Exhibition: Manifest
Michael Waugh
Exhibition Dates: April 17-26, 2026
Opening night: Friday, April 17, 5-8 PM
Hudson D. Walker Gallery
Additional video screening April 23rd
Stanley Kunitz Common Room, doors open at 7PM
In Manifest, Michael Waugh presents four works that utilize his adaptation of the archaic drawing technique known as micrography. In Waugh’s labor-intensive works, representational images are made out of a dizzying lattice of the artist’s tiny handwriting – thousands upon thousands of words coalescing and transforming both text and image.
At the center of the show is a work that presents a repeating image of a woman falling through a burning sky. The woman is composed out of text that Waugh transcribed from Donna Haraway’s esoteric, feminist classic, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Flanking this work are two drawings of animals, installed as audience or witness to the falling woman. These animals are composed of text transcribed from Obama-era government reports – delving into the more immediate but mundane problems of banking de-regulation and election interference. And a final work, a near-abstraction, depicts a stylized knot – composed out of text written by John Kenneth Galbraith from his book, The New Industrial State. These works don’t attempt to illustrate or Ted-Talk these topics. They don’t reveal a path for us to manifest understanding. Instead, the figures in these artworks appear as audience, like us, formed by knots of overlapping and irreducible detail.
Michael Waugh lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Waugh is most known for his labor-intensive calligraphic works in which he copies, by hand, historically significant texts. He holds a BA in history from the University of Texas, an MFA in creative writing from Texas State University, and an MA in painting from New York University. His work has been reviewed by the New York Times, Art in America, and ARTNews. His work has been exhibited at the National Academy of Design (New York, NY), the McEvoy Foundation (San Francisco, CA), The Roswell Museum of Art (Roswell, NM), The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes (Havana, Cuba), the 21C Museum/Hotel (Oklahoma City, OK), the Arkansas Art Center (Little Rock, AR), and Diverse Works (Houston,TX) among others. His work has been supported by the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation as well as through residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, the Galveston Artist Residency, The Roswell Artist in Residence Program, the Wassaic Project, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program. His work is held in numerous collections, including that of the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the 21C Museum Hotel Collection, The Los Angeles County Civic Art Collection, and The Amon Carter Museum of American Art. His work is on permanent display at the Dock Street School in DUMBO, Brooklyn as part of the NYC Public Art for Public Schools program
