Artist Talk: Michelle Gregor

Main Exhibition Gallery, FREE

Join us for a free artist talk with To Be Human exhibition artist Michelle Gregor, who will discuss her work in the exhibition and delve into how she uses the figurative motif along with decades of experience working with clay.

Biography:

Michelle Gregor received her BA in Studio Art from the University of California, Santa Cruz (Chancellor’s Grant) in 1983 and her MFA from San Francisco State University in 1994 (Outstanding M.F.A. Candidate, Art Department).

Rooted in a tradition of Abstract Figuration, Gregor is a multifaceted artist who works in clay, bronze, paint and drawing media, handling each medium with a process-oriented and intuitive approach that results in painterly forms and images. She has an intuitive sense of color that unifies her productions in various media and endows all of her work with a painterly vigor reflecting her Bay Area roots and fascination with Abstract Expressionism.

A tenured Professor of Art at San Jose City College, Gregor brings to her teaching the same sensibility that defines her studio practice.

The human figure has become a central focus in Gregor’s practice, serving as a consistent point of exploration across media. Her work often involves multiple firings in ceramic pieces and layered applications of color using water-based techniques that allow for natural movement and variation. This additive and subtractive method creates surfaces with a patina-like quality, emphasizing depth and the passage of time. Her sculptures are noted for their nuanced surfaces and evolving forms. Gregor’s sculpture has been described as lyrical, graceful, and spiritual.

Artist Statement, To Be Human:

The figure remains my most reliable point of departure as an artist, a source that, after many years of practice, still feels infinite. Art history offers an inexhaustible treasury of the human form, and it is within that long conversation that my own work finds its footing. I begin with a simple pose, seated, reclining, or standing. From there the figure begins to take its shape, each decision emerging directly and in conversation with the material.

Clay has recorded the human imprint for thousands of years. After many decades of working in this medium I’ve settled into a haptic understanding, an attentiveness to clay’s expressive materiality. Trusting gesture and the spontaneous mark, the working composition unfolds through all stages of making as a dialogue between hand and material. Beginning with solid construction methods and ending with color applications, slips, glazes, and stains are built up in pools and layers across multiple firings. Wet pigments are left to pool and move, allowing gravity to contribute its voice within the composition. My hope is that the surface carries the accumulated depth and weight of time passing.

Identity is never singular. One is many things at once: artist, professor, daughter, sister, partner, queer, feminist, educator, a body moving through time. I don’t make work about these layers so much as from them. Experience accumulates in the body and is expressed through the hands in form, texture, and surface, emerging through the creative process.

Returning to the figurative motif as a vessel for self-knowledge, this body of work considers notions of visibility and the richness of lives that exist away from the mainstream. Though not expressly autobiographical, the work inevitably reflects my own identity and perspective. The act of making is inseparable from the act of claiming space. In a culture that too often forgets its own humanity, creative practice itself is an act of resistance. To live creatively is to claim space, to assert personal agency and to inhabit creative birthright.