Artists
Megan Major
Career Level: Emerging
Medium: Paper, Photography, Printmaking
Open for Commissions: Yes
Megan Major is a Detroit-based visual artist whose abstract and experimental photographic practice explores environmental change, perception, and material transformation through lens-based processes and camera-less photography.
https://www.meganmajor.com/
https://www.instagram.com/m_major/
About
Megan Major is a visual artist based in Detroit, Michigan. Her practice centers on abstract and experimental photographic processes that explore environmental change, material transformation, and perception. Working with lens-based photography, cyanotypes, Lumens, and artist books, she often incorporates natural elements such as water, ice, plant matter, and road salt as both subject and material. Through processes of obstruction, inversion, and chemical interaction, her work examines instability, disappearance, and the ways environmental conditions imprint themselves onto photographic surfaces.
Major holds a BA in Photography from Grand Valley State University and is a co-organizer of the Detroit Art Book Fair. She was a 2026 fellow at the Vermont Studio Center.
Artist Statement
My practice explores environmental change through abstract and experimental photographic processes that allow natural forces and materials to shape the image. Working across lens-based photography, cyanotypes, Lumens, and artist books, I use water, ice, plant matter, road salt, and chemical reactions as active collaborators within the work. Rather than using photography to clearly document a scene, I often work through obstruction, inversion, reflection, and material transformation to examine the instability of perception and the ways environmental conditions imprint themselves onto photographic surfaces.
Many of my projects focus on water as both subject and process, investigating melting ice, changing landscapes, contamination, and cycles of disappearance and emergence. In some works, glacier ice is photographed through layers of transparency and reflection, while in others, melting snow collected from urban environments stains and alters cyanotype paper with salt and residue. My camera-less works often rely on chance interactions between light, chemistry, weather, and organic matter, allowing the image to emerge slowly through exposure, seepage, and decay.
I am interested in creating images that hold multiple truths at once: images that shift between microscopic and cosmic, natural and synthetic, presence and absence. Through abstraction, I aim to disrupt fixed readings of the photographic image and invite viewers into a space of uncertainty, where environmental change is experienced as something both material and psychological.
Gallery
Past Exhibitions:
2026 | Featured Artist | Detroit Artists Market - Detroit, Michigan
2026 | Transforming Tradition: Emerging Artists in Practice | Bas Blue in partnership with Detroit Artists Market and Wasserman Projects - Detroit, Michigan
2026 | Orange II - The Art of Community | Gallery at Ideation Orange - Hazel Park, Michigan
2026 | Untitled | Ninety-Seven Modern - Detroit, Michigan
2026 | The Blue Condition | The Voyeur Bordello - Detroit, Michigan
2026 | Teresa Lousias Memorial Photography Exhibition | The Padzieski Art Gallery - Dearborn, Michigan
2026 | Too Tired of 2025 | Too Tired Project - Barnard, Vermont
2026 | The Worst Picture Show | Blue Sky Oregon Gallery For the Photographic Arts - Portland, Oregon
2025 | Detroit Warehouse Art and Design Fair - Curated by Katy Kim | Boyer Campbell Building - Detroit, Michigan
2025 | Abstracting the Anthropocene: An Ecological Elegy - Two Person Show with Brittanie Bondie | Riverside Arts Center - Ypsilanti, Michigan
2025 | Hot DAM! the Detroit Artists Market Annual - Curated by Dr. Kelli Morgan | Detroit Artists Market - Detroit, Michigan
2025 | Photography Now - Curated by Whitney Bradshaw | Woman Made Gallery - Chicago, Illinois
2025 | Composing Detroit - Until Next Time:… | Playground Detroit - Detroit, Michigan
2025 | Lumiere: Photography Exhibition - Juried by Brian Day | Playground Detroit - Detroit, Michigan *Voting Finalist
2025 | Growth - Curated by Sierra R. Aguilar | Lenscratch - Los Angeles, California
2025 | Hatchback 19 - Juried by Grace Serra | Hatch Art - Hamtramck, Michigan
2025 | The Abstract Image | The Chateau Gallery - Louisville, Kentucky
2024 | A Little of This & A Little of That: Photo Show | 4850 Bellevue - Detroit, Michigan
2024 | Hot DAM! the Detroit Artists Market Annual - Curated by Katie Pfohl | Detroit Artists Market - Detroit, Michigan
2024 | 43rd Michigan Fine Arts Competition | Birmingham Bloomfield Art Center - Birmingham, Michigan
2023 | Spring Salon | Detroit Contemporary - Detroit, Michigan
2023 | Get Together | Reyes Finn - Detroit, Michigan
2020 | ARTWORK | Art Mile - Detroit, Michigan
2019 | Issue Press Publications on View at the Michigan State University Special Collections Library | Lansing, Michigan
2016 | The Softer Side | El Club - Detroit, Michigan
2015 | Tall Tales | Light Leaked and Canopy Collective - Cleveland, Ohio
2015 | Megan Major: Past and Present (solo) | This Week in Art, MCBW - Detroit, Michigan
2015 | Memory Wastes | The Garden Gallery at DittoDitto Books - Detroit, Michigan
2015 | Picnics in a Polar Vortex | Public Pool - Hamtramck, Michigan
2014 | Distorted Fragments (solo) | This Week in Art, MCBW - Detroit, Michigan
2014 | Blooms, Bugs, and Beasts | The Scarab Club - Detroit, Michigan
2014 | Material/Photo | Paint Creek Center for the Arts - Rochester, Michigan
2013 | Unnatural (solo) | This Week in Art, MCBW - Detroit, Michigan
2013 | What Goes Up Must Come Down | Paint Creek Center for the Arts - Rochester, Michigan
2013 | Desaturated | Fourteen-Eighty Gratiot Gallery - Detroit, Michigan
2012 | Sum of Parts: Annual Members Exhibition | Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography - Detroit, Michigan
2012 | Imperfect Specimen (solo) | This Week in Art, MCBW - Detroit, Michigan
2012 | Je T'aime à Mort | 2136 Michigan Ave - Detroit, Michigan
2012 | A Divining Lens: Photos by Megan Major, Lauren Semivan, and Clinton Snider | Public Pool - Hamtramck, Michigan
2012 | Whitdel Arts Annual Members Show | Whitdel Arts - Detroit, Michigan
2007 | Hide and Seek | Performing Arts Center Gallery - Allendale, Michigan
2007 | New Works of Photography | Flux Gallery - Grand Rapids, Michigan
2006 | Southwest Desert Workshop | Padnos Gallery - Allendale, Michigan
Awards & Residencies:
2026 | Vermont Studio Center Fellowship | Vermont Studio Center - Johnson, Vermont
Press & Media Links:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bBmlTiPyY3UulQwzwWvtns_KstN8cY2D/view
https://hyperallergic.com/artwork-art-mile-detroit/
https://www.metrotimes.com/arts/ex-mocad-employees-curate-exhibition-o