Hillary Wagner is an interdisciplinary artist based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She maintains a socially engaged art practice and a related studio-based practice that is primarily grounded in sculpture and installation but often incorporates sound, drawing, writing, collage, performance, video, and photography. Driven by a strong relationship to materials of an elemental nature, her work emerges from her lived experience as a woman from rural, agrarian Appalachian Ohio and an acute awareness of her political identity created by a regionally defined class subjectivity. Informed by the history of extraction and exploitation of Appalachia’s land and people, Wagner’s work combats ruling class’s deliberate, systematically-induced, sociopolitical amnesia in the region and imagines alternative futures for Appalachia and elsewhere.
Wagner's first solo show, Homemaking: An Overture, is currently on view at DSGN CLLCTV in Cincinnati, OH. Gallery hours are 5-9pm Fridays and Saturdays (and by appointment) from April 5th, 2024 through April 26th, 2024.
Please visit at soilseriesbethel.com and birdcloset.com to read about Wagner's social practice work.
Wagner holds an MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design and BA in Fine Arts from Mount Vernon Nazarene University. She was an invited speaker at the Queen’s Museum’s 2018 Open Engagement Conference and Project Anywhere’s 2018 Anywhere and Elsewhere Conference at The New School. She was interviewed by the Bad at Sports Podcast in Episode 639: Art and Ecology. Wagner has served as a visiting artist at The College of New Jersey, Northern Kentucky University and Mount Vernon Nazarene University. She has served as adjunct faculty at Northern Kentucky University in courses on digital media and art appreciation. She is a founding member of the art collective Bird Closet and oversaw their 2018 self-titled solo exhibition at Schnormeier Gallery in Mount Vernon, OH. Her work was selected for Project Anywhere’s 2018 global peer-reviewed online exhibition and she has been featured in publications such as Project Anywhere's Anywhere and Elsewhere conference publication, Anywhere iii - "Three Conversations", Penmarks Annual Literary Journal and Plough Quarterly - "Return to Appalachia." In 2020, her work from the project SOIL SERIES: A Social Drawing and the art collective Bird Closet, was selected as the subject of several Guggenheim Practicum publications by Kanyinsola Anifowoshe and Mikki Janower including “Sustainable Futures: A Community Is a Garden.” and the tool kit “A Community Is a Garden: Tools for Artists, Communities, and Institutions.”
