Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation
Website: miafeuer.com
Mia Feuer was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, the descendant of Ashkenazi Jews who settled on the Canadian prairies of Saskatchewan five generations ago. She received her BFA from the University of Manitoba in 2004 and her MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2009. After graduate school she built her early career in Washington, DC, mounting solo exhibitions at major venues and earning recognition as a DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Artist Fellow (2011). That same year she won the Trawick Prize, a prestigious Washington-area contemporary art award, and in 2012 received the Joseph S. Stauffer Prize from the Canada Council for the Arts. Feuer now lives and works in Oakland, California, where she serves as Associate Professor of Sculpture at California College of the Arts (CCA).
Feuer has conducted extensive research on climate change across the globe, traveling to the tar sands of Alberta, Canada, the Arctic Circle, and other sites of ecological extraction and crisis. Her residencies include fellowships at the MacDowell Colony (2010), the Millay Colony (2010), the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts (2011), and Headlands Center for the Arts in Marin County, where she was a California Visual Affiliate in 2019–2020. In addition to her studio practice, Feuer tends goal for Oakland’s Project Mayhem Ice Hockey Team—an activity she has described as deeply entwined with her sculptural and spiritual practice.
Feuer employs sculptural installation to examine what she describes as the parallel ways capitalist patriarchal systems degrade, exploit, and harm both the Earth and the bodies of women. Her work moves between the monumental and the personal, incorporating synthetic materials, found objects, construction waste, rocks, papier-mâché, and Arctic debris into installations that are simultaneously beautiful and unsettling. A major body of work, The Tar Sands (2011–2013), grew from her restricted access to oil production sites in Alberta, where she observed dead trees installed upside down with roots in the air and nested with ravens. Her landmark installation An Unkindness (2013) at the Corcoran Gallery of Art featured a fully operational black ice skating rink in the museum’s rotunda alongside a looming bird-like sculptural canopy. The Solar Mothers (2006–2019) brought together fantastical multi-species figurative sculptures—including portraits of her grandmothers, both of whom died in 2015 during her own pregnancy.
Recent work has turned toward the figure and the maternal body. The ongoing series Holy Goalie (2023–) weaves together her goaltending practice with sculptural and spiritual inquiry, while 2025 works including My Pieta and Exhaust continue her exploration of grief, care, and the Anthropocene. Feuer has been recognized internationally, including a 2015 FutureGreats profile in ArtReview.
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