Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Maggie Lee

Maggie Lee’s work has taken shape in a wide array of forms including sculpture, installation, photography, zine-making, blogging and moving image. Her videos often oscillate between the personal and the pop-cultural, blending diaristic self-documentation with collaged found sound and image. Lee’s work probes the emotional undercurrents and personal resonances of contemporary culture: memories of the artist’s early years in suburban New Jersey, candid scenes from New York City nightlife, and totem-like odes to the assorted mass-produced ephemera that adorns daily life.

Lee garnered significant acclaim for her 2015 feature-length video Mommy, assembled in the process of the artist clearing out the contents of her childhood home in Westfield, New Jersey. Using a wide array of materials—film slides, home movies, voicemail messages, pixelated cell phone videos, and motion graphics that harken back to Web 1.0 aesthetics—the work provides a piercing glimpse into both the story of the artist’s mother’s emigration to the United States from Taiwan and Lee’s own coming-of-age. Earlier works such as her Video Salad series (2010–2011) or Fall NYC (2014) often take a similar approach, freely mixing quotidian moments, documentation from concerts and parties, appropriated imagery, and music with DJ-like dexterity. 

Lee was born in 1987. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Jenny’s, New York; Édouard Montassut, Paris; Lomex, New York; 356 Mission, Los Angeles; Real Fine Arts, New York; and LadyBug House, San Francisco. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at Loong Mah, New York;  Svetlana, New York; Shoot The Lobster, New York; Stadgalerie Bern, Bern Switzerland; White Columns and Art Production Fund, New York; Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), New York; Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, France; Kai Matsumiya, New York; Kunstalle Zürich, Switzerland; T293, Rome, Italy; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Schloss, Oslo, Norway; Triple Canopy, New York; New Museum, New York; and Greene Naftali, New York. She lives and works in New York.

Civic Square Building, Room 110

This lecture is presented as part of the Spring 2023 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, free and open to all.