Michele Brody
Blue & Red 2008
18” x 11” — Handmade blue and red cotton/abaca paper cast in the form of the United States map according to the 2008 Electoral College. Wheat grass roots visible on the underside of where seeds sprouted along the routes of interstate highways.
Blue & Red 2016
18” x 11” — Handmade blue and red cotton/abaca paper cast in the form of the United States map according to the 2016 Electoral College. Wheat grass roots visible on the underside of where seeds sprouted along the routes of interstate highways.
Borderlines
15.5” x 12.75” — Background of handmade abaca paper with layer of US/Mexican border watermark made from day lily leaves harvested in The Bronx covered by layer of handmade kozo paper from mulberry tree chopped down in Brooklyn.
Michele Brody is an environmental, community-based artist whose practice thrives on the interaction with new communities and environments. She has developed an interdisciplinary practice that incorporates a wide spectrum of resources and techniques. She is intrigued with the process of creating a controlled environment where the work organically develops and changes over time. This form of artistic creation represents the constant state of entropy we live in, and how the delicate characteristics of memory and time can both erode and enhance our interpretations of experience.
With each new project she leans towards a minimalist approach where she focuses on interweaving manmade, natural, and living materials to create a sense of elegance out of the simplest of gestures. Her intent is to evoke a visceral encounter that comments on the compartmentalized preservation of Nature and History, while planting a new awareness of the tenuous relationship between ourselves, nature and the built environment.
Born in Brooklyn in 1967, Michele Brody received a Liberal Arts Degree from Sarah Lawrence College in 1989 and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago’s Fiber and Material Studies Department in 1994. She has had one person shows at the Atelier-galeried’Art Contemporain: Arras, France; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporaneo: San Jose, Costa Rica; Dina4 Projekte: Munich, Germany; Temple Judea Museum: Elkins Park, PA; as well as chashama, Littlejohn Contemporary, the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, Hudson Guild, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, Julio Valdez Project Space and the Bronx Museum of the Arts in New York City.
Michele Brody has been the recipient of a grant or residency every year since 1995 from such institutions as the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pollock/Krasner Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, Bronx Council on the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts. She as worked as an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, the Headlands Center for the Arts, Ox-Bow, Emmanuel College, Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation, BronxArtSpace, Wave Hill Cultural Center and Garden and 5 years as a SU-CASA Artist in The Bronx. In 2006 she completed two permanent works of public art in The Bronx for the MTA and the Department of Education’s Public Art for Public Schools program. In 2011 she was awarded the Best 3-D Entry at the international Art Prize competition in Grand Rapids, MI by juror Glenn Harper of Sculpture Magazine for her installation “Nature Preserve” at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. Michele Brody currently resides and works in The Bronx, NY.