Michele D. Lee Exhibition Statement — From Where I Sit
From Where I Sit: 25 Years of Exploration of the Figure Michele D. Lee · The Art Center Cooperative · June 15 – July 17, 2026
What does it mean to return to work made a quarter century ago and find it still alive? From Where I Sit is Michele D. Lee's retrospective reckoning with twenty-five years of paintings that never stopped being true. Spanning work from the early 2000s through the present, the exhibition gathers figures that have always resisted easy definition — neither fully abstract nor strictly representational, but alive in the tension between the two. As New York Times art critic William Zimmer wrote of her work: "Lee's constant and obvious use of contrast gives her art its loud ring of truth: the world operates on a dynamic and the coexistence of opposites." That observation, made in 2001, has only deepened with time. The show takes its title from the posture of reflection itself — the artist seated, looking back at what she made when the urgency was fresh. The earliest work in this exhibition was born of a specific instruction: paint like you draw. Let instinct lead. Don't be afraid. Twenty-five years later, the figures in these paintings still carry that freedom.