TAWA at 45
The Exhibition
Madelaine Shellaby
Morphic Field
graphite on paper; 2021; 26″h x 34″w
Madelaine Shellaby has been a practicing artist in California, Louisiana, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. Shellaby has received Dodge Foundation grants as artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for Creative Arts in California, and at the Virginia Center for the Visual Arts; she has received three Artist Fellowship grants from the NJ State Council on the Arts; has received an NEA Services to the Field grant; and an NEH teachers grant. In addition, her artmaking has connected her to work as a curator and educator. Shellaby’s digital prints and drawings update the Vanitas tradition, combining material from multiple sources into a digital collage of drawings, photographs, paintings, scans, and more. She makes books and installations with the same interest in connecting mediums and subjects to delve into myth and anecdote alike. “Fablestones,” her Stone Stories Archive, is an installation of her museum, and has been shown in different configurations in France, California, and New York. She has imagined artists, curators, and donors who figure in the installations she calls visual novels. Most recently she has gathered disparate artwork and stories under the umbrella biography of a man who has collected extensively artists whose work is about “art about birds, wings and other things.”