Maria Park: Diagram as Medium
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Field Diagram (2025), installation view at the Everson Museum of Art.
Abstract
In this presentation, Maria Park will share her work centering around the language of diagrams, which began as a collaboration with her late partner Branden Hookway, and how, following his death in 2021, it became a medium for tracing the correspondences between magical and rational thinking, signs and rituals, and grief and love. It focuses on her fall exhibition, Field Diagram, which presents the diagram as a shifting field, one where the lines are continuously drawn and redrawn.
Biography
Maria Park's work explores how technology shapes perception and participation in the world. Through paintings, installations, and public projects, she examines human presence and agency within a media-reliant society. Born in Munich, Germany, and raised in the Bay Area, Park studied at the New School/Parsons and Wimbledon School of Art in London, earning a B.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Art and an M.F.A. in Painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work has been presented in numerous exhibitions nationally and internationally, including solo museum exhibitions at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Santa Rosa; group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum in St. Louis and the Seoul National Museum of Art in South Korea.
Park has received public commissions from the San Francisco Arts Commission in partnership with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, FIGMENT/ AIANY for Governors Island in New York City, and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore. Her collaboration with late partner Branden Hookway, Training Setting, was published in the Berlin-based journal Interface Critique in 2018. Awards include the M.F.A. Grant Award from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Korea Arts Foundation of America Award, Rapid Response Fund from the Atkinson Center for Sustainability, and the Murphy Fine Arts Fellowship from the San Francisco Foundation. Park is an Associate Professor in the Department of Art, where she has taught since 2006.
