BIOGRAPHY
Michelle Hinebrook is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary visual artist, educator, and curator. Her practice brings together creative production, material research, critical inquiry, and contemplative practices, exploring the intersections of art, design, and technology.
She received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and her BFA in Art & Design, with honors, from the College for Creative Studies.
Hinebrook’s professional practice includes curating, exhibition development, arts education, institutional programming, and collaborations with art consultants, advisors, designers, galleries, collectors, and organizations. Her work has been exhibited, commissioned, collected, published, and reviewed internationally and is represented in institutional, corporate, hospitality, and private collections. She is currently seeking exhibitions, commissions, teaching opportunities, and collaborations with galleries, collectors, institutions, and organizations across art, design, technology, and education.
Hinebrook has completed projects and commissions for institutional, corporate, hospitality, and private collections, including the Pew Foundation, Daimler Art Corporate Collection, Edelman Corporate Collection, Ritz-Carlton Dubai, Raffles Branded Residences in Istanbul, Embassy Suites Minneapolis, Union Square South in New York, Universal City Hilton in California, Houston Royal Sonesta, Renaissance Hotels, Hyatt, Hilton, Baker Tilly, and Hotel Baronette.
Her work has been placed through art consultants, advisors, designers, and art organizations including DAC Art Consultants, Pfizer Corporation, Canvas Art Consultants, Eaton Fine Art, Michael Foley, Soho Myriad Art Consultants, 20x200, Inson Wood, Jen Bekman.
Her exhibitions include David Klein Gallery, Maryland Center for the Arts, Foley Gallery, Helene Nyborg Contemporary, Brooklyn Contemporary, Blacklist Gallery, Hallway Gallery, LTS Gallery, Edelman Gallery, 101 Exhibit Gallery, Hewitt Gallery of Art, Pratt Institute, Islip Art Museum, McKenzie Fine Art Gallery, Museum of New Art, One Line Gallery, Civilian Art Projects, Nancy Margolis Gallery, WSE Gallery at NYU, and Lemberg Gallery. Her work is represented in institutional, corporate, and private collections, including the Pew Foundation for the Arts, Museum of Arts and Design, Pfizer Corporation, Detroit Institute of Arts, Cranbrook Art Museum, numerous private collections.
Hinebrook’s thirty-year career in arts education and professional practice includes visiting artist, critic, educator, and curatorial work with Pratt Institute, the College for Creative Studies, Bowling Green State University, Virginia Commonwealth University, Western Carolina University, the College Art Association, and Artisan, LLC.
Her teaching experience includes the Joan Mitchell Foundation, Pratt Institute, Young Audiences New York, Marquis Studios, Cranbrook Academy of Art, the College for Creative Studies, the University of Michigan, Bowling Green State University, UrbanGlass, Snowfarm, Artists Space, Parsons School of Design, Western Carolina University, NurtureArt, New England Crafts, Studio in a School, PS 20, and Berkeley Carroll School.
Hinebrook is Director of The Brooklyn Contemporary Artist Space and Artful Edge Academy in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her experience includes exhibition planning and design, curatorial practice, gallery direction, installation, exhibition programming, and arts event planning and promotion. Her curatorial work includes exhibitions and programming for the Pratt Manhattan Graduate Communication Design Gallery, Brooklyn Contemporary Artist Space, the College for Creative Studies, and Girlee Detroit Contemporary.
STATEMENT
My paintings investigate subtle energetic bodies and the unseen forces that move through and around us. I am interested in how we construct meaning from what we experience and perceive. We are constantly taking in information and sensory experience, selecting what receives our attention and filtering it through memory, emotion, sensation, dreams, subconscious associations, and our individual patterns of perception. This involves multiple ways of seeing and knowing, including perceptual, intuitive, somatic, symbolic, visionary, and emotional experiences.
My paintings are reflections of what I pay attention to and how I respond to moments of beauty, nature, and emotional and sensory experience. As a neurodivergent artist, my perception is shaped by synesthetic, sensory, intuitive, and spiritual experiences. Painting allows me to investigate this way of perceiving and explore what exists beneath the visible. What do we notice, and why? Why do certain images, experiences, places, or moments move us? How do intuition and the subconscious shape what we see? What does our attention reveal about how we understand the world and ourselves?
I think of my paintings as psychological landscapes: interior spaces where memory, dreams, sensation, emotion, environment, and imagination interact and flow together. Each painting is an accumulation and synthesis of observation, memory, sensation, emotion, symbolic imagery, spiritual perception, and the physical process of painting.
My imagery emerges through an intuitive dialogue with materials. Working on the floor, I use water and gravity to direct watercolor, inks, and pigments across the canvas, allowing them to spread into fields of color, lines, shapes, stains, and organic edges. I observe and respond as spontaneous images and spatial relationships begin to emerge, shaped by both physical and psychic processes. I work into these forms with oil paint, allowing the image to interact with my memories, intuition, subconscious associations, and personal symbols. Symbolic imagery surfaces through this process, drawing from subconscious memory and collective consciousness.
The resulting paintings bring together fragmented and interconnected forms, layered spaces, organic shapes, symbols, emotional uses of color, and fluid spatial relationships that reflect the movement of thought and the ways experience is filtered and transformed within the mind. The canvas is a space where different ways of seeing and knowing can exist simultaneously: the inner and outer worlds, observation and intuition, representation and revelation, the personal and collective, the human and natural, the visible and invisible.
I approach painting as a spiritual practice and a space for exploring the metaphysical dimensions of existence. A near-death experience in 2020 deepened my inquiry into consciousness, the energetic body, and our interconnectedness with nature and one another. Since then, my work has continued to explore the numinous mysteries of existence and the ways spiritual, psychological, sensory, symbolic, and intuitive experiences shape our perception of reality.
When viewers encounter the paintings, they bring their own memories, sensations, emotions, associations, attention, and subconscious experiences into the work. I am interested in what they notice, why certain images, experiences, places, or moments move them, and how intuition and the subconscious shape what they see. The painting becomes another space in which these things can be filtered, synthesized, and transformed into meaning.
My work explores how our attention shapes our reality and seeks out interconnections between body, mind, nature, and cosmos.