Art show inspired by Bauer's poetry opens Jan. 16th

MEAN/TIME, a one-person exhibition by Brooklyn-based artist Katie Merz, will run January 16th through February 21st at Fiendish Plots in Lincoln. The show features images and hieroglyphs inspired by the poetry of Grace Bauer, Nebraska poet and Professor of English, who will give a reading at 7pm on January 16th to celebrate the opening of the show. Visitors can take in the exhibition Saturdays and Sundays between 12:00 pm and 4:00 pm, or by appointment.

About the Artist

Katie Merz has been exhibiting her paintings since 1993 in New York City and Brooklyn with solo shows at Jack Tilton Gallery, Pierogi, Mitchell Algus Gallery, Ferro-Strouse among others and group exhibitions at The Brooklyn Museum, Hunter Gallery, Postmasters, The Drawing Center and White Columns among others. She has had solo shows at Wendy MacDaris in Hudson, NY, Tenderloin Culture Lab in San Francisco and Headland Center for the Arts, to name a few. Additionally she has been involved in numerous public art pieces in New York City.

In 2013 Merz founded the school-less School in New York City. The school-less school was founded in a reaction to the Cooper Unions’ decision to charge admission. There are bi-monthly classes offered that take place on the streets of New York. The students are asked to examine an aspect of the city, and to make visual interventions that respond to the streets of New York. Artists, musicians and writers also contribute to the classes as guest teachers and observers. This is a social experiment that opens the possibility of creating beyond the confines of a school.

In 2009 she received a Judd Fellowship for a residency at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas. In 2011 Merz was awarded the Deadelus Painting Fellowship for a residency at the MacDowell Colony where she has been invited back eight more times. Merz was also an artist in residence at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY, Art Farm in Lincoln, NE and Ucross in Claremont, WY as well as the Olberman Center in Iowa City, IA. She is also a 2015 recipient of a Pollock-Krasner grant.

Her paintings have been positively reviewed several times by Roberta Smith of the New York Times as well as by Kim Levin of the Village Voice, and Jerry Saltz, Ingrid Schaffner and Calvin Reid of Art in America. Katie Merz received her BFA from the Cooper Union in NY, NY.

About the Poet

Grace Bauer's last collection of poems, Nowhere All At Once, (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014) won the Society of Midland Authors Book of the Year Award for 2015.) Her previous books include Retreats & Recognitions (Lost Horse Press), Beholding Eye (Custom Word), and The Women At The Well (Portals Press), as well as several chapbooks (Cafe Culture, Field Guide to the Ineffable: Poems on Marcel Duchamp, Where You’ve Seen Her, and The House Where I’ve Never Lived). She is also co-editor, with Julie Kane, of the anthology, Umpteen Ways of Looking at a Possum: Critical & Creative Responses to Everette Maddox. A 20th Anniversary Edition of The Women At The Well is forthcoming from SFASU Press in 2016, and a new collection, All The Supposes, is forthcoming from the University of New Mexico Press in 2017.

Her poems, stories, essays, and reviews have also appeared in numerous anthologies and journals, including Arts & Letters, Bat City Review, Colorado Review, Doubletake, Georgia Review, Los Angeles Review, North American Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and more.

Bauer has won an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Idaho Poetry Prize, and was nominated (in 2009) for the national Poets’ Prize. She has received fellowships from the Virginia Commission for the Arts, the Nebraska Arts Council, The Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and The Virginia Center for the Arts, as well as the Sorenson Award for Distinguished Teaching in the Humanities from the University of Nebraska, where she has taught in the Creative Writing Program since 1994.