About the artist
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My work explores how places carry memory: what was once there, what remains, and what we imagine might come next. I construct images in layers, combining drawing, digital manipulation, transparent materials, and light. The physical structure of the work reflects the way time and perception overlap.
I laser-engrave images into plexiglass, work into the surfaces by hand, and combine them with printed or drawn imagery. In some pieces, light causes different elements to emerge or recede as the viewer moves, revealing how our understanding of a place can shift depending on where we stand and what we choose to notice.
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Maria R. Schneider is a Spanish-born, Philadelphia-based visual artist whose work explores how cities hold memory and how traces of what has disappeared continue to shape what we see and experience in the present. Through fragmented architecture, shifting perspectives, and layered imagery, she examines the relationship between place, history, and transformation.
Schneider combines traditional drawing and hand-applied color with digital processes, laser engraving, transparent plexiglass, and LED illumination. Her compositions often bring together buildings from different periods, allowing past and present to occupy the same visual space. Images overlap, fracture, and move between clarity and abstraction, reflecting the way places are continually constructed, erased, remembered, and reimagined.
Light is both a material and a conceptual element in her work. Illuminated engraved surfaces reveal forms that might otherwise remain hidden, including structures that have disappeared from the contemporary landscape. Transparency allows different histories and viewpoints to coexist, while the physical separation between layers creates depth, shadows, and changing relationships as the viewer moves around the work.
Although architecture and urban environments are recurring subjects, Schneider’s practice also extends to geological, botanical, and imagined landscapes. Across these bodies of work, she is interested in the tension between permanence and instability, built and natural systems, and preservation and change. Her work considers places as they change over time, shaped by what has been built, altered, remembered, and lost.
Schneider’s artistic perspective is informed by a multidisciplinary background. After earning a law degree and an MBA, she pursued formal art studies at the Art Students League of New York and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. Her analytical training and artistic experimentation converge in a process that is both carefully constructed and open to discovery.
Her work is represented in corporate, institutional, and private collections, including CubeSmart, PricewaterhouseCoopers, AIR Communities, and the University of Pennsylvania. She has exhibited at venues including the Pennsylvania State Museum, Philadelphia City Hall, and ArtPrize in Grand Rapids, Michigan.