Biography
Megan Hillaker is a trans-disciplinary artist born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 2004, and currently located in Baltimore, Maryland. They are pursuing their BFA in painting at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where they are anticipated to graduate Summa Cum Laude in 2026. Hillaker has been a recipient of MICA’s Visionary Scholarship (2022-2026), the Creative Achievement Award (2022-2023), and the Kevin Kearney Scholarship of Painting (2025-2026). Their work has been showcased in various exhibitions, including a solo show, Mundane/Monument, with Baltimore Art Gallery in Baltimore, MD, group shows Thread with Make Studios, Baltimore, MD, Spatial Awareness at MICA, Baltimore, MD, and Corduroy Hills at Burren College of Art, Ireland. Their work has been published internationally in the Irish New Generational Arts Review and locally in Bmore Arts, Baltimore, MD.
Artist Statement
Central to my artistic exploration are topics of religion, power, and memory as they intersect with concepts of identity. More broadly, my practice has focused on themes of loss, grief, and inherited trauma. Through my work, I examine how memory can be preserved, distorted, or concealed across generations, and how these dynamics shape our understanding of each other.
Currently, I am conducting academic research on the media produced by the evangelical purity culture movement of the 1990s and early 2000s. By posing religious relics and kitsch objects with elements of decay, my art explores this movement’s perpetuation of gendered harm and the adherence to artificial identity; simultaneously critiquing the long-lasting repercussions of its rhetoric, increasingly felt in our contemporary society. My work discusses my personal engagement with purity culture rhetoric and my experiences growing up as a queer, femme-presenting individual in fundamentalist Christian spaces of America.
Although painting is my primary medium, my practice is deeply transdisciplinary. I primarily use wood panels for their historical and religious legacy, shaping each substrate with care, so that each piece becomes a metaphorical reliquary for its image. Lab-grown bio-materials, like mycelium, are also used to evoke the passage of time, generational legacy, and the visceral, sensory experiences of inhabiting a body within constructed spaces. In my recent body of work, cantilevered paintings obscure and reveal image alternately, and invite viewers to consider their positionality within the distribution of these structures of power.