Michelle Fornabai is a conceptual artist, trained as an architect, who uses architecture as a medium--exploring "malpractices," translated literally from the German kunstfehler as "art mistakes," in conjunction with architectural "standards of practice," de lege artis in Latin, "according to the rules of the art."
Trained as an architect, Michelle Fornabai received her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University. Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, the Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT and the Yuan Art Museum, Beijing, China, where it was subsequently acquired for their permanent collection. Her work has been supported by the LEF Foundation and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Study in Fine Arts among others, and has been reviewed in Surface, Praxis, The New York Times and Frieze Magazine. She has lectured at the Whitney Museum, the ICA in Philadelphia, the San Francisco Art Institute, the Fashion Institute of Technology and for the Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation.
Her recent work on ink, Rorschach Paintings, Projective Drawings, Synesthesia Series Paintings and Ink or V is for Vermillion as described by Vitruvius: An A to Z of Ink in Architecture explores the relation between material cues and their perceptual and cognitive processing. In 2015, while artist in residence at the MacDowell Colony, she completed act 3: mix (To a Water Lily), two landscape-scale works in floating concrete using the vibrational setting of concrete with sound, as part of her decade-long project Concrete Poetry: 10 Conceptual Acts of Architecture in Concrete.
