pronouns: he/they/she

about

Molly Hassler is an interdisciplinary artist, often embracing collaboration and primarily using drawing and fibers techniques to mine the complex relation between representation and identity as a queer person in the Midwest. 

Molly Hassler holds a BFA in Fibers and Certificate in Community Arts. They are a 2021 recipient of the Mary L. Nohl Emerging Artist Fellowship and Springboard for the Arts: Rural Regenerator Fellowship. They have been awarded residencies at Vermont Studio Center and, most recently, Wassaic Project. They have shown their work at Ortega Y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, New York, the Jackson Dinsdale Art Center in Hastings, Nebraska, and locally at Portrait Society Gallery and Real Tinsel. Hassler currently works at Woodland Pattern Book Center and Lynden Sculpture Garden, carrying out multiple community-based projects in the greater Milwaukee Area. 

statement

My art practice rests between peculiar three-dimensional objecthood and semi-narrative works containing drawings and text that speak to the sweetness and trauma of queer and trans coming of age. My drawings are relics of the geographic dysphoria I feel navigating between the contemporary art world and the bucolic life of my upbringing.  Faced with the overwhelming absence of Midwestern and non-urban queer imagery, I make my own. I imagine the rural as a transexual utopia and manifest queer representations of working-class labor.

Choosing to believe in daughterhood, queerness, and home as functional sites for creative practice, I construct symbols of intense gratitude for the communities I move through. With an eye towards justice, my work conspires ceaselessly across the urban-rural divide to end the billionaire class.