Michelle Grabner - Weaving Life into Art

The Indianapolis Museum of Art (IMA) is proud to present Michelle Grabner: Weaving Life into Art, the artist's first solo exhibition at an encyclopedic museum. It features painting, sculpture, photography and video, as well as the largest installation of her ongoing paper weavings. Over 20 years ago, Grabner began making such weavings, which have come to represent the rich interwoven nature of her artistic practice, as she chooses to work both in and outside the traditional networks of the art world.

Drawing from her everyday experiences as artist, professor, curator and critic, as well as mother and wife, Grabner consciously makes her art reflect her life and vice versa. She actively threads together the various roles she has undertaken in the arts, such as co-curating the 2014 Whitney Biennial, teaching students and managing the much-admired alternative art space The Suburban with her husband, artist Brad Killam, at their home in Oak Park, Illinois. (This fall, The Suburban will reopen in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)

Her diverse interests, which range from painting and philosophy to football and knitting, resonate throughout her art. For this Indianapolis exhibition, curated by Tricia Y. Paik, Grabner, a lifelong fan of football, has produced a new series of photographic works inspired by the Indianapolis Colts.

Born in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in 1962, Grabner was most recently featured in her first comprehensive solo museum exhibition at MOCA Cleveland in 2013. Among other solo shows, she has been featured in group exhibitions at a number of institutions, including the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), New York; MCA Chicago; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. In 2014, she co-curated the Whitney Biennial, marking the first time an artist has served as a curator of this exhibition. A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1996, Grabner is represented by James Cohan Gallery, New York and Shanghai.