Michelle Wilson

Biography

Michelle Wilson is a papermaker, printmaker, book, installation, and social practice artist. She is also one-half of the ongoing collaborative, political art team BOOK BOMBS. She has exhibited her work both internationally and in the United States, including participation in biennials such as Philadelphia's Philagrafika 2010 and the 2006 Second International Biennial for the Artist's Book in Alexandria, Egypt. Her practice includes frequent collaborations with other artists, in particular her ongoing projects Book Bombs (with Mary Tasillo) and the Rhinoceros Project (with Anne Beck). Her work finds synchronicity between personal narrative and contemplative activism. In the nonlinear narratives she explores, location, landscape, and history play a role. They are more than setting; they are characters and catalysts for transformation. The exterior landscape depicted is an embodiment of an interior landscape explored, a manifestation of a cognitive environment. Many of the narratives she explores have a duality or interconnection of ideas: the crossroads of politics and the environment, colonialism and natural history, wordplay, migration, vegetation, and the loss of diversity. Her artworks are in various collections, including Yale University (New Haven, CT), the National Museum of Women in the Arts (Washington, DC), and the Mediatheque Andre Malraux (Strasbourg, France). She is a past Artist-in-Residence at the David and Julia White Colony in Ciudad Colon, Costa Rica, the Jentel Artist Residency Program, in Banner, Wyoming, and the San Francisco Center for the Book. Grants she has received include a Puffin Foundation Grant, a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Project Streaming Grant, and an Artist-Investigator Grant from San Francisco's Triangle Arts Lab. In 2007, she was awarded the Lenore Adelman Award for Book Arts. Creative Capital designated her as an "On Our Radar" artist in 2015.

Research Interest

Art Practice