Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner is a Wisconsin-born and based artist, writer, critic, curator, and professor. Over the past 30 years, Grabner has dispelled earlier mores for working mothers and the suburban Midwest with her ideas and artwork that span the USA and beyond.

Born in Oshkosh, Michelle spent most of the 1980s as a student. She studied at UW-Milwaukee for her BFA degree in Painting and Drawing and her MA degree in Art History. Her graduate MFA degree in Art Theory and Practice is from Northwestern University. 

Grabner is currently the Crown Family Professor of Art and the Senior Chair of the Painting and Drawing Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where she has taught since 1996. With her national and international recognition, Grabner has helped to decentralize the notion of where influential art can be created.

Michelle’s studios in Fox Point and Milwaukee are where her art is created, while her outreach to far-flung points emanates from her articles in journals such as Artforum, Art in America, and X-tra, among others. Her art is represented by Green Gallery in Milwaukee and by James Cohan in New York City. In 2021 Grabner was awarded a prestigious Fine Arts Guggenheim Fellowship and an artist-in-residency in Umbria, Italy.

*** These pieces offered by the gallery come from a collection of Grabner’s 1980s artwork rescued more than 20 years ago from an attic storage spot. The finder contacted a well known Milwaukee collector who retained the artwork before holding an exhibit at the Cedarburg Art Museum in 2021. The artist was also contacted, who was thrilled to see this earlier artwork, and signed the backsides of these rediscovered works on paper.  These rare early works of representational experimentation and verging abstraction - in contrast with Grabner’s current artwork. ***