Origin: Queens, New York by way of the Midwest
Currently Exhibiting in: Bushwick, Brooklyn
Instagram: @scaredcicada
Margaret Schneider (they/she), also known as Scared Cicada, is a queer, nonbinary third-generation artist, writer, and musician. Their interdisciplinary practice reclaims maternal Russian-Ukrainian lineage while addressing ancestral trauma and ecological devastation through a distinctly urban, visionary lens.
Raised in the Midwest, Schneider now resides in Queens—a full-circle return to their great-grandparents’ early refuge in New York after escaping the pogroms of Odessa. Living in one of the world’s most culturally diverse boroughs informs their daily work, enriching their commitment to equity, language, and cross-cultural reverence.
Their mixed-media works have been shown across New York, including solo and group exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, Greenpoint Gallery, Queens College Art Center, Dream Space, The Living Gallery, and Bushwick Community Darkroom, among others. Schneider’s recent art expands on traditions of mystical symbolism, outsider art, and socially conscious surrealism.
Featured Artwork at Bushwick Gallery
These Crushing Defeats
Year of Creation: 2024
Medium: Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
Dimensions: 24″ x 24″ x 1″
Price: $850
Description:
Created atop a discarded canvas found on a spring walk to Socrates Sculpture Park, These Crushing Defeats is both palimpsest and prayer. Schneider reclaims what appears to be a breakup collage—adding layers of acrylic, handwritten messages, stars, wings, and hearts. The result is a luminous and intimate act of annotation, a vivid ritual of emotional transformation. Bright, chaotic, and painfully sincere, this piece bears witness to shared loss and healing, while inviting viewers into its layered dialogue on art as a devotional offering. devotional offering.
Exhibition Information
April 2025: Urban Narratives: The City as Canvas
Curated by: Fern Messa Joson
Theme: Turning the cityscape into a canvas, this exhibition captures the raw, vibrant energy of urban life through graffiti, street photography, painting, and more.
Exhibition Dates: April 3 – April 10, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 3 | 6 PM – 8 PM
Guided audio experience
For accessibility, the full video transcript is provided below for those who prefer to read or are unable to listen.
“Before you is These Crushing Defeats, a work that hums with both pain and devotion. Look closely—this canvas wasn’t blank when Margaret Schneider, also known as Scared Cicada, began. It was found, already marked with fragments of someone else’s story. A breakup collage, discarded and forgotten. Schneider didn’t erase that story—they built upon it.
What you see now is a layered act of reclamation. Acrylic washes over old wounds. Handwritten notes—some legible, some ghosted—whisper from beneath. Stars, wings, hearts: symbols of tenderness and defiance. The canvas becomes a palimpsest, where loss is neither hidden nor glorified, but made sacred through transformation.
Schneider’s work often draws from ancestral memory, queer identity, and ecological grief. Here, all those threads converge in a luminous chaos. It’s devotional—not to a god, but to the power of healing, of marking pain and moving through it anyway.
Notice the colors—bright, clashing, tender. There’s nothing polite about this piece, and that’s the point. It’s honest. It’s messy. It invites you to bear witness to emotional labor, to private ceremony made public.
In These Crushing Defeats, art becomes both offering and archive. A record of hurt, yes—but also of the courage to layer beauty on top of it. To not start over, but to continue.”