Maggie Ens
Artist's Statement
I gather natural, artificial, and manufactured materials and assemble them into mixed media abstract forms that echo feelings of wilderness, kindness and spirit.
My work moves toward what is alive—toward creation, care, and reverence.
Guided by intuition and the agency of materials, each piece resists fixed meaning. It unfolds slowly, shaped by memory, karma, imagination, and touch.
Existing between chaos and order, the work asks for pause. It invites slow looking, offering not answers, but a space where connection can surface. At its core, the work is about connection—to place, to time, and to the space for presence within an accelerated world.
Artist's Bio
MAGGIE ENS was born in Missouri and divides her time between Easton, Pennsylvania, and Jersey City, New Jersey. She studied psychology, theatre, and fine art at Western Michigan University, Grand Valley State University, and the California College of the Arts, where she worked with the inspiring Beat Generation painter, Jay DeFeo.
Ens earned her MFA in Painting and Sculpture from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, in 1981 before moving to New York City to serve as studio assistant to feminist pioneer Mary Beth Edelson. Concurrently, Ens worked at La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela’s Dream House at the Dia Art Foundation in Tribeca, during its Harrison Street years, immersed in continuous tone and colored light — a formative encounter with duration and presence.
Since the mid-1980s, Ens has developed her “Echo-logically sENSitive” practice, creating intricate found-object sculptures and immersive “urban/suburban jungle” collaborative installations. Seeking to draw inspiration develop a rich, tangled ecosystem of sound, performance, installation, and artist-run energy, Ens was active in Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab) during the East Village art movement and exhibited at artist-run spaces including ABC No Rio, the Rivington Sculpture Garden, Fashion Moda, the New Wilderness Foundation and the International Fusion (IF) Art Museum.
Ens’s work has been shown internationally in Paris, Helsinki, Montreal, Tokyo, and Poznań, and is held in numerous private and public collections. Archival materials related to Colab’s BLAST and the International Fusion (IF) Art Museum are housed at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Guggenheim Museum.
Since the mid-1980s, Ens has developed her “Echo-logically sENSitive” practice, creating intricate found-object sculptures and immersive “urban/suburban jungle” collaborative installations. Seeking to draw inspiration to develop a rich, tangled ecosystem of sound, performance, installation, and artist-run energy, Ens was active in Collaborative Projects, Inc. (Colab) during the East Village art movement and exhibited at artist-run spaces including ABC No Rio, the Rivington Sculpture Garden, Fashion Moda, the New Wilderness Foundation and the International Fusion (IF) Art Museum.
