Catherine Meier creates drawings, animations, and large-scale installations of earth, sky, and horizon – of vast, open landscapes. Large in scope, her projects develop through time spent deep listening and giving attention to specific locations. She holds a BFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an MFA from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries, and film festivals as well as in the very land that gives rise to her work. Meier’s project Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek, a hand-drawn animation that records the temporality and vastness of the land, was a featured project in Creative Capitals’ online web forum On our Radar. She has held place-oriented residencies at Badlands National Park and Cedar Point Biological Station. Meier received a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board and Arrowhead Regional Arts Council grants, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for graduate study. Meier lives with her family near the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Fellowship Statement

I work to describe in visual artistic form the human encounter with vast, open landscape. My drawings, animations, and installations speak to the intricate, beautiful, and unseen understandings of land and place.

A settler descendent, I grew up in a small town at the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, and for seven years I worked as a truck driver hauling cattle throughout the Great Plains. While my personal and family history is tied to the Plains, my work is not based in nostalgia—it originates from a deep physical, mental, and emotional need to move in and through open land. My interest extends beyond visceral, personal need into a deep and abiding engagement with the history, culture, and environmental concerns of these large but delicate grasslands. I am deeply rooted in rural working class experience, and I find inspiration and guidance from contemporary Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, the study of place and language, and environmental activism.

My work has become the story of time told through the language of place.