Michelle Grabner’s Artists to Watch in the New Year

We asked several of our friends and contributors for the artists they’ll be paying close attention to in the new year. When we put the question to Michelle Grabner (a particularly difficult one for a curator of the upcoming Whitney Biennial to narrow down), she offered:

“Regarding artists who I can’t stop thinking about, I would first say Alma Allen. He is an impressive sculptor who lives and works in Joshua Tree and is exquisitely reworking a Brancusi-like formal and material vocabulary. Also, my friend and curator Stuart Horodner took me to the Arnett collection in Atlanta and seeing the work of Lonnie Holley and Thornton Dial in such mass has totally refigured my thoughts around the ‘unmonumental’. And finally the work and research by Abigail DeVille is simply the bomb!”

Michelle Grabner is an artist, writer, and professor in painting and drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She also taught at UW-Madison, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Yale, Norfolk, and The University of Pennsylvania. She is one of three curators organizing the 2014 Whitney Biennial.

Explore the rest of our 2013 highlights and discover more artists to watch in 2014!