Michelle Stuart: Mexico doesn't seem alien to Californians.

In order to execute the idea, you need a certain material that is going to allow you to do what you're challenged to do in your imagination. You should use whatever you can and it's amazing how even if you change the medium, your work is still yours.

Michelle Stuart

imagination order ideas

I find great satisfaction in the rigorous structure of the grid, but I like the organic on the grid so that there's a combination of structure and chaos.

Michelle Stuart

chaos structure satisfaction

I have found, and most artists are probably this way, that [when] you're working on some kind of idea, the idea makes demands.

Michelle Stuart

demand artist ideas

I've always liked New York even before I lived in New York. It represents something, I think, and it would be trite to say what it represents really because it's been said so many times.

Michelle Stuart

new-york would-be thinking

I did live in Paris for three years and I prefer New York.

Michelle Stuart

paris new-york years

Flying used to be so great but now it's more of a trial.

Michelle Stuart

flying used trials

I was out in California over the holidays and I was working with some photographs I took out there just now, actually, which were all different photographs of the sunset. They're really interesting because El Niño has changed the cloud configuration, not only the sea, but also the whole makeup of the clouds, the sunset, and the different gradations of color and tonality. So it'll be interesting to work with that.

Michelle Stuart

sunset makeup holiday

I've always been interested in archaeology, I guess ever since junior high or high school.

Michelle Stuart

junior-high juniors school

The cultures of the Americas were extremely complex and interesting, with their own languages and observatories to watch the stars. The more you know about them the more you realize how extremely impressive they were. Bloodthirsty, though, I think they were as well.

Michelle Stuart

stars interesting thinking

When I graduated from high school, this is in Los Angeles, I was very interested in taking a trip to Mexico to see the archeological sites. So three other people and myself drove down there.

Michelle Stuart

three people school

I have made on occasion posters and things like that for political reasons but not my work.

Michelle Stuart

posters political reason

I veer more toward the philosophical and the poetic than I do toward the alert and angry.

Michelle Stuart

angry poetic philosophical

One of the reasons that I went to Mexico aside from the Maya and the pre-Columbian aspect of it was that I wanted to work with [Diego] Rivera, which I did, on a mural that he was painting at the time. But at some point I realized that I wasn't going to be a political artist, it just wasn't in my repertoire.

Michelle Stuart

mexico political artist

Very early on I was interested in doing political art, but it was not feminist political art.

Michelle Stuart

feminist political art

I never made "feminist art," and if I did it was not deliberate.

Michelle Stuart

feminist made art

There was a great sense of community mainly among the women artists at the time because we felt left out. I still know most of the women that I knew then, the ones that are still alive.

Michelle Stuart

community alive artist

In fact, in the history of a lot of cultures there is a theater. For example, there are the theaters in Java, [Indonesia] and of that area where they use puppets and they have backgrounds and shadows.

Michelle Stuart

shadow example culture

Fortunately, when we have all our marbles, we can shift our memories very quickly.

Michelle Stuart

our-memories marble memories

I have lots of objects. Every object has a story, which makes me think I should write a story about every object.

Michelle Stuart

stories writing thinking