Michelle Stuart 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 more than 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 was a resident at the American Academy in Rome. Among the grants that she has received are John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1975); four National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grants (1975, 1977, 1980, 1989); two New York Foundation for the Arts grants; and a Ford Foundation grant. She is an academician of the National Academy.
Portrait of artist in her studio by Bill Milne
