Troy Michie


Troy Michie is an American collage artist, painter, interdisciplinary installation artist, and sculptor based in New York City. Michie's work is often in dialogue with the canon of collage; as well as, investigating society's understanding of race, gender, sexuality, and other fields of identity and power.

Early life and education

Troy Michie received a BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2009 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting/Printmaking in 2011.

Career

Michie participated in the Tuesday Night MFA Lecture Series at BU School of Visual Arts.

Fat Cat Came To Play

On December 3rd, 2017, Troy Michie held his first solo exhibition Fat Cat Came To Play through Company Gallery, which lasted until January 21st, 2018. In the solo exhibition, Michie explores the significance of zoot suits, which are “broad-shouldered suits that were popular with Italian, black, and Latino men in the United States in the 1940s”. The installation was inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots, which took place in 1943 after white servicemen attacked a group of Mexican Americans wearing Zoot suits. Unlike his earlier works, which dealt with sex, Fat Cat Came To Play focused on exploring “blackness, queerness, and sexuality within an assemblage” by expressing socio-economic traits on to the Zoot Suit. In many of his installations, Michie cuts out the faces of photographs from this era to address that these histories of the minorities are still relevant today. A notable piece of the exhibition was “Disruptive Patterns”, which aimed to remind people that police officers were among the attackers in the Zoot Suit Riots. The exhibition stayed true to Michie’s philosophy of representing the cultural expressions, specifically through fashion, of “historically marginalized American male figures”.

Exhibitions