Signe Stuart

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Signe Stuart's professional history spans over sixty years. Her approach to art making has always relied on experimentation and rule breaking. Using the materials and form of painting, she breaks away from the standard rectangle and concepts of framing. For Stuart, a sheet of paper or a sewn canvas is a metaphorical slice of time and space, a context in which to construct ideas about the connections and intersections of consciousness with matter and energy.

She has been in at nearly thirty solo museum exhibits including such venues as the South Dakota Art Museum (where a 60 year career retrospective is ongoing through March 30, 2024), the Roswell Museum and Art Center (Roswell NM), the Sheldon Art Museum (Lincoln, NE), the North Dakota Museum of Art (Grand Forks, ND) the American Swedish Museum (Minneapolis, MN), the Nordic Heritage Museum (Seattle, WA), Northern Arizona University Art Museum (Flagstaff, AZ), the Plains Art Museum (Fargo, ND), the Sioux City Art Center (Sioux City Iowa), and the Montgomery Museum of Art (Montgomery, AL), among others. Her works on paper are currently exhibited at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts, NC.

During her career, Signe has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts mural commissions, a South Dakota Arts Council Artist Fellowship and a New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop Fellowship. She received several purchase awards including a Ford Foundation Purchase - Seattle Art Museum. Teaching, lectures and artist residencies include: Professor of Art, South Dakota State University; visiting artist, Williams College, MA; U-Cross Foundation Residency, WY and Cowles Visiting Artist at Grinnell College, IA.

ARTIST'S STATEMENT

"I make art because I want to see what my ideas look like … ideas about the quantum world and how it creates Nature: life, consciousness, and the universe as we know it.

My art making process has evolved through more than 6 decades and mimics the way nature evolves through endless transformation and becoming. Instead of quantum particles, my vocabulary is lines, colors, and shapes. I combine and recombine these into sewn canvas paintings and works on paper, forming different iterations of the same ideas. Ongoing experiments with tools and materials bring gifts of properties and uses that transfer from one body of work to another. Chance, my constant teacher, and ally, informs and shapes the direction of my work.

Canvas and paper surfaces are my metaphorical planes of time and space. I construct and paint events on them to conjure thinking about why things are the way they are.

After an artwork is finished, it needs to be completed. That means showing it and allowing viewers to recreate it through their own sensibilities. I have several solo exhibitions this year: Flux, works on paper, at the Turchin Center for Visual Arts in North Carolina, Evolution at Pie Projects Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and a retrospective at the South Dakota Art Museum… a year of completions."

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Signe Stuart's six decade career retrospective Signe Stuart: Events in Time and Space is on view at the South Dakota Art Museum from October 4, 2023 to March 30, 2024.