Meg Stein, MFA (she/they) is a white, cis-female visual artist living and working in Durham, NC, primarily working in sculpture and social practice. She has exhibited her work at VICTORI + MO, Garis & Hahn, A.I.R. Gallery, the Nasher Museum of Art, Westbeth Gallery, VA MOCA, Duke University, and the Spartanburg Museum of Art, among others. Stein has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, the Millay Colony, The Hambidge Center and others and is the recipient of grants from the Puffin Foundation and South Arts among others. In addition to her work as a visual artist, Meg is a member of Art Ain’t Innocent, a Durham-based multi-racial, cross-class Southern arts visioning collective. With a background in mindfulness and somatics, Meg is also works with people as a Focusing guide and teacher at Alive and Aware Practice and she incorporates an embodied approach into both her visual art and facilitation work.

Artist Statement

My sculptures explore embodied healing in order to reckon with and transform harmful ways of being and to help people experience freedom and aliveness. Weaving together many frameworks, including white anti-racism, healing justice, ecofeminism, environmental justice, meditative arts, visionary sci fi, southern gothic and Southern-rooted liberation movements, my work dissembles and then re-imagines symbolic vocabulary from our bodies and surrounding environment, creating space for new possibilities around how we can relate to ourselves, to one another and to the more-than-human life around us.

I create familiar yet unknown amalgamations to reveal the dialogue between seemingly disconnected realms and remind us of the tools we already possess. Spiny areolas sprout from dermal and geological folds; stalagmites reach through glistening entrails; marine-like creatures pulse through watery environments. My sculptures are richly hued biomorphic forms that are playful yet unsettling, beautiful yet grotesque—evoking organs, bodily cavities, terrestrial formations, and verdant landscapes. Their reaching appendages and bulbous protrusions elicit wonder and discomfort, prompting reflection on our intimate relationships with the ecosystems we inhabit and embody. This inventive vocabulary of possibility is presented within a social practice context that invites exploration of our internal relationships in order to see the impact those ways of being have on the surrounding ecosystem.

Existing as locations of possibility that activate viewers' embodied experiences, this work invites audiences into a process of revealing, reckoning and shifting that awakens each individual's natural ability to exist as a simultaneously singular and collective site of transformation.

-Meg Stein, 2025

Studio Contact
Email: studio at megstein dot com
Instagram: @meg.stein.art