The Joyce Girls

Nickname: Miss Margaret

Country: United States

Statement: I am an artist, but am also a Literature teacher and literary critic. I teach literature at The New School and at NYU and publish academic articles as Margaret Boe Birns, but I show as an artist under the name Meg Boe Birns. I have always though I had a Literature Self and an Art Self, and the slight difference in name expresses that. My Art Self works with paint, canvas, papier-mâché, clay, wood, metal and found objects to create pieces that do not subsume the materials within the content, but instead make the materials part of the subject matter. Whether abstract or figurative, my work will often integrate tactility into a design, but it is not the product of a conscious or intellectual plan; I believe I work within an intuitive context, as though the imagery springs directly from unconscious in the manner of automatic writing. This belief speaks to the three intuitive female artists for whom I feel a special affinity--Leonora Carrington, Veronica Ryan Yayoi Kusama, and especially the fiber artist Judith Scott.

Bio: Meg Boe Birns is an artist, teacher and writer living and working in the East Village. She has studied privately with Lenora Shargo from the Maryland Institute of Art, Henry Pearson from The New School and Pennsylvania Academy of Art, and has been a student in a number of art classes at The New School. She has exhibited her work in a variety of venues in and around New York City—in the East Village: Small Works at the Washington Square East Gallery TNC Gallery, Ridge Street Gallery, Tompkins Square Gallery, Gallery on Second. Elsewhere: Lynn Prince Gallery, Art for Healing Gallery, Governors Island Nolan House Gallery, La Galeria at Boricua College, Cork Gallery at Lincoln Center, Rockland Center for the Arts, Viva Gallery, Amrita House Gallery, Sea Cliff Gallery. Her drawings have been published in the Art Times, Collages and Bricolages, The Creative Woman and on the cover of the premiere issue of I, The First Person. She has been given awards by the Rockland Center for the Arts and the National Art League.