MICHELLE BLADE
Los Angeles, CA
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RECENT
MARCH 202614 March 2026
A Salutary Spring
Gliding through the verdant
mess of tangled beauty,
the limb of time refuses
The vase precedes the compost
With the bedroom door cracked,
two horned owls call out in the blackness
discussing, considering, offering
The halftime show on the tv
echoes down the hall
As the wave-like din of a party rises and falls
God bless America(s)!
The present, unaware
of its solidarity with yes and no
attempts to sketch evolution.
Dormant seeds
already shedding their introversion,
stretch spellbound, towards conviction.
A dry crunch of a sycamore leaf
and the dog’s face presses into the screen.
Somewhere between restless and lazy
I too breathe in the smell of the damp
warm brick and night blooming jasmine
Mimicking, learning
She devoutly believes
In the infinitude of beauty
Spring is no sleep walker
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PAST:
THE RIVER
Shanghai, China
Dates | 2025.11.16 - 2026.1.25
Curated by Michael Slenske
Powerlong Museum
Press Release:
Los Angeles–based artist Michelle Blade will present her solo exhibition The River, curated by Michael Slenske, at Powerlong Museum in Shanghai, on view from November 16, 2025, to January 25, 2026. Organized in collaboration with Asia Art Center, which represents the artist, the exhibition follows her previous solo shows Maker of Meaning (Taipei, 2023) and Grace Electric (Beijing, 2024).
Rivers don't just move water, they carry memory. They etch identity and meaning into every stone lodged in their beds, every muscle used to traverse them. As tomes of ancient civilizations, rivers aren't just geographic, they're scenographic. A river, be it raging or trickling, is a living, breathing sculpture. It's a liquid archive, a continual work-in-progress whose entire mise en scène reshapes with every bend. In Taoist philosophy, the Dao itself is riverine, or maybe just a stand-in for a Blade-like swimmer: humbled, observant, flowing with (never against) the current. That notion of flow forms not just the conceptual spine of The River, but the throughline of the artist's entire practice: a Californicated blend of Romanticism, Magical Realism, and personal mythmaking via deft and delicate mark-making.
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GRACE ELECTRIC
Beijing, China
16 November 2024-19 January 2025
Asia Art Center is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in China of the represented artist Michelle Blade (b. 1981), Grace Electric, at Asia Art Center (Beijing). The exhibition will be on view from November 16, 2024, to January 19, 2025, and will feature 14 paintings created by Blade in 2024. Through still lifes and landscapes, the works explore moments of “a year in the life” as seen through the eyes of a mother, a painter, and a wanderer.
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MAKER OF MEANING
7 January - 26 February 2023
Asia Art Center is proud to announce a solo exhibition Maker of Meaning with American artist Michelle Blade. The concept on Maker of Meaning stems partially from French philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) and his view that one must actively create one’s life through choice and decision. By grasping the notion that humans are more than our socially defined roles and by actively becoming meaning makers in life one can create sense and purpose through decision. Sartre distinguished between human ‘facticity’ – the set of facts that describe who and what we are at any point of time – and human ‘transcendence’ – our latent capacity or potential, which is never fully actualized at any point of time. We are creatures of potential and, as creative beings, that feels limitless. Michelle Blade feels this most in her roles as painter and mother, and at this point in her life the multiple roles are inextricably woven together, each purposefully informing the other.
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BETWEEN THE BONES
& NOW
The scenes in Michelle Blade’s recent paintings are preternaturally luminous; days are flaxen pink, nights are brooding indigo. A third-generation Angeleno, Blade wields California light in ways that make quotidian events idyllic, sometimes ecstatic. The twelve paintings (all completed in 2023) on view in her first exhibition at Micki Meng picture moments drawn from the artist’s day-to-day with her two daughters in her native city, often inhabiting spaces that resonate with family history. Together, these tableaux offer a dialectic picture of a single artist mother as she parses her roles, observing herself and her children, integrating art and life.
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THE JOURNEY
BEFORE ME
Etel Adnan, Michelle Blade, Kristy Luck
Members’ Preview: April 13 | 1 - 2 pm
Public Opening Reception: April 13 | 2 - 4 pm
A cross-generational conversation, “The Journey Before Me: Etel Adnan, Michelle Blade, Kristy Luck,” Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Novato, CA) features writings and images by renowned poet, essayist, and visual artist Etel Adnan, a longtime resident of Marin County, as well as new works by California-based painters Michelle Blade and Kristy Luck. Shown together for the first time, the three artists share a keen attentiveness to the natural world, a deep interest in color’s emotive power, and a continual exploration of the relationship between place, memory, and the poetic ambiguity of visual expression.
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BLUE HORSE
Loyal GalleryApril 27–May 28, 2022
Loyal is proud to announce a solo exhibition with Michelle Blade, “The Blue Horse”. This is the Los Angeles artist’s first solo exhibition in Europe and her first with the gallery. The exhibition consists of twelve paintings installed over two floors of the gallery. A catalog is published for the exhibition.
These are paintings documenting time, closely examining the stillness, strength, persistence of the natural world. Like Charles Burchfield painting through the seasons, taking note of the waxing and waning of blooming flowers, leaves, and quality of light, Blade endeavours to document the seasons of her parenthood, watching her daughters as they interact in places where three generations of her family have also engaged. Blade contemplates and intersects these different times, as she creates a form for memory, infusing color and texture in this group of twelve acrylic and ink on cotton poplin canvases.
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WHEN THE SUN LOSES
ITS LIGHT
Sep 10 - Oct 22, 2022
Curated by Jeff Poe
Los Angeles, CA, August 2022—Blum & Poe is pleased to present When the Sun Loses Its Light, with work by Michelle Blade, Ian Collings, Shanique Emelife, Claudia Keep, Karyn Lyons,
and Lauren Satlowski.
Christmas 1980. I was back from college. It’s me and my brother Greg. Or Gregory to everyone else. I was playing River on the piano, and we were doing our best Joni. Warbling through the
high notes neither of us could come close to hitting. Laughing. There’s a polaroid around here somewhere I remember that Ma took. Found it! Here it is. Loved that night. Has always stayed
with me.
I’m gonna get to the point here—some months ago, an eighty-seven-year-old Canadian man was hospitalized after a bad fall. While undergoing a test to check the electrical activity in his
brain, he suffered a heart attack. Because the man had a do-not-resuscitate order, the doctors let him pass away as the EEG recorded his thoughts. And what his brain activity scientifically showed is something that has been conjecture forever: our life does flash before us when we die. In the minute before and after his death, the EEG scan read that he fell into a dream state that revealed his brain replaying memories from the span of his life.
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VARIOUS
acrylic and ink on Poplin
Diptych, each 80 x 62”