Michelle Grabner

Michelle Grabner (b. 1962, Oshkosh, Wisconsin) received her MA in Art History and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University. She is currently Senior Chair of the Department of Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and was a Core Critic at Yale University in the Department of Painting and Printmaking from 2011 to 2014. She returned to Yale in 2020 as a Visiting Artist. A regular contributor to Artforum, her writing has also appeared in publications including Art in America, Frieze, Modern Painters, and ArtAgenda. Grabner co-curated the 2014 Whitney Biennial with Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and served as the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in the metropolitan area of Cleveland, OH that ran from July through September of 2018. Along with her husband, artist Brad Killam, she is the founder and co-director of two non-profit art spaces in Wisconsin: The Suburban and The Poor Farm. The John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI commissioned Grabner to create an artist-built environment in June 2021.

Grabner has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Hedreen Gallery at Seattle University; INOVA, The University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee; Ulrich Museum, Wichita; and University Galleries, Illinois State University. She has been included in major group exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Akron Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate St. Ives, UK; and Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland. Her work is included in the collections of museums including the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MO; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO; Indianapolis Museum of Art, IN; MUDAM, Luxemburg; Milwaukee Art Museum, WI; Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, WI; Knoxville Museum of Art, TN; Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, NE; Daimler Contemporary, Berlin; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C. and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Grabner lives and works in Milwaukee. 

Courtesy of James Cohan, New  York