Michelle Stuart
| Michelle Stuart | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1933 (age 83–84) |
| Nationality | American |
| Education | California Institute of the Arts |
| Awards | Guggenheim Fellowship (1975), NEA Grants (1975, 1977, 1980, 1989) |
Michelle Stuart (born 1933) is a New York based, American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture, painting and environmental art. Her art has created complex, multifaceted investigations of the relationship between nature and culture for over four decades and ranges in scale from monumental earthworks to intimate talismanic sculptures. In the 1970s, Stuart became known as a pioneer in the use of nontraditional materials, introducing into her art earth, seeds, plant parts, ash, fossils and archaeological shards. Her body of work is informed by her interest in archaeology, anthropology, cartography, botany, biology, exploration, literature and history. It addresses the metaphysical while remaining profoundly rooted in its own materiality.
Stuart grew up in Los Angeles. After attending the city's Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of the Arts), Stuart worked as a topological draftsperson - a position that followed in the footsteps of her father, who mapped rights-of-way for water lines in California's inland deserts. Her fascination with Pre-Columbian cultures took her to Mexico about 1951, where she worked as a studio assistant to Diego Rivera. After a sojourn in Paris, Stuart moved to New York, where she has resided since 1957.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Stuart’s experiments with alternative mediums led to her earth rubbings (often called “scrolls”), which were created through a process of smashing, pulverizing, rubbing and imprinting soil and rock into sheets of scroll-like paper. In this early phase of her career, Stuart drew significant inspiration from recently released photographs of the surface of the moon, and saw parallels between her early rubbings and these lunar landscapes. This important body of luminous monochromatic drawings offered the revolutionary gestures of both bringing land art into the gallery and expanding the Minimalist vocabulary to include nontraditional materials. Grounded in the particular place from whence she gathered her materials (like Sayreville, NJ, the Mesa Verde, CO, or the Honduran Mayan archaeological site of Copán), Stuart’s works explore the elements inherent to that locale and displace them in a translated artistic form within the gallery or museum context. During this time, Stuart investigated other means of addressing specific sites through her ambitious landworks or, as she terms them, “drawings in the landscape”. In Niagara Gorge Path Relocated (1975), the artist situated a 460-foot scroll of paper cascading down a large bank of the Niagara River Gorge at Art Park. For Stone Alignments/Solstice Cairns (1979), she positioned 3,400 boulders in a linear configuration which indicated the rise and fall of the sun at its summer solstice.
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