Linn Meyers

Linn Meyers, Every now. And again, ink on wall, 2011. Hammer Museum.

Linn Meyers (born 1968), known professionally as linn meyers, is a visual artist based in Washington, DC and Los Angeles. She is known for dense, intricate drawings, paintings, installations and prints that range in scale from page-sized images to large pieces on Mylar and panel to monumental, site-specific wall works. Her art is rooted in a process of repetitive drawing—thousands of hand-drawn marks that come together to form rhythmic, patterned wholes and serve as records of their own making. While ostensibly abstract, her works are also widely suggestive of natural phenomena and fundamental aspects of the universe, from fingerprints to galaxies, and cellular patterns to tidal waves. Curator Anne Ellegood observed, "She is after a purity of making—a physical process that does not hide behind illusionism—a directness wherein the materiality of the work is evident and … all the mystery is removed so that it is what it is." The Phillips Collection, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden Her work belongs to the public collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, British Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art and The Phillips Collection, among others. In 2023, Meyers received the Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Early life and career Meyers was born in 1968 in Washington, DC and grew up in the DC area. After graduating high school, she lived for a year in Paris, France before moving to New York City to enroll at The Cooper Union. She completed a BFA in 1990, then moved to Oakland, California to attend the California College of the Arts where she earned an MFA in 1993. During her first professional decade, Meyers lived in New York City, New Haven, CT, North Carolina and Pittsburgh before returning to her native Washington in 2002.

In her early career, Meyers largely focused on landscape-based paintings that moved from ambiguously referential studies in tone and atmosphere to more abstract pieces in which loosely gridded brushstrokes created elusive, pulsing spaces. The Frick Pittsburgh, the New Britain Museum of American Art and G Fine Art (Washington).

Work and reception Meyers's creative process relies equally on a meticulous, rigorous focus and an intuitive approach open to tiny slippages and imperfections of the human hand that take her compositions in unforeseen directions. Describing the process, Artforum critic Annie Buckley wrote, "Meyers's drawing magnifies the scope and intensity of singular marks through expansive patternmaking; taken together, the lines appear to pulsate, embodying both the physicality of her process and that of the space." At a deeper level, however, critics contend that her works function like maps of time and space, evoking processes rather than things, and most concretely, serve as records of physical movement and their own becoming. She creates them line by line in on-site over the course of days, weeks or months, often with spectators witnessing the effort and unfolding of the work. The Phillips Collection commissioned a wall drawing in response to one of its van Gogh paintings: at the time being (2010), whose dense web of lines suggested immersion in the brushstrokes of the Dutch artist. In 2016, Meyers created Our View From Here (2016), a 400-foot-long drawing executed over 11 weeks that snaked through the Hirshhorn Museum's curving, circular second floor gallery; the title referenced the inability to see the work in its entirety.

Awards and collections Meyers has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (2001) and Fifth Floor Foundation (2004, 2007), a Smithsonian Artist Research fellowship (2009), a Santo Foundation award (2016), an Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2023), and nine DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities fellowships between 2008 and 2023. She has been awarded artist residencies at Ballinglen, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Bowdoin College, the Hirshhorn Museum, Hayama Residency (Japan), Iris Project, Millay Arts, San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art and Tamarind Institute.

Meyers's work belongs to the public collections of the Allentown Art Museum, British Museum, Hammer Museum, Hirshhorn Museum, Kreeger Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, The Phillips Collection, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others.