ADAA The Art Show: Michelle Stuart

Galerie Lelong & Co., New York, in collaboration with Marc Selwyn Fine Art, is pleased to announce a presentation of historical works by Michelle Stuart for The Art Show 2024. Since the 1960’s, Michelle Stuart (b. 1933, Los Angeles, CA) has created pioneering works that synthesize Land Art, drawing, painting and sculpture.  Through her use of nontraditional often organic materials, Stuart brings the natural environment into her work, exploring a diverse array of cultures and their relationship to the land. Collapsing time, memory and place, Stuart’s work addresses the metaphysical while remaining profoundly rooted in its own materiality and the artist’s knowledge of archeology, botany, and history.

Throughout her career, Stuart has been an explorer and a voyager, traveling the world to collect and record natural and cultural phenomena and creating works that embody a sense of place. In #14 Blue Stone, 1973, an early and iconic graphite rubbing by the artist, Stuart captures the subtle variations of the ground at the site where the work was created. Gestural markings recorded onto the large-scale paper scroll create a vibrating surface, both ethereal and immersive.

In other works, Stuart’s process begins in the landscape and is completed in her studio. In Strata Series: Copan - Stela C, 1979, for example, Stuart takes soil from the Mayan archeological site and later incorporates it into muslin-backed paper. With Book of the Stone, 1984-85, Stuart binds together leaves of earth-laden frottage, turning a symbol of learning and sagesse into an object of mystery.

A documentary on the artist, Michelle Stuart: Voyager, produced by Karen Shapiro and directed by Karen Bellone is currently in production.

A comprehensive survey of Stuart’s work will be presented at The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles in 2026.

Stuart has exhibited internationally over the past 40 years. Notable solo exhibitions include Sayreville Strata Quartet, Dia:Beacon, New York (2017);Theatre of Memory: Photographic Works, The Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York (2016); Place and Time, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Drawn from Nature, which opened at the University of Nottingham, England and travelled to Parrish Art Museum Water Mill, New York (2013) and Santa Barbara Museum of Art (2014). This presentation follows two recent institutional exhibitions featuring Stuart’s work: Dream Monuments: Drawing in the 1960s and 1970s, at The Menil Collection, Houston, and Land Art: Expanding the Atlas, at the Nevada Museum of Art, Reno. Her work is featured in public collections worldwide including MoMA, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Dia Art Foundation, and Whitney Museum, New York; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; The Art Institute of Chicago; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Museum of Contemporary Art, Australia; SFMOMA, San Francisco; Tate Gallery, London; The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington D.C.; The Philadelphia Museum of Art; The Centre Pompidou, Paris; and The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, among others.

Stuart was born in 1933 in Los Angeles, California, and currently lives and works in New York, New York.