2026 Michael Miller Scholarship Fund Winner

Cynthia MacCollum

Cynthia MacCollum’s practice focuses on long-term, temporal and research-based installations with an ecological focus. A sense of place is fundamental to all of her work. Adopting a schematic approach, she employs forms of record-keeping as she tracks the passage of time, the migration of birds, the decline of native species, and the blooming of spring ephemerals. Recent solo exhibitions include It was Evening all Afternoon (2024) at MAPSpace in Port Chester, NY, and Thirteen Moon(2021) at the New Canaan Society for the Arts. Group shows include February(2025), Blue Print Gallery, Dallas, TX; Crit Ecologies: Artist, Community, Criticality(2024), Hudson Valley MOCA, Peeskill, NY; and When Darkness and Light are Blue and White(2024), Pearl Conrad Gallery, Ohio State University, Mansfield, OH. Her work is a form of intimate observance, using painting, collecting, and recording to adore and document her local natural spaces. 

In September of 2025 MacCollum was a resident at the Skopelos Foundation for the Arts. There she created monotypes inspired by local flora and fauna, including Fig, Plumbago, Skopelos plums, Finnekas Palm, and Elm-leafed Blackberry. This work is also about her experience of being there: observing a Hummingbird Hawk-moth at the trumpet vine, spying a migrating group of bee-eaters, eating ripe figs straight from the tree. 

Ode to the Fig is one monoprints that include hand-written text in the form of micrography. There are three different text components on Ode to the Fig: Excerpts from the DH Lawrence poem “How to eat a fig”, several paragraphs of Sylvia Plath’s “Fig Tree” (from In the Bell Jar), and MacCollum’s experience of visiting a local farm and eating figs straight from the tree. Honey Bee is a painting completed after returning home that contains research about the history and biology of the Fig species, her experience of visiting a monastery and searching for the Scarce Swallowtail butterfly, and her introduction to the bird species of Bee-eaters.