Michelle Grabner
American artist, curator & critic (born 1962)
Michelle Grabner (born 1962 in Oshkosh, Wisconsin) is an artist, curator, and critic based in Wisconsin, Chicago, and Umbria, Italy. 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. In 2024 Grabner was inducted into the Wisconsin Academy of Art and Science.
01Life
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.
02Work
PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin, Ohio
Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Art Omi, Ghent, New York
Bates Museum of Art, Lewiston, Maine
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, California
Chazen Museum of Art, Madison, Wisconsin
Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, OH
Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Glen Ellyn, Illinois
Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas
Daimler Contemporary, Berlin, Germany
Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana
Haggerty Museum of Art, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
ICA Boston, Boston, Massachusetts
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, Portland, Oregon
Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Missouri
Knoxville Museum of Art, Knoxville, Tennessee
Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, Wisconsin
Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, Massachusetts
MUDAM, Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg
Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, Illinois
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Massachusetts
Museum of Wisconsin Art, West Bend, Wisconsin
Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon
RISD Museum, Providence, Rhode Island
Schneider Museum of Art, Ashland, Oregon
Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC
Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois
Sculpture Milwaukee Legacy Collection, Milwaukee, Wisconsin
Victoria and Albert Museum, London, United Kingdom
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Wellin Museum of Art, Hamilton College, Clinton, New York
West Virginia University Art Museum, Morgantown
Wright Museum of Art, Beloit, Wisconsin
RECOGNITIONS
2019, National Academy of Design, Academician
2021, Guggenheim Fellowship
2024, Wisconsin Academy of Arts and Sciences, Fellow
2025, Mary L. Nohl Fellowship
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."
Sources and credits
This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article “Michelle Grabner”, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.
Fathomly is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Spotted a problem? Tell us.