Michelle Stuart “Theatre of Memory”

The Bronx Museum of the Arts

This event has ended.

The exhibition consists of twelve recent large-scale works that showcase the artist’s lifelong involvement with photography. Organized by guest curator Gregory Volk, it is accompanied by a forty-page catalogue.

In the 1970s, Michelle Stuart became internationally known for synthesizing Land Art, drawing, and sculpture through her pioneering use of natural materials. Photography, which has been present in her work throughout her career, has been her primary medium since 2011. Eschewing typical tools such as Photoshop, and drawing from a vast archive of analog and digital photographs that she has taken and collected for almost half a century, she devised a highly personal and original method of photographic manipulation that conveys the impression of deeply felt images seen through time and layers of consciousness.

Stuart’s passion for photography has been evident in her work since the late 1960s, most often in concert with drawings and rubbings or within grids of snapshot-sized prints that document the earth’s stratifications and color variations in site-specific works. The newest pieces – a confluence of images, ideas, and objects – result from a lifetime of selecting, preserving, recording, and reporting. In them, one encounters ruminations on war, human frailty, natural phenomena, metaphysics, traces of personal and political history, and a nod to surrealist cinema.

The exhibition will debut My Still Life (2015-16), a major, large-scale work created for this show—“an autobiographical opus of sorts,” as Volk describes it. Thirty-nine framed archival inkjet prints of sculptural tableaux that she has constructed and photographed in her studio, bring together meaningful objects and images that Stuart has collected and saved for many years.

Also included in the exhibition are two works from the artist’s early 1980s Codex series. Featuring her own photographs and squares of earth-rubbed paper made at specific sites, such as a New Jersey quarry and the ancient Maya city of Uxmal, they foreshadow her recent photo-based work.

Born in Los Angeles, Michelle Stuart lived in Mexico City and Paris before arriving in New York in the late 1950s, where she continues to live and work. Her most recent solo museum exhibition, Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature, curated by art historian Anna Lovatt, originated in 2013 at the Djanogly Art Gallery, Nottingham, UK and traveled to the Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, accompanied by a monograph published by Hatje Cantz. Stuart’s work has also been the focus of solo shows at the Institute of Contemporary Art, London; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague; and many other major museums and galleries worldwide.

She has participated in numerous group shows and international surveys ranging from documenta VI, Kassel (1977) to Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and the Haus der Kunst, Munich (2012). Stuart’s work was recently featured in America is Hard to See (2015), the inaugural exhibition at the new Whitney Museum of American Art and Apparition: Frottages from 1860 to Now, at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and the Menil Collection in Houston (2015-2016). She is currently participating in Drawing Then: Innovation and Influence in American Drawings of the Sixties at Dominique Levy Gallery, New York (through March 19, 2016) and will be featured in Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947–2016, at Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, Los Angeles (March 13 – September 4, 2016).

Major works by the artist were recently acquired by the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Whitney Museum of American Art; and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and are also in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Moderna Museet, Stockholm; the Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra; and many other distinguished institutions.