Biography
Meg Boe Birns is an artist, teacher. and literary critic living and working in New York City. She has studied privately with Lenora Shargo from the Maryland Institute of Art, Henry Pearson from The New School and Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and has been a student in a number of art classes at The New School. She has exhibited her work in a variety of venues in and around New York City, including the Small Works at the Washington Square East Gallery, the TNC Gallery, the Ridge Street Gallery, the Lynn Prince Gallery, and the Art for Healing Gallery, the TNC Gallery. and online at The Lark Gallery and People and Paintings gallery. Her drawings have been published in the Art Times, Collages and Bricolages, The Creative Woman and on the cover of the premiere issue of I, The First Person. She has been given awards by the Rockland Center for the Arts and the National Art League.
Artist Statement
Artist’s Statement I am an artist, but am also a Literature teacher and literary critic, I teach literature at The New School and at NYU and publish academic articles as Margaret Boe Birns, but I show as an artist under the name Meg Boe Birns. I have always though I had a Literature Self and an Art Self, and the slight difference in name expresses that. My Art Self works with paint, canvas, papier-mâché, clay, wood, metal, paint pen, paper, and found objects to create pieces that do not subsume the materials within the content, instead make the materials part of the subject matter. Whether abstract or figurative, my work relies on intuition as much as on an idea or plan I may have, as though the imagery springs directly from unconscious in the manner of automatic writing.
