Wednesday, September 29 @ 5 – 6:15pm
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Online at Zoom: go.wisc.edu/uw-art-talks
As a printmaker, Michelle Martin is interested in the depiction of social interactions and societal commentary through experimental, non-linear narratives created by using pre-existing source imagery in a collage/drawing/printmaking hybrid process. While Martin admires the traditional applications, her work focuses on pushing the traditional boundaries of collage, combining it with digital drawing and hand printing techniques to create images that appear to be “unbroken.” She draw from sources from Old Masters and Victorian era popular imagery to clip art. This process is a form of “image sustainability,” a recycling of past imagery into new forms. Both monumental and intimate in scale, the historic images Martin re-purposes encourage a nostalgia for fairy tales and whimsical stories, and also generate disquieting and open-ended narratives that serve as a form of “stealth” political and social commentary. Exploring themes of monstrosity and hybridity, her work investigates the modern experiences of identity, fear and desire filtered through a historical lens.
An active artist working in all print media and drawing, Martin’s work has been shown in over 220 national and international exhibitions since 1995, including venues in New Zealand, Venezuela, Iceland, Italy, Bulgaria, Turkey and England. She has won numerous awards and purchase prizes, including an Oklahoma Artist of Excellence Award in 2003, the 2007 Print Prize in the Bradley Print and Drawing Exhibition, and the Oklahoma Visual Arts Fellowship (Oklahoma Visual Arts Coalition) in 2008, two Brackett-Krennerich Purchase Awards (Delta National Small Prints Exhibition) in 2013 and 2014, Materials Awards (2018 Boston Printmakers North American Print Biennial) and Recognition/Purchase Awards from the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts. Her work is in several private, public and university collections, including the Ft. Wayne Museum of Art (Ft. Wayne, Indiana), Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, Georgia), Kohler Library (Madison, Wisconsin), Muscarelle Museum of Art (The College of William and Mary), the Akron Museum Art Library Program, The College of Notre Dame of Maryland permanent collection, Rutgers Center for the Innovative Paper, the Southwest Collection (Texas Tech University), and the Paul and Lulu Hilliard University Art Museum (University of Louisiana).
Martin received her BFA from Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, and earned her M.F.A. in Printmaking at The Ohio State University. Martin is a Professor of Art at The University of Tulsa and Gallery Director of the Sherman Smith Family Gallery, located at the Henry Zarrow Center for Art and Education in Tulsa, Oklahoma. michellemartinprintmaker.com