Visiting Artist Lecture Series: Michelle Grabner

The Wisconsin-born and -based artist Michelle Grabner is known for her broad perspective developed as teacher, writer and critic over the past 30 years. The site where it all comes together is the studio. Her artmaking—which encompasses a variety of mediums including drawing, painting, video and sculpture—is driven by a distinctive value in the productivity of work and takes place outside of dominant systems. Grabner instead finds a creative center in operating across platforms and towards community.

Central to the work is process. Grabner uncovers new dynamic relationships through her visionary practice of repetition. With a deep attention to abstract patterns and all the metaphors they conjure, Grabner pushes the limits of compositional structures to discover the tipping point between stability and precariousness; between continuance and wondrous difference.

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, WI) received her MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She is Senior Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a Core Critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2011 to 2014. In 2021, Grabner was awarded the Fine Arts Guggenheim Fellowship. She returned to Yale in 2020 as a Visiting Artist. A regular contributor to Artforum, her writing has also appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, Modern Painters, and Art-Agenda. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio, and the vicinity that ran from July through September of 2018. She is also the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin, The Suburban and The Poor Farm, with her husband, artist Brad Killam.

This lecture is presented as part of the Spring 2023 Visiting Artist Lecture Series, free and open to all.