Meg Rotzel (b. 1976, Appleton WI) is an artist and curator based in Boston, MA. Her artwork is rooted in the practices of noticing, drawing, and recording through image. Using a variety of media including graphite, ink, watercolor, ceramics and found objects, she assembles artworks that explore phenomenons of seeing, sensing, and making sense, and the heirarchies of collections. This website pictures a series of Meg’s recent works that are complete and in process. Subjects include the nature of language, precarity, healing, and protection.
Meg’s curatorial work is based in the research university setting. As Curator of Exhibitions at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study she commissions new works that engage with knowledge production, the formation of community, and the legacies of collections and colonialism. She organizes contemporary art projects in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery and oversees exhibitions that draw from the collections of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. Meg has organized exhibitions with Alia Farid, E.J. Hill, Wendy Jacob, Tomashi Jackson, Mary Lum, Gala Porras-Kim, Jill Slosburg-Ackerman and Maralyn Pappas, Xiveria Simmons, Anthony Romero with Deanna Ledezma and Josh Rios, and Clarissa Tossin, among others.
Meg worked for a decade at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she connected artistic disciplines to research in science, technology, and the humanities. She created new artworks together with faculty, labs and centers through programs originating from the Center for Advanced Visual Studies, the List Visual Art Center, the MIT program in Art, Culture and Technology, and the Center for Art, Science and Technology. While at MIT she produced artworks with Mel Chin, Joan Jonas and Jason Moran, Fritz Haeg, Xavier Le Roy, Rick Lowe, John Malpede and Wendy Jacob, Trevor Paglen, Otto Piene, Tomas Saraceno, and Anika Yi, among many others.
After attending art school, Meg founded and directed the Boston based non-profit the Berwick Research Institute (2001-2009) with other area artists. She developed collaborative residency programs for artists and curators in their early careers, participated in the Bumpkin Island Encampment, and produced temporary public artworks across Boston. She has been an artist in residence at the Frank Williams Collection in Wellesley Massachusetts, the Substation in Boston Massachusetts, the Franz Masareel Centrum in Kasterlee Beligium, Smith College in Northhampton Massachusetts, and the Queer Orphanage in New Hampshire. She is a recipient of grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the LEF Foundation, the St. Botolft Foundation, and was awarded fellowships and merit scholorships for her education at Brown University, Tufts University, and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Meg received a MA from Brown University in Public Humanities, a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Tufts University, and a Diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Studio photography by Mel Taing, in process works photographed by the artist
All images copyright Meg Rotzel, 2025