Artist Story: Michelle Grabner

Mine is a story about busyness and a constant strain for equivalence and balance. I am also profoundly curious about the elasticity of the lines that inscribe family, work, nature, art and society. I am middle age. I live in Middle America. I am middleclass. And it is in this middle that convention, experimentation and the imagination can compress into alternative ways of being.

Because anecdotal accounts make me uncomfortable, I direct readers to a very nice Wallace Stevens poem "The Pleasures of Merely Circulating" as an insight into my values as a painter, writer, mother, and teacher.

The Pleasures of Merely Circulating

The garden flew round with the angel,
The angel flew round with the clouds,
And the clouds flew round and the clouds flew round
And the clouds flew round with the clouds.

Is there any secret in skulls,
The cattle skulls in the woods?
Do the drummers in black hoods
Rumble anything out of their drums?

Mrs. Anderson's Swedish baby
Might well have been German or Spanish,
Yet that things go round and again go round
Has rather a classical sound

Michelle Grabner is an Associate Professor in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She runs The Suburban, an artist project space in Oak Park, IL. She is a corresponding editor for Xtra and artUS. Her work is represented by Rocket, London; Marlborough Gallery, NYC; Richard Heller Gallery, Santa Monica; Wendy Cooper Gallery, Chicago; and Allston Skirt Gallery, Boston.