Michelle Grabner wants to make us look twice, even a third or fourth time.
The Milwaukee-based artist has spent her career examining visual languages that are taken for granted. Born and raised in Wisconsin, she is known for locating the patterns and systems at work in the quotidian and prosaic, be it the patterns on a quilt or the logo on a cereal box. These pieces are rooted in process. Her most well-known works are a series of paintings she’s made based on textiles—burlap, for example—that she has, in some way, altered.
Over her decades-long career, Grabner has expanded her practice beyond the studio as curator and professor. In 2014, she co-curated the Whitney Biennial alongside Anthony Elms and Stuart Comer, and was the inaugural artistic director of FRONT International, a triennial exhibition in Cleveland. She is currently the senior chair in the department of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and previously taught at Yale. She and her husband, artist Brad Killam, are also the founders and directors of two non-profit art spaces, The Suburban and The Poor Farm, both in Wisconsin.
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Janitorial Cart) (2024-2025). Courtesy of Abattoir Gallery.
Recently, Grabner has expanded her practice in a new direction, after being invited to the MakerSpace, a pottery division at the Kohler Company in Wisconsin, which allows artists and designers to work with skilled factory workers and experiment with industrial materials and expand their practice or size-up their works. She pushed her work into the realm of porcelain.
A selection of these works is on view at the Independent Art Fair this week with Cleveland’s Abattoir Gallery. At first blush, these works look simply like the contents of a janitorial closet—sponges, sinks, push carts, mops, and spray bottles. These aren’t Duchampian readymades, however, but porcelain sculptures made at the Kohler Company. The meaning of such works is multivalent, commenting on class and custodial work, on one level, and engaging with formalist questions posed by artists from Robert Gober to Mierle Laderman Ukeles, on another.
Grabner, whose work is represented by both Abattoir Gallery in Cleveland and James Cohan Gallery in New York, is also currently the subject of two museum shows, Underdone Potato, a retrospective up at the Schneider Museum of Art in Oregon, and Under the Sink at the Haggerty Museum in Wisconsin.
Recently, we caught up with Grabner who offered insights into this latest chapter of her practice, and on all the work she feels she has yet to create.
Can you tell me about the work on view at Independent right now? What can viewers expect?
You’ll be seeing janitorial elements that I slip cast and glazed at the Kohler Company—everything from Kohler sinks, mats, sponges, to stainless steel cleaner and hand soap cast in porcelain, including a janitor’s cart. Once you cast that slip at the Kohler Company, it’s high-fired so it’s considered porcelain. There’s an installation of sinks on the wall. Think Morandi meets the janitor’s closet in terms of forms.
There is also a large-scale weaving that I produced in Guadalajara, which is a riff on cornflake box. I want the booth to feel you’re seeing the back of the house, right? This is the stuff that’s in the janitor’s closet or the back of an institution.
What conversations are you hoping to spark with this installation?
One question might be: Who does this labor? Why is it never seen? How do institutions depend on this kind of custodial work? That’s a very fine conversation to have. I’m ok with the conversation about the ethical implications of labor.
But also with my other work, there is a rerouting of value systems and thinking about materials and formal conditions? Why do porcelain sinks give a kind of organizing structure to a kind of relationship to these other elements? People often walk by these forms without really understanding what they are or realizing that they’re made from porcelain. They won’t do that at the art fair, and maybe people will go a little bit farther in thinking about the transformation of these materials and value, and how materials are produced.
Why is material transformation important to this work?
I don’t believe I’m an original artist. I stand by my unoriginality, but the work becomes valuable in its transformation, whether that’s seeing the material in a different context, or an unexpected context, or if it’s a material transformation from a plastic squirt bottle to a porcelain object.
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Doorstop) (2024–2025), Credit: Kohler Co.
Can you tell me a bit about how you started working with porcelain?
I never had a relationship with the material until I was invited by the John Michael Kohler Arts Center to do one of their washrooms several years ago. They invite artists to commission other artists to kind of take on the washroom as a site.
I had a crash course in how to slip cast and make plaster molds and glaze. Laura Kohler invited me back to continue that work and move it forward. The exhibition at the Schneider Museum includes a lot of work that I’ve also made at Kohler over the course of this year, including 200 porcelain cabbages and several hundred potatoes.
Can you tell me a bit more about the Schneider Museum of Art show?
It’s a survey exhibition called “Underdone Potato.” The title is a Dickensian reference to when Scrooge won’t trust his eyes because of some upset stomach, which he says is caused by an underdone potato. It’s about being a solidly mid-career artist with all the pressure of having so much work to do yet. The museum allowed me to kind of play with the idea of a survey, and more than half is all new work. I am one of those artists for whom the idea of a survey show is too arresting. I could not look backward. I could not stop and pause to reassemble past work, so this allowed me to take on a curatorial role in suggesting new projects.
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Towel) (2024–2025). Courtesy: Kohler Co.
When it comes to these works, and the works on view at Independent, is material confusion part of experiencing the work? E.g. is this a real sink?
I hope that what you’re going to see is so many visual vocabularies and a whole range of materials and different organizational structures. The challenge is not just that this is porcelain or ceramics, but that something else is going on. So, really thinking about a whole sundry of material vocabularies and asking why one looks much more abstract than another. Hopefully, there’s time and assessment beyond what we think we know, to just look at a mass amounts of difference in a broad sweep of verisimilitude.
How do you think working in the factory affected your work or practice?
When you’re working at the plant on the floor where hundreds of sinks are being produced, just 10 feet to your left in this massive warehouse urinals or bathtubs are coming off the line, it really does play with value. That space plays with ideas of value, and originality, authorship, and invention. As soon as you make a plaster mold, you can cast endless amounts of form from that same mold. They’re never going to be exactly alike just because I’m not a machine, but they are still very, very similar. Then it becomes a question of looking for sameness and difference, but with a massive set of material.
Rather than move to New York or L.A., you’ve stayed rooted in the Midwest throughout your career. What vantage points has that offered?
I go to New York all the time to do business and work, but being in the interior allows some interesting distance, to be able to look at cultural centers including Chicago and see some blind spots. That literal distance and being pulled back, I can kind of see things and have freedom and creativity to go places that I don’t think I would have.
Michelle Grabner, Untitled (Scrunge) (2024–2025). Courtesy of Kohler Co.
Going back to you mentioning the pressure of being a mid-career artist. Do you feel pressure to create?
Let me just tell you, there’s a massive panic about work that needs to happen. It’s not even for exhibition, but just these ideas that need to be explored. I just cracked this open, thinking through the factory work, and now I want to think through working in prints.
You’ve talked in the past about structuring your studio practice around raising your kids. Are your kids out of the house now?
My oldest son was born in 1987. He’s a college professor out in Pasadena. My youngest daughter I had late in life, and she just started college. So for over 35 years, I’ve always had kids in the house until now. I don’t understand this relationship to time, and it does feel like I’m grappling with it through super high production. It’s a bit of compensation for a pattern of life that is no longer there.
What’s on the horizon for your work?
Since I’ve been at Kohler, I haven’t been thinking about painting. I think people understand me as a painter. That break from painting is really both exciting and nerve-wracking to me as I step back into the painting studio. Especially given the context of painting and the very strange discourse around it at the moment, plus its relationship to the marketplace.
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