Statement
Megan Hildebrandt is a cancer survivor and recently had her second child. These life events have greatly impacted her creative practice. Confronting her own mortality at age 25 and then experiencing the fragility and strength of birth, she has become obsessed with tracking time- documenting the small, routine moments of life that loop and repeat. Hildebrandt wants to give the viewer intimate, personal moments that capture the both fleeting and endless seconds of being alive.
Her work explores autobiography, the passage of time, illness narrative and recovery from trauma via figurative and abstract drawings and paintings. Hildebrandt attempts to recover time lost to cancer treatment, and to track the development of a new self and her young children. Her work serves as touchstones to mark a life both interrupted and reinvigorated.
Biography
Megan Hildebrandt received her BFA from the Stamps School of Art & Design in 2006, and her MFA in Studio Art from the University of South Florida in 2012. Hildebrandt has exhibited nationally and internationally, including: The Painting Center, New American Paintings, The Baltimore Museum of Art, The Museum of Contemporary Craft, Arlington Arts Center, Detroit Contemporary, HEREarts Center, Latitude 53, Johns Hopkins Medical Center, the LIVESTRONG Foundation, Hyde Park Art Center, The Torpedo Factory, and Collar Works.
In 2018, Hildebrandt received an Art Works grant from the National Endowment for the Arts for the Aesthetics of Health Course she developed for Interlochen Arts Academy. In 2022 Hildebrandt co-authored an article about adapting the Aesthetics of Health curriculum effectively for higher education during the pandemic in the American Medical Association Journal of Ethics. This course is now taught each spring at the University of Texas at Austin.
An artist, educator, and arts-in-health advocate, Hildebrandt currently lives and works in Austin, Texas, where she is Associate Professor of Practice in the Department of Art and Art History at The University of Texas.