Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner (born 1962 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. She has curated several important exhibitions, including the 2014 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art along with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and FRONT International, the 2016 Portland Biennial at the Oregon Contemporary, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland, Ohio in 2018. In 2014, Grabner was named one of the 100 most powerful women in art and in 2019, she was named a 2019 National Academy of Design's Academician, a lifetime honor. In 2021, Grabner was named a Guggenheim Fellow by The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Life
Grabner received a B.F.A. (painting and drawing) in 1984 and an M.A. in art history in 1987 from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her MA thesis and exhibition was titled "Postmodernism: A Spectacle of Reflexivity" and included work by Richard Prince, Sherrie Levine, and Kay Rosen among others. She received an M.F.A. from Northwestern University in 1990. She is the Crown Family Professor of Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she has been teaching since 1996. In addition, Grabner has also held teaching appointments at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Yale Norfolk, Bard College's Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine.

Work
Her work is in the collection of the Art Museum of West Virginia University, Morgantown; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; DaimlerChrysler Collection, Berlin; Musée d'art moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Indianapolis Museum of Art; the Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, OH; the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; the RISD MUSEUM, Providence, RI; the Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA; the Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, NY; the Bates College, Lewiston, ME; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London among others. The Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland presented her first solo retrospective, Michelle Grabner, "I Work From Home", November 1, 2013 - February 16, 2014. The Indianapolis Museum of Art, MOCA Cleveland, Illinois State Galleries, and INOVA at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee have each hosted survey exhibitions of Grabner’s work. Her work has been commissioned by the Art Preserve, John Michel Kohler Art Center, Sheboygan, WI; the Columbus Public Library, Dublin Branch, OH; and Sculpture Milwaukee, Milwaukee WI.

Grabner is presently represented by James Cohan, New York; EFREMIDIS, Berlin/Seoul; and Green Gallery, Milwaukee among others. Notable recent solo exhibitions include A Minor Survey at MICKEY, Chicago (2023); Similitude at EFREMIDIS, Berlin (2022); and Michelle Grabner at James Cohan, New York (2021). Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Gallery Gisela Clement, Bonn, Germany; the Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland; La Mama Galleria, New York; and PS, Amsterdam, Netherlands among many others. She has participated in residencies at the Atlantic Center for the Art, Master Teacher, New Smyrna Beach, Florida; Arts/Industry, Foundry Kohler Company, Kohler, Wisconsin; and Bullseye Glass, Portland, Oregon.

She is a National Academician at the National Academy of Design; a Lifetime Distinguished Artist at the Union League Club of Chicago; a Trustee and member of the Acquisition Committee, Milwaukee Art Museum; holds a seat on the advisory Committee of the CUE Foundation New York; is a member of the International Association of Art Critics; and a Artist Pension and Trust Participant.

Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Museum Biennial and curated the 2016 Portland Biennial. She was the Artistic Director for the inaugural exhibition, FRONT International, the 2018 Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, titled "An American City."

A 2023 Artforum review describes Grabner's "enduring interest in vernacular patterns drawn from domestic life" which informs works that "dazzle with intricate geometries—fractal arrays of flowers, starbursts, swirls, spirals—all of which emerge from deep histories of ornamentation that go back into antiquity and loop forward to grandmothers’ afghans."

Writing
Her reviews are regularly published in X-tra and Artforum. In 2010, Mary Jane Jacob and Grabner co-edited THE STUDIO READER, published by the University of Chicago Press. In 2018, Grabner edited An American City: Front International, a two-volume exhibition catalog published by the Cleveland Museum of Art.

The Suburban and The Poor Farm
With her husband Brad Killam, she founded The Suburban in Oak Park, Illinois in 1999 as a project space that honors the tradition of artist directed programs. The space hosted a range of international contemporary art. In 2015, The Suburban began programming exhibitions in Milwaukee’s Walker’s Point neighborhood.

In 2009 Grabner and Killam opened The Poor Farm in rural Waupaca County, Wisconsin. The Poor Farm is dedicated to annual historical and contemporary exhibitions, lectures, performances, publications, screenings and alternative educational programs. Since 2018, the Poor Farm is committed to hosting a long-term research residency called Living Within the Play, exploring the contingent nature of hosting and gathering, the fleeting and the reverberating, particular to the moment of temporary, intentional assembly.