bio

Mary Beth Meehan is an artist and photographer who has spent decades forging human connection through individual narrative and visual representation. Her installations and exhibitions feature dedicated archive work alongside traditional portraiture, and the incorporation of printed material has organically led to a recent focus on mixed media collage. These expressive assemblages allow Meehan the opportunity to turn attention inward to explore her own interior landscape.

Using hand-painted papers, colored tissue, book pages, pencil, acrylic, watercolor, and charcoal, Meehan takes her honed skills of editing and framing and applies them to nuanced abstraction. The various shapes, depths, and transparencies of each element reflect her knowledge of light, composition, balance, and color. Every intuitive move contains its own tension, velocity, energy, and movement, inciting feelings of vulnerability, tenderness, awkwardness, and even unease. Meehan reflects and refracts her own experiences and embraces her strong internal visual logic, providing a richly reliable source of connection.

Meehan has exhibited at organizations including Aperture Gallery, the Griffin Museum of Photography, Stanford University, Smith College, and the Rhode Island School of Design, and her work has received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. She has held artist residencies at Stanford University, the University of West Georgia, the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and Brown University, and has lectured at the School of Visual Arts, the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, and the Missouri Photo Workshop. Meehan’s work has been featured and reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and Le Monde. 

A native of Brockton, Massachusetts, Mary Beth received a Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature at Amherst College, and a Master of Arts degree in photojournalism at the University of Missouri, Columbia. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

artist statement

For over thirty years photography has been my means to enter the world around me, it has drawn me into the lives of the people with whom I have shared that world, and has shown me who they are, who we all are. The people with whom I collaborated to share their stories granted me a connection with them, and the visual tools of the medium – light, color, form, mood – reflected those relationships and lived realities outward.