Michele

With a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994, I have spent the past 15 years utilizing a strong background in the liberal arts to create site-specific,... [more]

With a BA from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1994, I have spent the past 15 years utilizing a strong background in the liberal arts to create site-specific, mixed media installations, and works of public art that are generated by the history, culture, environment, and architecture of a wide range of venues. While living and working in such places as France, Costa Rica, California, the Midwest, Germany, and my home of New York City, my art career has developed into a process of working in collaboration with each new community as a means towards developing an interpretation of the sense of a place as an outsider looking in. My exhibition record includes one-person shows at the Temple Judea Museum; Elkins Park, PA, Chashama Gallery; NYC, Littlejohn Contemporary; NYC, Hunter Museum of Art; Chattanooga, TN, Dina4 Projekte; Munich, Germany, Karpio + Facchini Gallery; Miami, Fl, the Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo; San Jose, Costa Rica, and at Le Quai de la Batterie, Atelier-galerie d’Art Contemporain; Arras, France. The award of a Pollock/ Krasner Foundation Grant in July of 2003 aided greatly in the rebuilding of the sculpture Grass Skirt Extra Large for the traveling group exhibition Material Terrain, which opened at the Laumeier Sculpture Park and Museum in February of 2005. In 2001 the New York Stock Exchange, Met Life, the New York Foundation for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts’ Architecture, Planning & Design Program made grants towards the public art project Re-Covering the Cityscape: Impressions of History Underfoot, which investigates and commemorates lost elements of history through the design of a series of abstract mandala-like patterns cast in the form of functional manhole covers. The project’s first manhole cover was installed on Wall Street in 2002. I have also had the opportunity to work as an Artist-in-Residence at the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation’s Space program in NYC in 1999, the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California in 2002, and at Le Quai de la Batterie, Atelier-galerie d’Art contemporain in the north of France in 1998 and in 2002. In 2008 I was awarded an Artists and Communities grant from the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation for my one-person show and residency at the Temple Judea Museum. During the spring of 2006 I completed three major permanent public art installations in New York and Texas for the Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Arts for Transit program, the Department of Education’s Public Art for Public Schools program, and for the city of Frisco, Texas’ Percent for Art program. In 2007 I was commissioned to create a permanent lobby installation for the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan, and debuted the first interactive performance of Tea House Productions at the 11th Annual D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival, in Brooklyn, NY. The essence of my work is to understand how we live with change while trying to manage the delicacy of memory within the constant flux of life. With each new project I concentrate on the exploration of light, color, pattern, space and time - by interweaving manmade, natural, and living materials to create an architectural threshold through which the viewer is invited to enter. It is during the precise moment of passing by, over, into, under or through this means of access that I wish to create a transformational experience. Where the viewer develops a new sense of awareness of the tenuous relationship between themselves, nature, and the urban environment. I recently worked as an Artist-in-Residence for Earth Celebrations’ Hudson River Pageant and Ecological Project that debuted on May 9, 2009. And just opened with Tea Cart Stories in the windows of the Lower East Side Tenement Museum at 97 Orchard Street. This Fall I will also be a part of the alternative public art festival Art in Odd Places during the month of October on 14th Street. [show less]