Matt Keegan

21 Jul. – 18 Aug. 2025

Photo by Rafik Greiss

Over the course of his career, Matt Keegan (b. 1976, Manhasset, NY) has worked fluidly across mediums, creating sculpture, photographs, videos, and text-based work that probe the myriad ways in which art and language mediate the personal experience of physical space as well as historical, social, and political events.

Keegan’s artistic practice often parallels contemporaneous publishing projects, and at times a confluence of the two modes of production has compelled the artist to develop new arenas for artistic discourse and collaboration. In 2008 Keegan published AMERICAMERICA, an artist book commissioned and published by Printed Matter, NY, which focuses on the year 1986 and its correspondence with 2008. The book opens with documentation of a 2007 road trip, inspired by Hands Across America, in which Keegan cast the hands of mayors located between New York and New Mexico. In 2003 Keegan co-founded the annual publication North Drive Press with Lizzy Lee, a childhood friend. Numbering five issues between 2004 and 2010, the unconventional project operated as an alternative space for artist-to-artist interviews and art multiples. North Drive Press is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Public Library, The Library at the Hessel Museum and Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University, among others.

Matt Keegan’s work has been exhibited at museums such as the Athenaeum at the University of Georgia, Athens, GA; Museum of Modern Art, NY; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, TX; Grazer Kunstverein, Graz, Austria; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, Bilbao, Spain, and Berlin, Germany; The Kitchen, New York, NY; The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, NY. Keegan’s work is represented in numerous museum and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, among others. He received his MFA from Columbia University in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2001, and his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 1998. Keegan is currently a Senior Critic in the Painting & Printmaking Department at Yale University, and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Matt Keegan, Hunger, 2024, Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in

Matt Keegan, Rosa's Bakery, 2024, Cut, collaged, and mounted ink-jet prints with gouache and Flashe paint, 59 x 53 in

Matt Keegan, FaceTime, 2024, Oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in

Matt Keegan, Polar Bears to Laundry, 2024, Flashcards handmade by the artist's mother with magnets and steel, 42 x 72 x 2 in

Yale School of Arts