About

Katie Merz is a Brooklyn-born artist whose practice is influenced by cartoons, architecture, graffiti, and the kinetic structures of urban life. Her public work creates a convergence between graffiti, coding, and everyday language, transforming words, symbols, architectural forms, and visual fragments into what she describes as “urban hieroglyphics.” These seemingly simple pictographic systems unfold into animated networks of dialogue, mathematics, memory, and place. Her walls become kinetic maps—black-and-white blueprints shaped by the specific sites, subjects, and communities they depict.

Merz has created murals and installations across the United States and exhibited nationally and internationally. Rooted in the grit and immediacy of the Brooklyn streets where she grew up, her work distills complex ideas into direct, kinetic lines that remain deeply connected to their environments.

A graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art, Merz taught drawing there from 2005 to 2023. Her honors include the Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Robert Motherwell painters grant, and residencies at the Chinati Foundation, Ucross, and MacDowell. In 2019, she received The Cooper Union’s Saint-Gaudens Lifetime Achievement Award and was inducted into its Alumni Hall of Fame. Following the creation of the Ursinus Smokestack in 2020, Ursinus College awarded Merz an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters, and she served as the keynote commencement speaker for the Class of 2021.