Maren Hassinger (born Maren Louise Jenkins in 1947) is an African-American artist and educator whose career spans four decades. Hassinger uses sculpture, film, dance, performance art, and public art to explore the relationship between the natural world and industrial materials. She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes. Hassinger has stated that her work “focuses on elements, or even problems—social and environmental—that we all share, and in which we all have a stake…. I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.” Trained in dance, Hassinger transitioned to making sculpture and visual art in college. Hassinger received her MFA in Fiber Arts from UCLA in 1973. She was the director emeritus of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art for ten years. She currently lives and works in New York City. Early life In 1947, Maren Louise Jenkins was born in Los Angeles, California, to Helen Mills Jenkins, a police officer and educator, and late father, Carey Kenneth Jenkins, an architect. At an early age, she showed a gift for art and was exposed to both her mother's interest in flower arranging and her father's work at his drafting table. Education In 1965, she enrolled at Bennington College and graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in sculpture in 1969. She originally intended to study dance, which she had practiced since she was five years old, at Bennington. Instead, she sought to incorporate aspects of dance into her sculptures. During Hassinger's years at Bennington College, the institution was an all-women's college with mostly men serving as instructors, many of whom had New York gallery affiliations. Hassinger believed the institutional connections and affiliations of the instructors were distant from the experiences of many students, and she rejected the formal strategies that were being taught. In an essay on Hassinger's practice, Maureen Megerian wrote:". . . Clement Greenberg's formalist approach dominated the art department, so instructors focused on the creation of abstract, Constructivist-inspired welded steel sculpture. Minimalism, then predominant in the New York art world, presented another model of formulaic, abstract art for students to follow. [Hassinger] ultimately rejected such strict formal strategies, although the discipline of these methods, especially such Minimalist devices as repetition and regular arrangement, provides her work with a rational underpinning that she consciously complicates and makes