Creighton Michael

Creighton Michael, SquiggleTenri, graphite and paper coated rope, 48" x 144" x 5", 2005, Tenri Institute, New York City. Creighton Michael (born 1949) is an American abstract artist known for his cross-medium style of work. He produces sculptures, paintings, drawings and installations noted for their distinctive use of structure and line as well as for their conceptual content, which centers on questions of nature, perception and visual language, among others. Many of his works call attention to and subvert the traditional distinctions between two- and three-dimensional artwork, or challenge convention in other ways. National Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Phillips Collection, among others. He has exhibited at venues including the Queens Museum, High Museum of Art, Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and SculptureCenter. He is based in the lower Hudson Valley of New York and is a member of American Abstract Artists in New York City.

Life and career Michael was born in 1949 in Knoxville, Tennessee.

Michael has had solo exhibitions organized by the High Museum (1987), Mint Museums (2005), and Hafnarborg (Reykjavík, 2008), among others.

Work and reception Michael's oeuvre spans several decades and falls into distinct bodies of work that range across media. He was part of an emerging generation of artists that introduced elements from drawing and painting into abstract sculpture—symbolism, personal reference, representational illusion and the subconscious—creating neo-constructivist works that were intuitive and surreal rather than monumental and comprehensible.

Michael's early sculptures were made largely of recycled paper, rubber and wood and provoked associations with archaic armor and weaponry, tribal relics, and natural forms like shells and cocoons. The linear, elongated forms of the "Punch" series (1982) and the architectonic "Traveler" works (1982–4) resembled hides stretched over skeletal armatures that were appended with additional shapes; Combining wing- or sail-like slabs of paper or fabric, projecting strands of curved wood and an active use of void areas, these works were likened to experimental drawings in space.

1990s cross-media series: drawing, sculpture, painting In the 1990s, Michael produced bodies of work that cut across media—sculpture, drawing and painting—and investigated specific themes such as landscape, patterning, gesture and mark-making. His embrace of other media coincided with his move to rural country, inspiring the drawing series "Navigator," "Water Music," "Dart," "Aquifer" and "Edge." These series merged abstraction and representation, delicate line and bold form, and accretive mark-making and erasure while exploring themes involving conflict and resolution in nature. Creighton Michael, Field 2703, oil on linen on convex panel, 36" x 34" x 2.5", 2003. Collection: Progressive Corporation.

Michael's exhibitions "Vantage" (1998) and "Haiku/Innuendo" (Neuberger Museum of Art, 2001) focused on largely abstract oil paintings and drawings reflecting an engagement with complexities and transformation in nature, incidental patterns and nebulous spaces. In the red, sepia and buff-colored Dust, Haiku and Innuendo paintings, he used complexes of mark-making and looping, linear patterning to generate tonal fields that reviewers related to works by Rothko and Monet's late paintings of water. Brooklyn Museum, Delaware Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, High Museum of Art, Knoxville Museum of Art, McNay Art Museum, Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Phillips Collection, U.S. Department of State, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others.

Michael has received a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in sculpture, a Sam & Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts award in painting, and an Edward F. Albee Foundation fellowship.

Other professional activities Michael was on the art faculty at Rhode Island School of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and Hunter College in New York City and was a visiting lecturer at Princeton University.