Katie Merz
(b. 1960 Brooklyn, NY)
blue riff
2023
Acrylic paint
Courtesy of OZ Art NWA

Familiar, cartoon-like shapes, lines, and forms sprawl across the surfaces of the adjacent blue wall, picnic tables, and benches, enveloping you in the world of Katie Merz’s modern-day “urban hieroglyphics”. Katie’s artwork unites the realms of graffiti, coding, and everyday language. While these urban hieroglyphics appear to be simple, they seek to draw from diverse sources: dialogues, notes, words, architecture, math, and random visual connectors.

Katie aims to make the images accessible and easy to decode and designs each drawing for the space it will inhabit. In research for each site, she lists words and observations about the landscape. She then riffs off that list to make the shapes and forms she associates with the words. Then the puzzle comes together, creating a wall filled with a language not of words, but symbols representing those words. The artist considers the completed walls as kinetic maps or blueprints of the specific sites and subjects they depict.

(written by Carlyn Wilder, 2024)