Michele Oka Doner
(b.1945, USA)
Michele Oka Doner is an internationally renowned artist and author who works with an extensive variety of media including sculpture, prints, drawings, functional objects and video amongst others.
Michele Oka Doner’s work is driven by a lifelong study and appreciation of the natural world, from which she derives her formal vocabulary. Her work encompasses diverse materials like glass, bronze and silver with which she mirrors the world around her – from the small and intimate to the large and magnificent.
Michele is well known for creating over 40 public art installations throughout the United States and in Europe, including Radiant Site at New York’s Herald Square subway (1987), Flight at Washington’s Reagan International Airport and A Walk on the Beach at The Miami International Airport (1995-2010) which features 9000 bronze sculptures inlaid over a two meter long concourse of terrazzo with mother-of-pearl – it is one of the largest public artworks in the world.
Oka Doner has created collaborative collections with Steuben in glass, Christofle in silver and Nymphenburg in porcelain. Her public art projects can be found in courthouses, public libraries, hospitals, museums, universities, as well as in public parks and transportation centers in the United States. She designed the costumes and sets for George Balanchine’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Miami City ballet which debuted in March 2016. A solo exhibition of her work was shown in 2016 at the Perez Museum of Art Miami.
Michele Oka Doner’s work can be found in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée des Arts Décoratifs at the Louvre, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, The Dallas Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the St. Louis Art Museum, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, The University of Michigan Museum of Art and the Yale Art Gallery to name just a few.
Interview: Michele Oka Doner in Conversation with Elisabetta Cipriani
