An Artist Talk with Myra Mimlitsch-Gray

About

Myra Mimlitsch-Gray explores craft as subject and object, engaging the field’s history and methods to interpret utility and form. Her studio practice is at times speculative, theoretical, and in conversation with pedagogical concerns. She conceptualizes material conditions to construct fictions and portraits. Facture is explored as an idea and then constructed as an image; this research is reflected in the objects she generates.

Mimlitsch-Gray received her MFA in Metalsmithing from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has been awarded individual artist fellowships by the United States Artists Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the New York Foundation for the Arts. Artist Residencies include: The Banff Centre, Alberta; Konstfack University, Stockholm; The MacDowell Colony; and the Arts/Industry Residency in Foundry at the Kohler Co./John Michael Kohler Arts Center. An American Craft Council Fellow, Mimlitsch-Gray was named Master of the Medium by the James Renwick Alliance. As Professor and Head of the Metal program at SUNY New Paltz, she received two Chancellor’s Awards from the State University of New York: Excellence in Scholarship and Creative Activities, and Excellence in Teaching.

• Mimlitsch-Gray’s work is currently on view in OBJECTS:USA 2024 at R and Company (NYC).

Recent  exhibitions include Gone Astray: Jewellery and Utensils on the Fringe of Reason (Jewellery Museum, Pforzheim DE; CODA Museum, NL) Parall(elles): A History of Women in Design (Montreal Museum of Fine Arts QE, CA); Prima Materia: the Periodic Table in Contemporary Art (Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, CT); Crafting America (Crystal Bridges Museum of Art, AR), and EXACTLY: precision and process (Pamela Salisbury Gallery, NY). Mimlitsch-Gray is a contributing essayist to the exhibition catalogue, This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World, published by the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution. Her work is included in public collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Yale University Art Gallery, among others. She maintains a studio in the Hudson Valley of New York.