[2] She incorporates everyday materials in her art, like wire rope, plastic bags, branches, dirt, newspaper, garbage, leaves, and cardboard boxes.
I want it to be a humane and humanistic statement about our future together.”[2] Trained in dance, Hassinger transitioned to making sculpture and visual art in college.
At an early age, she showed a gift for art and was exposed to both her mother's interest in flower arranging and her father's work at his drafting table.
Hassinger believed the institutional connections and affiliations of the instructors were distant from the experiences of many students, and she rejected the formal strategies that were being taught.
Clement Greenberg's formalist approach dominated the art department, so instructors focused on the creation of abstract, Constructivist-inspired welded steel sculpture.
[Hassinger] ultimately rejected such strict formal strategies, although the discipline of these methods, especially such Minimalist devices as repetition and regular arrangement, provides her work with a rational underpinning that she consciously complicates and makes more emotionally engaging.
[2] In 1969, she moved to New York City to enroll in drafting courses and concurrently work as an art editor at a publishing company.
[7] During the 1980s, the League of Allied Arts sponsored the musical Ain't Misbehavin honoring various Black artists.
[9] Maren Hassinger started her artistic experimentation in a Los Angeles junkyard in the early 1970s, where she came across bulks of industrial wire rope.
[14] Hassinger was part of Los Angeles art collective Studio Z which included Nengudi, David Hammons, Ronn Davis, Duval Lewis, RoHo, Franklin Parker, Barbara McCullough, Houston Conwill, and Joe Ray (artist).
Southern fiction writer Walker Percy continued to influence her childhood connection between the natural and the manufactured world with his work, Wreath.
During an exhibition at the Pasadena Art Museum in 1973 Hassinger was introduced to Hesse's work and admired her obsessive exploration of forms and techniques, and ability to convey emotion through fiber methods.
It depicts Hassinger acting out her personal story and references back to an African past through associations to sculpture, art/cultural history, and feminist issues.
[7] She unveils how meaningless cultural stereotyping is due to the way it establishes racial and social barriers and buries away the similarities and parallels that exists between people.
The show traveled to the Pérez Art Museum Miami in 2023, and works by Maren Hassinger were included alongside artworks by 50 other contemporary international artists such as Félix González-Torres, Vija Celmins, Betye Saar, Ana Mendieta, Silke Otto-Knapp, John Koch, Ed Ruscha, Pat Steir, among others.