About Erica

Erica Meier is a Wisconsin-based artist living and working near Milwaukee whose interdisciplinary practice examines American labor identity, material culture, and the politics embedded in everyday objects. Through jewelry, tools, utensils, and sculptural forms, Meier creates what she describes as “object rhetoric”—work that uses material specificity, scale, and function to question how labor, gender, and value are constructed and perceived in American society. Drawing from construction, domestic labor, and industrial histories, her work explores contradictions between visibility and invisibility, utility and decoration, virtue and spectacle.
Meier frequently employs materials such as steel, stainless steel, and sterling silver, shifting between industrial and precious contexts to destabilize assumptions about worth, ownership, and identity. Tools, machines, and familiar American iconography become sites of tension—where symbols of patriotism, masculinity, and productivity reveal their roots in appropriation, stereotype, and cultural mythmaking. By engaging the body through wearability and function, Meier invites viewers to reconsider how labor is assigned, gendered, and politicized, and how material language can create space for reinterpretation rather than division.

Meier earned her BFA from the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater in 2009 and her MFA from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 2013. She is currently Teaching and Graduate Faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee in Jewelry and Metalsmithing and Digital Fabrication, where she also serves as the Jewelry and Metalsmithing studio technician and department safety coordinator. Her academic work is deeply intertwined with experiential learning, interdisciplinary pedagogy, and institutional leadership, including curriculum development, graduate advising, safety program creation, and large-scale facilities planning and grant implementation.

From 2013 to 2016, Meier was a resident designer and frame builder at Waterford Precision Cycles, where she developed internationally recognized, award-winning steel and stainless bicycle frames—experience that continues to inform her material fluency and labor-driven studio practice. She has taught across the UW System since 2012, including UW–Madison, UW–Parkside, and UW–Whitewater, and has instructed nationally at institutions such as Penland School of Craft and been a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Arrowmont School of Craft.

Meier has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, curated major exhibitions including Jewelry Speaks: The Voice of the Jill Wine-Banks Pin Collection, and regularly presents lectures and workshops on contemporary metalsmithing, labor, and material culture. She has been at UW–Milwaukee since 2018.