many of the works no longer exist, the pair continue to collaborate today. From 1984-1985, Hassinger continued her work as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. In 1997, she was offered a position as the Director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art, where she continued until her retirement in 2018. In 2015, Spelman College featured a retrospective of her work, and in 2017, her work was included in the traveling exhibition, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985. In 2018, the Baltimore Museum of Art mounted a major retrospective of her work titled The Spirit of Things.