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Maria Schechter
Contact/About
Instagram: @soil2surface
Youtube: @soil2surface
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Studio Visits: By appointment only
Artist Statement:
Over the past eight years, Maria Schechter has developed a sustainable artistic practice rooted in research, material responsibility, and craft-based processes. This long-term commitment has shaped not only how she makes her work, but why she creates. Sustainability, for her, is not a singular solution but an evolving methodology—one that considers environmental impact, historical continuity, and the ethics of making. These concerns form the foundation of her work. Marie's work brings together a range of sustainable approaches, including material choices, process-driven techniques, and slow, deliberate methods of production. Craft-based practices play a central role, acting as both a conceptual framework and a physical language within the work. Through painting, photography and sculpture, she explores and innovates on how nature and space can carry layered meanings across time, connecting personal experience with soil memory.
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Research has been a vital component of her work. In particular, her engagement with visual and architectural references from history has informed both the aesthetic and conceptual direction of her projects bringing her closer in relation to the earth. She is drawn to how sacred practices are being reborn in the studios of artists around the world. She believes sites of resonance—places where material, symbol, and belief converge give birth to new ideas. These historical influences are not reproduced directly, but translated through contemporary materials, historical practices and sustainable processes, allow the work to exist in dialogue with the past while remaining grounded in present.
Artist Bio:
Maria Schechter is an American interdisciplinary artist. She has been an artist for 30 years and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, and pursued graduate studies at New York University working toward a master’s degree in Visual Art Administration. She later completed a Master in International Business at Schiller International University in Heidelberg, Germany.
Marie's sustainable, ecologically rooted practice is primarily focused on natural dyes, the use of natural materials and mycelium as a medium. The palettes she forages and transforms into painting palettes follow methods used by artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Vincent van Gogh, as well as artists before the late mid- 1800s—including our earliest ancestors. She is committed to continuing these traditional practices, preserving the colors of the natural world from around the world. Schechter’s creative process involves ethical foraging and the use of natural materials—fruits, flowers, mushrooms, seeds, and botanicals—to produce her own plant-based pigments. She is also known for her innovative use of mycelium as a sculptural medium, working with unseeded substrates that do not fruit mushrooms to emphasis impermanence and regeneration. Her seminal mycelium project, Gatekeepers—a five-foot arch grown over three years through the use of 300lbs of a mycelium substrate—serves as a living homage to cycles of growth and decay. ​Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with exhibitions at institutions such as the Anderson Museum, the Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Bret Waller Gallery, Minnetrista Museum & Garden, Seattle Art Museum and the Triton Museum in Santa Clara, California.​ Schechter’s contributions have been recognized with numerous awards, including a MacArthur Award nomination 2002, the 2025 CERF+ Get Ready Grant, 2024 DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award, the UCLA Artist Achievement Award, Art and Accessibility Grant UCLA, and the Center for Cultural Innovation Covid-19 Grant. Her writing and work have been featured in Eluxe Magazine, The Ecological Citizen, Nature Evolve Magazine, and Axios.
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