Michelle Stuart


Michelle Stuart is an American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. She is based in New York City.

Early life

Stuart was born in 1933 and she grew up in Los Angeles, California. After attending Chouinard Art Institute, Stuart worked as a topological draftsperson. She worked in Mexico about 1951 as a studio assistant to Diego Rivera. She married Catalan artist José Bartoli in 1953. She lived for a while in Paris, then moved to New York, where she has resided since 1957.

Work

In the early phase of her career, Stuart drew inspiration from recently released photographs of the surface of the moon and saw parallels between her early rubbings and these lunar landscapes. This body of luminous monochromatic drawings brought land art into the gallery. During this time, Stuart investigated other means of addressing specific sites through her landworks or, as she terms them, "drawings in the landscape". In Niagara Gorge Path Relocated, the artist situated a 460-foot scroll of paper cascading down a large bank of the Niagara River Gorge at Art Park.
Throughout her career her art has figured in reviews of the work of women artists.
In the 1980s, Stuart shifted her focus. She embarked on a series of gridded paintings that introduced beeswax, seashells, blossoms, leaves and sand embedded in an encaustic surface. Stuart also created complex multi-media installations involving light and sound elements.
Her series titled Extinct was inspired by a Victorian-era album of leaves. For one work in the series, she revisited the grid formation, but this time placed a variety of dried plants within each compartment. During this time, Stuart also created the Seed Calendar drawings, which employ the grid to map the maturation stages of a seed.
Throughout her career, Stuart has also sought to manifest her love of literature and the writing process through a variety of strategies. In the early 70s, she began to create the Rock Book series, artworks that in their use of natural materials from specific sites might be considered alternative travel logs. These works take the form of tattered, bound journals made of earth rubbings. For example, in Homage to the Owl from Four Corners, earth, owl feathers, string and beeswax are brought together to form a book.
Stuart has published artists' books, including The Fall, a book-length prose poem about keeping historical records and Butterflies and Moths.
Stuart currently lives and works in New York City and Amagansett, Long Island.

Exhibitions

Michelle Stuart has exhibited in Europe, Asia and the United States for more than thirty years. Selected exhibitions include: the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; the Art Museum of the Ateneum, Helsinki, Finland; the Musée d’Arts de Toulon, France; the American Academy of Arts & Letters; Kunsthalle, Hamburg, Germany; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan.
She has had one-person exhibits at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA; The Rose Art Museum, Waltham, MA; the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, Netherlands; the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, MA; Centre d’Arts Plastique Contemporaines de Bourdeaux, France; The Arts Club of Chicago; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY; Galerie Ueda and Ueda Warehouse Tokyo, Japan and individual galleries in both the United States and Europe. In 2013, Stuart was the subject of a retrospective that focused on her drawing. It was organized by the Djanogly Art Gallery, University of Nottingham, UK, and travelled to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Santa Barbara, CA and the Parrish Art Museum, Watermill, NY.
In 2008 Stuart was part of a group exhibition called "Decoys, Complexes and Triggers: Feminism and Land Art in the 1970s," at the SculptureCenter in Long Island City, New York other artists in this exhibit included Alice Adams, Alice Aycock, Lynda Benglis, Agnes Denes, Jackie Ferrara, Suzanne Harris, Nancy Holt, Mary Miss, and Jackie Winsor.
Stuart's works were featured in Documenta VI, Kassel, Germany and in the American Biennial Pavilions in Seoul, Korea, and Cairo, Egypt.
Among her commissions are the grand lobby installation: Paradisi: A Garden Mural, at the Brooklyn Museum. Site sculptures include Starmarker and Star Chart: Constellations, in Wanas Sculpture Garden, Knislinge, Sweden; Garden of Four Seasons, Scheide Music Center, Wooster, Ohio; Garden of Four Seasons, a bronze/marble sculpture relief in Tochige, Japan and Tabula, a thirty-four-part marble relief at the New Stuyvesant High School in Battery Park, New York City, for which she won a New York City Art Commission Award for Design.

Collections

Selected collections include the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Whitney Museum of American Art; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Detroit Institute of Arts; The Philadelphia Museum; the Brooklyn Museum; the Menil Collection, Houston; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Musée d’Art de Toulon; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and the National Collection of Art, Canberra, Australia, among others. The selected private collections include those of Agnes Gund, Werner Kramarsky, Dorothy and Herbert Vogel, New York; Jil Sander, Hamburg and the Ammann Collection, Zurich.

Awards

Stuart is a recipient of the CAPS Grant, New York State ; the Macdowell Colony Fellowship, Peterborough, New Hampshire ; National Endowment for the Arts Grant for Individual Artists, Tamarind Institute grant ; New York Creative Artists Public Service grant in painting ; Guggenheim fellowship ; Finnish Art Association Fellowship, Helsinki ; Artists' Fellowship, New York Foundation for the Arts ; New York City Art Commission Award, for excellence in design ; Purchase award, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters ; and the Anonymous Was A Woman award, from Philanthropy Advisors, LLC.

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