Education

• 2022 The University of Chicago, Master of Arts in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History.
• Mental Health First Aid Instructor Certificate–National Council for Mental Wellbeing–facilitated by the University of Chicago. 
• 2021 University of Louisville. Master of Fine Arts Studio Art and Design.
• 2012 Art Academy of Cincinnati. Bachelor of Fine Arts, Painting, Minor in Art History with a Specialty in Contemporary Art, Cum Laude.

Bio

Megan Bickel is an artist, writer, digital humanist, and educator working out of Columbia, South Carolina. Their work considers and utilizes various approaches and technologies such as painting, data manipulation, digital collage, and poetry to assess power, world-building, and the construction of ‘utopia’s. Reviews or mentions of their work have appeared in Hyperallergic, Artforum, Ruckus, NewCity, and others. She is the recipient of the Great Meadows Professional Development Grant (2024), The Artist Activist Grant from the Kentucky Foundation for Women (2020 and 2023) and multiple Community Event Grants from the Center for Communities for various curatorial projects (Louisviile, KY).

She was the founder and organizer of houseguest gallery (2018-2025) where they organized and curated exhibitions and events out of their home.. They’ve had arts criticism, science fiction, and images published in Burnaway, Anarchist Review of Books, Sixty-Inches-from-Center, Ruckus, and others. She is an Assistant Professor of Painting at the University of South Carolina School of Visual Art, and Co-Director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville.

She has recently organized two Artist-in-Residencies at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Greenville (Maggie Genoble (2024) and Reid Arowood (2025). In addition she curated the unfortunately timely Scorched Landscapes by Israel Campos (Los Angelos, CA) in Jaunary of 2025 and in May of 2025, Maybe Kudzu Covering My Body: Camouflage in the South, which included work from nine artists with connections to the American South: borealis, Jacob Riddle, Katie Hargrave & Meredith Laura Lynn, Max Trumpower, Mo Costello, Nathaniel(le) Hendrickson, Raymond Thompson, and Utē Petit: all explore camouflage as subject, action, visual reference, or by actively camouflaging. She will be curating an extension of this exhibition at the University of Louisville’s Cressman Center in January of 2026. In October 2026, she will be curating a ‘suticase show’ for SWAB BARECELONA.

Bickel’s paintings and installations have been exhibited at artist run, commercial, and museum spaces nationally and internationally; including group and solo exhibitions at the Speed Art Museum (Louisville, KY), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), University of Chicago Logan Center (Chicago, IL), LADIES ROOM LA (Los Angeles, California), Georgetown College (Georgetown, KY), QUAPPI Projects (Louisville, KY), Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cincinnati, Oh), and MADS Mixed Reality Gallery (Milan, Italy), KMAC (Louisville, KY) amongst others.

She most recently received her M.A. in Digital Studies, Language, and Culture from the University of Chicago in 2022. In 2021, she received her Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Louisville (Dean’s List). In 2012 she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the Art Academy of Cincinnati (Cum Laude).

She is also a gardener, avid napper, lazy power lifter, bicyclist, proud dog and cat mom, and cycling infrastructure advocate.

Artist Statement and Research Focus

My work pulsates between paintings, ethical data analysis, and writing. Always considering the codependent development of camouflage, photography, and digital screen technologies; my paintings push and pull sensory depth, detail, and narrative by shifting perspectival planes and senses of color and material. This results in mysterious and unserious fields of imagery that interrogate what it means to be visually critical. I embrace an absurdity within painterly abstraction amidst fictionalized landscapes that include reflective materials such as sequined textiles or holographic modeling cloth. The resulting work pulls from American Landscape Painting, Dadaism, Casualism, Queer, Drag, and EDM culture, Science Fiction, and early 2000’s Virtual Reality aesthetics.

The paintings come from staged photographs that have been digitally manipulated, printed on canvas, and then painted upon. The staged photos contain reflective textiles, installed amongst grasses, bodies of water, or construction zones. The varying parts are digitally assembled alongside virtual artifacts such as screenshots from my unpublished VR films produced using Unity or 360 footage, and photos of painted marks. The myriad components push the definitions of the environment that I describe in the paintings. The integration of reflective materials in the landscape naturally disorganize our perception of the presented space. Natalie Weis describes this visual experience in her Hyperallergic review of my recent exhibition, Orgonon, at Institute 193 as “a vibrant and disquieting sense of what it feels like to be alive right now: to witness a flourishing of creativity amid war and environmental destruction and to sense an uneasiness with artificial intelligence even as we’ve come to depend on it in our daily lives and interactions.” The resulting work cultivates imagined spaces (both real and painterly) that confront the economy and understandings of class, and politics through fantasy–resulting in nonsensical, euphoric, and hallucinatory images that intentionally and gently, deceive.

Recent bodies of work explore the iconography of safety in the outdoors as a visual metaphor for systemic control and (mis)management. We see safety cones, plastic netting, and fencing amongst rocks. Utopian agrarian landscapes merge and break with holographic textiles reflecting in the light. The images use the wilderness–or the imitation of–alongside visions of safety to question illusions of control and its relationship to state control and complicity in the climate crisis. My work imagines spaces beyond this corporal reality.

Please see the following curatorial statements from recent exhibitions and a recent review in Hyperallergic by Natalie Weis, below.

• John Brooks, Quappi Projects, 2019. _we_are_inside_the_fire_
• Keelan O’Sullivan, Institute 193, 2024, Orgonon
• Natalie Weis, “There’s Something Toxic About Megan Bickel’s Landscapes”, Hyperallergic, July 2024

Courses with Megan

• ARTS 210 Introduction to Painting
• ARTS 211 Beginning Painting
• ARTS 310 Intermediate Painting I
• ARTS 311 Intermediate Painting II
• ARTS 410 Advanced Painting I
• ARTS 500 Visual Meaning
• ARTS 511 BFA Capstone: Professional Practices
• ARTS 514 Workshop: Painting
• ARTS 710 / 810: Graduate level Painting Seminar