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Michelle Weinberg works in drawing and painting, and she creates art for interiors, architecture and public spaces. She received her BFA from School of Visual Arts in NYC and her MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. She is the recipient of awards, fellowships and residencies including an Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Award, a NYSCA Grant to Individual Artists, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Colony, two Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awards (2016, 2025), a Lower East Side Printshop Keyholder Residency, Studios at MASS MoCA residency, a Joseph Robert Foundation Award, SouthArts, a Creative Learning Grant from the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, a Wavemaker Grant from Cannonball Miami, a South Florida Cultural Consortium Fellowship in Visual and Media Art, an Individual Artist Fellowship and an Artist Enhancement Grant from the State of Florida, the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts, 100 West Corsicana in TX, Millay Colony, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, homesession and Fundacion Valparaiso in Spain, and Altos de Chavon in the Dominican Republic.Exhibitions of her work include: a collaboration with Carini Lang Carpets in NYC, ArtBridge/Studio 502, NYC, Pulp Holyoke, Project: ARTspace, NYC, ArtPort Kingston, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance, FIU Frost Art Museum, Schmidt Center Galleries, Florida Atlantic University, the Wolfsonian Museum, Emerson Dorsch Gallery and Dot FiftyOne Gallery in Miami, La Plataforma in Barcelona, The Hewitt Gallery at Marymount Manhattan College and ARENA by Renee Riccardo in NYC, The Bob Rauschenberg Gallery at Edison State College in Fort Myers, FL, The Schoolhouse Gallery in Provincetown, MA and Islip Art Museum, NY. Weinberg designs hand-knotted rugs, tiles and wall coverings inspired by her handmade marbled papers. Commissions include a 700 linear foot mural “River Semaphore” in Lower Manhattan produced by ArtBridge and partners including Battery Park City Authority, NYC Parks and Downtown Alliance, murals for The Wolfsonian Museum-FIU in Miami Beach, Facebook offices in Miami and Young at Art Museum in Dania, FL, public art projects for Miami-Dade County, Miami International Airport, City of Tampa, City of Pembroke Pines, Cultural Council of Jacksonville, and City of Hollywood, in FL.Weinberg has organized exhibitions and presentations of work by other artists, including “Artists Draw Their Studios” and “Cuts a Figure” via her platform Available Space. Weinberg is Creative Director of Girls’ Club in Fort Lauderdale, and a consultant to museums and non-profits, developing exhibitions, education programming and more. She is Co-Director of Project: ARTspace in NYC, a Lecturer at SUNY Purchase College and an Instructor at Marymount College.Read her response to One Question/One Answer at Romanov Grave.Her work may be found at White Columns Curated Artist Registry.Book a one-on-one session with Michelle in her studio at VAWAA.comphoto: Christine Harris

Midnight, the Moonlight and You, 12 x 18 inches

Using color pencil, pastel, crayon and graphite on paper, drawings in color can combine hard edges with color fields and painterly gestures. The drawings range in size from 5 x 7 inches to 12 x 9 inches, 14 x 10 inches, 42 x 31 inches and larger. Drawing is the most spontaneous move I can make as an artist. In addition to single works, I draw in an evolving library of handmade sketchbooks I've kept since art school, which currently number 80.
My drawings are auto-fictional accounts of the ordinary entanglements of life. I probe social veneers—objects, interiors, vernacular architecture, theatrical space—to produce eccentric scenarios. Flickering patterns modulate space and form architectural structures or stage sets. Pastel and hothouse color and personalized geometry forge new spaces for making thoughts visible.

Transfer Drawing

Night Bloomers, 18 x 36 inches

My carbon transfer drawing process is an engine of drawing devised to collaborate with chance, and to resolve the handmade with the mechanical and the digital. The drawings are made by slipping conventional carbon paper between folded sheets of mulberry paper and inscribing on the back, which transfers imagery from one side of the page to the other. My conscious drawing impulse is partially hidden from me as I work, allowing for a kind of wayward drift that engenders a new place of invention and learning. I've described this process as pseudo printing as it resembles engraving or etching, with half-tones and ghost images. After a Keyholder Residency at the Lower East Side Printshop 2024-25, I incorporated drypoint etching plates which activated new possibilities for theme and variation.

Light Boxes

Event Horizon, 20 x 16 x 2 inches

The carbon papers I use to make the transfer drawings accumulate on my worktable: they are my "negatives" or printing plates. They retain the layered residue of my drawing marks over time. After taping them to my studio window so that I could see them in the light, I mounted them in LED light boxes, so that their skeletal architectures are revealed. The light boxes pictured measure 20 x 16 x 2 inches.

Transparency Quilts

Zoetropic, 68 x 72 inches

To find a larger, architectural scale for the carbon paper drawings, I photograph each light box and enlarge it by printing numerous smaller sections individually on transparencies, which are pieced together to form quilts, measuring approximately 9' high x 6' wide. The color transparencies focus on double exposures transposing artifice onto ordinary views of places.

Theoretical Color

Theoretical Color 154-3940371, 55 x 45 inches

An exercise in the nomenclature of color. Each gradient begins and terminates in unexpected ways, using color pencils from a diverse collection of manufacturers and numbering systems.

Marbled Paper

Deep Blue, hand-marbled paper, 24 x 15 inches

An "engine of drawing" I employ to collaborate with chance. Each paper is lifted from the surface of a bath of liquid pigments, arresting their motion. High resolution scans of each paper may be printed as wall-sized murals or translated into hand-knotted rugs.

Painting on Canvas

Studio view

Oil paintings depict speculative architectures and arrangements of objects. Color is intuitive. Wipes, scrapes, layers, drawing and paint gestures are continually shifting scale. A playful physics.

Painting on Paper

Mid-Century Meditation, 10 x 16 inches

Using combinations of gouache, latex house paint, acrylic and watercolor on paper, these works apply flat color, pattern, hand-painted typography and a collage aesthetic to construct spaces for making thought visible.

Monotype

Monotypes in progress, Lower East Side Printshop, NYC

Working with oil paint, monotypes develop imagery in phases, making alterations in each unique print.

Public Art and Commissions

River Semaphore, Battery Park, NYC

I define my work at all scales as vivid backdrops for human activity. Art in public places offer unexpected art experiences to broad audiences in the midst of distracted environments and busy personal agendas. Work in murals, ceramic tiles and other mediums adapt well for interior spaces.

Carpets

Theoretical Color 42, 16 x 10 feet

Hand-knotted wool and silk rugs inspired by drawings and paintings translate an obsession for walls and floors into artworks for the home. For more info on my recent collaboration with Carini Lang, visit carinilang.com.

Interdisciplinary Projects

IPO Archive, Freedom Tower, Miami, 2007

Interdisciplinary works and collaborations with poets, dance/theater and film video artists expand my art ideas into new realms and connect me to new audiences.