Leeza Meksin

As part of Chinati Weekend 2019, artist in residence Leeza Meksin hosted an open studio at the Locker Plant.

Leeza Meksin is a New York-based interdisciplinary artist working in painting, sculpture, installation, public art, and multiples. Her work investigates (the often false) binaries of hard/soft, male/female, public/private, and highlights parallels between conventions of painting, architecture, and our bodies. On view at the Locker Plant, and partly inspired by the architecture of the building, especially its old refrigerator-style doors, were an array of Meksin’s richly colored, large-scale collage works created from cut, dyed, and layered fabrics as well as a series of themed drawings that the artist began as a sort of diary or daily practice upon her arrival in Marfa.

Leeza Meksin has created site-specific installations for the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), Brooklyn (2018–19), the National Academy of Design, NYC (2018), the Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York (2017), The Utah Museum of Contemporary Art in Salt Lake City (2016), the Kitchen, New York (2015), BRIC Media Arts, Brooklyn (2015), Brandeis University (2014), and in a National Endowment for the Arts funded project in New Haven, CT for Artspace (2012). She is the recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist grant (2015) and in 2013 co-founded Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run gallery and curatorial collective in Brooklyn, NY. Meksin’s work has been featured in Bomb Magazine, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, and many other publications. Meksin has been teaching at Columbia University School of the Arts since 2015. Currently her large-scale sculptures Turret Tops are on view at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum through August 2020.