Maria Schechter
Contact/About
Instagram: @soil2surface
Youtube: @soil2surface
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Studio Visits: By appointment only
TikTok: @mycomaria
Artist Statement:
My work investigates how natural color functions as a living archive of cultural memory. Through sustainable material practices, historical craft traditions, and community engagement, I explore the relationships between ecology, identity, and artistic practice. Working with pigments derived from local landscapes, I seek to preserve disappearing knowledge while fostering contemporary conversations about environmental stewardship, cultural continuity, and our evolving relationship with the earth. Over the past decade, I have developed a sustainable artistic practice rooted in research, material responsibility, and craft-based processes. This long-term commitment has shaped not only how I make my work, but why I create. For me, sustainability is not a singular solution but an evolving methodology—one that considers environmental impact, historical continuity, and the ethics of making. These principles form the foundation of my practice.
Working across painting, Eco-printing as a record of local biodiversity, and sculpture using earth based materials like mycelium as a medium, I employ slow, process-driven methods that honor the inherent qualities of natural materials. Craft serves as both a conceptual framework and a physical language, allowing me to investigate how nature, place, and time carry layered meanings. Through these material relationships, I connect personal experience with the memory held within soil, plants, and landscape. Research is central to my practice, particularly the cultural histories of color and the ecological knowledge embedded within pigment-producing plants and soils. Studying the lands and Indigenous knowledge systems connected to these materials has deepened my understanding of color as both substance and story. This ongoing inquiry guides my work, bringing me into closer relationship with the earth while acknowledging the histories and traditions that continue to shape our understanding of the natural world.
I am drawn to the resurgence of sacred and craft-based practices within contemporary art, where ancient knowledge is reimagined through present-day making. I am interested in sites of resonance—places where material, symbol, memory, and belief intersect to generate new ways of seeing. Rather than reproducing historical traditions, I translate their underlying principles through sustainable processes and contemporary materials. In doing so, my work exists in dialogue with the past while remaining firmly rooted in the present, inviting reflection on the interconnectedness of ecology, culture, and the enduring language of color.
Artist Bio:
Maria Schechter, born in Pasadena, California, is an American interdisciplinary artist whose practice explores the intersections of ecology, material culture, and sustainable craft. For the last decade, she investigated the transformative potential of color, a journey that has taken her across 17 countries in pursuit of cultural, historical, ecological traditions, and deep engagements living sustainably. Today, Schechter’s research-driven practice centers on natural pigments, plant-based dyes, environmental printing, and mycelium, both as a sculptural medium and a conceptual framework. Through these processes, she examines how natural materials hold cultural memory, environmental knowledge, and the histories of the landscapes from which they emerge. Schechter earned a bachelor of fine arts from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, and pursued graduate studies in visual arts administration at New York University’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development. She later completed a master of international business at Schiller International University in Heidelberg, Germany. Her interdisciplinary background informs a practice that bridges art, science, sustainability, and global material traditions. Working with ethically foraged fruits, flowers, mushrooms, seeds, bark, and botanicals, Schechter creates her own plant- and earth-derived pigments through methods rooted in historical colormaking traditions that existed long before industrially manufactured dyes. Drawing inspiration from artists and artisans of the Renaissance and earlier periods, she preserves and reimagines ancestral approaches to color through a contemporary ecological lens. Her commitment to sustainable practice extends beyond materials to include mindful sourcing, reuse, and processes that honor natural cycles of growth, transformation, and renewal. Mycelium has become a central element of Schechter’s practice, serving as both a living material and a metaphor for interconnected systems. Using unseeded substrates that do not produce mushrooms, she cultivates sculptural forms that explore impermanence, regeneration, and the evolving relationship between humans and the natural world. Her seminal work Gatekeepers—a five-foot arch cultivated over three years from more than 300 pounds of mycelium substrate—embodies these themes, offering a meditation on growth, transformation, decay, and ecological resilience. Schechter’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Anderson Museum of Art, Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Bret Waller Gallery, Minnetrista Museum & Gardens, Seattle Art Museum, and Triton Museum of Art. She has received numerous honors, including the 2025 CERF+ Get Ready Grant, the 2024 DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, the UCLA Artist Achievement Award, the UCLA Art and Accessibility Grant, the Center for Cultural Innovation COVID-19 Grant, and a 2002 MacArthur Award nomination. Her artwork and writing have been featured in Axios, Hyperallergic, Whitehot Magazine, Eluxe Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Nature, and Evolve Magazine.
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