Michele Brody is an artist who lives and works in New York City. Brody challenges the notion of monumentality and creates sculptures that rely on botanical elements, rendering her work time-based, ephemeral and performative. The artist’s recent work focuses on sheets of mulched flax paper imbued with flaxseeds that sprout and grow as the paper dries. Ultimately the sprouts fade into the rough-hewn surface, creating a lace-like drawing that is independent of the artist’s hand.

Nature Preserve (2011) was a site specific piece that consisted of 27 glass tubes stretching 8-feet high while floating individual plants native to the surrounding wetlands in Michigan. The installation space was lit only by incandescent lighting, which illuminated each glass structure, conferring a larger presence into these botanical forms. This piece was awarded Best 3D entry at Art Prize, 2011 by Glenn Harper, Editor of Sculpture Magazine. Reflections in Tea (2007-2012) is a moveable, interactive performance piece that features a vast collection of flattened and stained tea bags, assembled as quilts, while bearing personal notes, poems and memories that infuse the process of unfurling tea leaves with the act of meditation. As in a previous 2008 installation titled Tea House, Brody inserts the copper frame of a house structure that utilizes tea bag quilts as structural boundaries, defining the site where tea ceremonies take place.

In 2012 Michele Brody had two solo shows at the Hudson Guild Gallery II titled Drawing Roots and Reflections in Tea, which marked the culmination of a year-long residency at the organization’s senior center. Her work also appeared in six group exhibitions throughout the same year such as Small that took place at Art in FLUX Harlem from August 8th to September 13th, 2012 and Bellwether, the 11th Annual Outdoor Sculpture Show in the city of Bellevue, Washington. Brody has also created public art projects for Figment 2012 on Governors Island in New York City and for Bundesgartenschau 2011 in Koblenz, Germany. Since 2000, Michele Brody has received numerous grants, awards and artist residencies. She was awarded a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2001, a Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant in 2003, a Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation-Artists and Communities Grant in 2008 and in 2011 was awarded a residency at Ox-Bow in Michigan.