Artist Statement & Bio – miranda maher

Statement~

January 2026

I describe myself as a Contemporary Natural History Artist—partly tongue in cheek, since my work is not a meticulous cataloguing of the natural world in the traditional sense. Instead, I am cataloguing my own anxiety about ecological collapse and my anger at human arrogance toward the living systems we inhabit.

For many years my work addressed human violence directly. While I continue to point to human damage in series such as Infestations and Habitat, my recent work focuses on unsettling our habitual assumption of human centrality and privilege.

In Folded Milky Way: Some Things Are Very Old, Other Things Are Very Young, I shift the viewer’s sense of time by juxtaposing the incomprehensible age of the stars with the fleeting lifespans of small terrestrial creatures—implicitly placing humans within that same fragile scale. Wild Rivers is a hyper-decorative series celebrating major rivers, recalling the reverence older cultures held for water while maintaining a playful, contemporary sensibility. Lands as Yet Undiscovered merges historical circular maps of Antarctica with ink Enso drawings, a Zen practice associated with oneness, impermanence, and timelessness.

Ultimately, my work offers viewers an opportunity to shift perception—moving humans off the center stage and into a layered, interdependent web of living systems, where we are not masters, but participants.

Bio~

Work

Over the last 25 years, Miranda Maher has exhibited in university, non-profit and commercial gallery spaces in New York and throughout the US and internationally. Some venues that have shown her work: Wave Hill (Bronx), The Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, White Columns, The Drawing Center, Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery and Pierogi’s Flat Files. She has also shown work at Kunstbunker (Nuremberg), Spaces (Cleveland), CEPA (Buffalo), Artetica (Rome), Yatoo (S. Korea), Staub (g*fzk!)(Zurich), the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Bronx Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum of Art.

Along with her exhibition work, she has editioned more than 10 artist’s books and was the Art Editor for the poetry journal Long News in the Short Century. Her artists books are distributed by Printed Matter in New York.

Her work is represented in the Robert Schiffler Collection, as well as many university and museum collections including the Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art (Special Collections), Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, the Boston Museum and the Brooklyn Museum.

* * *

Life

Maher moved from Detroit to Brooklyn shortly after receiving her MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1990. Before that she lived in Providence while working on her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. And before that she lived in Kansas, Indiana, New York, Florida, North Carolina, back to Kansas, Virginia, Washington DC, Heidelberg, Munich, California and back to Washington DC. Nomad? Nomad.

For the last 20 years, she has pursued Japanese martial methods and Chinese meditative and healing arts along side herher visual art practice. In 2013, she retired from training Amagakure no Sato Ryu, holding the rank of Okuden Kaiden. She is a senior instructor of Universal Healing Tao and TaoZen and teaches Qigong, Taijii and Tao meditation in Brooklyn. She is also a Medical Qigong Therapist and a Master Teacher of Usui Reiki and travels regularly to Asia and Europe to continue her studies of Taiji and Neigong with her main teacher and Qigong friends.