The retrospective exhibition “Michelle Stuart: Drawn from Nature,” informed by the artist’s lifelong interest in the earth and cosmos, will be on view from Sunday, July 21, through October 27 at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.
Ms. Stuart, who splits her time between Amagansett and Manhattan, has produced and exhibited monumentally scaled works on paper, site-specific earth art, multimedia installations, paintings, sculpture and photographic works since the 1960s that explore a dialogue with the natural world, which she has fostered since her childhood.
After graduating from high school in Los Angeles, California, Ms. Stuart spent several months in Mexico studying archaeological ruins and murals. In the early 1950s, she returned to Mexico again for art school, but dropped out to work as a personal assistant to painter Diego Rivera until she moved to Paris, where she seriously picked up painting.
The Parrish exhibition originated at the Djanogly Art Gallery in England and was curated by Anna Lovatt, lecturer in modern and contemporary art history at the University of Manchester. Spanning from the late 1960s to present day, “Drawn from Nature” highlights the artist’s early contributions to process-based sculpture and Land Art, as well as her use of nontraditional natural materials. Among the works on display are rarely seen drawings from the late 1960s, which incorporate photographs and articulate the mottled surface of the moon—a predecessor to the 1970s “scrolls” that put Ms. Stuart on the international map.
After the show’s tenure on the East End, it will travel to the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in California, where it will be on view from January 26 through April 20. For more information on the exhibition, call 283-2118 or visit parrishart.org.
MICHELLE TRAURING
Michelle Trauring on Jul 15, 2013