Michelle Weinberg is a painter who creates art for surfaces, interiors, architecture and public spaces. She lives in NYC and has studios in Sharon Springs and Miami, Florida. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships, and residencies from Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, MacDowell Colony, Millay Colony, South Florida Cultural Consortium, SouthArts, State of Florida Individual Artist Award, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, Studios at MASS MoCA, 100West Corsicana in TX and more. Exhibitions and installations of her work include Project: ARTspace, High Noon Gallery, Berl’s Poetry Shop and New York Public Library in NYC, ArtPort Kingston, Russell Steele Gallery in East Hampton, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance in Narrowsburg, ARENA, La Plataforma in Barcelona, Schmidt Center Galleries at Florida Atlantic University, Frost Art Museum-Florida International University, Miami. Her private and public commissioned works include ArtBridge/Downtown Alliance in NYC, Wolfsonian Museum in Miami, Miami International Airport, Miami-Dade County Art in Public Places and Facebook offices. She is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions at New York Public Library, Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College, Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY, Miami Dade College Museum of Art and Design and Girls’ Club in Fort Lauderdale, among others. Weinberg maintains her own flexible platform for promoting artist initiatives called Available Space (www.availablespaceishere.com). Her ongoing project “Artists Draw Their Studios” numbers more than 125 artist participants and has been exhibited in four venues.  In addition to teaching Drawing at Marymount Manhattan College, Weinberg is a mentor at the Ratcliffe Incubator for Art and Design Entrepreneurship at Florida International University.   @mwpinkblue

Question:

“Where’s the body?”

Answer:

Though I often depict spaces and objects that suggest a human connection or presence, the explicit figure in my work is mostly absent. For some, this is provocative. When I was in college, I painted large figures on canvases, and I received a slew of questions about the backstory. Were the figures me? The stories from my personal life? I wasn’t interested in the confessional at that moment. Perhaps in the future. Perhaps never.

For me, the human is always present. By animating objects, spatial contexts, words, I am making personal thoughts visible. In any medium, I’m playing in a continuous space that drifts between the representational and abstract, the flattened and the volumetric. The figure and the ground are not oppositional: they are engaged in a committed relationship, comical or awkward as the negotiations may be. Like a stage set, the space also has a story to tell via many simultaneous perspectives, a multiplicity of viewpoints.

Work The Room, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 48” x 36″

I describe all my work and projects as vivid backdrops for human activity. This encompasses my idea of the theatre, the stage-set as a site of transformation, and puts human interaction right in the middle. Each drawing or painting is a rehearsal, and all my work, from pictures to murals to textiles to floor tiles and mosaics are collapsible into a single ongoing project. An adjustment of scale triggers whether it will be an intimate or a large-scale experience.

When I create art for an interior, exterior or public place, I’m thinking of surfaces as social veneers that are penetrated by viewers/participants. I like to connect with individuals moving across or around a public artwork by suggesting a synchronization with their own bodily rhythms of breath, footsteps, heartbeat and pulse. It’s this flickering, pulsating effect I’m after – a vibration we can feel with the fundamental sublime geometry existing beneath all things. Our capacity to perceive this geometry is amazing. Pattern is visual rhythm, and underneath it all, it represents infinity, renewal, a beat that goes on and on.

Tropic Episodes, 32 panels, each 7’ x 7’, inkjet print on acrylic, installed along moving walkway at Miami International Airport

When I work, I am conscious of crafting a simulation and then entering it, breaching its boundaries. Often elements from my real life studio (lamps, tables, a notebook, window, etc.) make appearances, and this is testimony to the leaky state of my simulation, its inherent porousness. There’s also a practical aspect to my imagination that acknowledges the necessary contributions of the table, the lamp, the ladder, the window, the notebook, the ruler.

My current large scale drawings are all somewhat diaristic in this way. In them I toss up the personal elements, let them float across a field, leave the thumbprints, act out a bit along the edge, misbehave with the smudge, accept the self-consciousness of it all. The notes to self.

Home Economics, graphite and colored pencil on paper, 12” x 18” (diptych)

I use humor and banal materials to frame the mystery I experience in the ordinary world. Like me, I suppose my approach to making art is both serious and informal, methodical and irreverent. I like to keep it open ended, inviting participants in the production of meaning, changing our mind(s).