M.A.R.
Manifest Artist in Residence
2025/2026
Megan Wolfkill
Megan Wolfkill (b.1996) received her Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art with a concentration in Painting + Drawing at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville in May of 2024. Megan’s thesis exhibition titled Back-to-Back was presented at the Ewing Gallery of Art + Architecture in March 2024. She was a finalist in the 2024 Miami University Yeck Young Painters Competition, and recently presented at SECAC in Richmond, VA. Megan has had artwork in numerous juried exhibitions in Tennessee, Illinois, Louisiana, Ohio, and has had two-person shows with artists such as Anthony Huang and Carole Quinn. Her work was featured in Manifest's 18th Annual Master Pieces exhibition in 2024. Her first solo exhibition, Durational and Momentary, took place at Gallery 1010 in Knoxville, TN in 2022.
Megan has attended residencies at Penland School of Craft in 2019 and 2020 and the Hambidge Center in 2019. She has been featured in publications such as Ouch! Collective Vol. 2, Phoenix Literary Arts Magazine Vol. 65, and I Like Your Work Winter 2022 catalog. In 2018, Megan completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Dance at Tulane University, where she attended on a full scholarship awarded for excellence in writing.
Megan was Manifest's 2024/2025 Scholar in Residence, and will be spending a second year with us as our Artist in Residence.
Artist's Statement:
To deeply know something or someone outside of yourself is intimate. Knowing requires you to put yourself aside and engage with the realities of another world through curiosity, intentional listening, and openness to ideas antithetical to your worldview or lived experience. This is not easy, but can be incredibly rewarding and is an integral step to forging deep connections with the world around you.
Intimacy appears in my work through the forms I use, how they’re assembled compositionally, and how I apply paint to surfaces. I use unprimed surfaces and translucent layers of paint to create a sense of softness and “lived-in”-ness that I associate with intimacy. My forms have rounded edges and slope towards each other gently. When forms overlap, transparency allows previous marks to be visible. This contributes to a sense of accumulated mark, archive, or history that allows viewers to have a sense of what came before.
Innate curiosity for the world and its people is central to my painting practice. I’m interested in the minute details of a body moving in space, the specificity of how paint dries based on what’s underneath it, the alchemy of combining logistically incompatible art materials, and the multifaceted nuance of human emotion. The desire for knowledge and understanding is a bid for intimacy with the people in my life and the environment I occupy. The art objects I make are a way to process and present the information I’m collecting through these daily connections.
The images pictured at right are a sampling of those submitted with Megan's application.
As Manifest Artist in Residence Megan will be based out of the MAR studios adjacent to Manifest Gallery on Woodburn Avenue in East Walnut Hills.
See more and learn about Megan's work here:
www.meganwolfkill.com
Information on how to apply for future SIR or MAR awards can be found here.
