Susan Michod

During the 1970s, Michod began to travel extensively to Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico City and Tucson, Arizona, studying indigenous art and pottery. Her paintings incorporated the designs found in Navajo weaving and Mayan ceramics, but her work was also influenced by the bright colors and bold visual movement of work produced by Henri Matisse and Josef Albers, among others.^[1]

In 1977, John Perreault championed Michod's work when he selected it for inclusion in a groundbreaking "Pattern and Decoration" show which he curated at PS1 (now MoMAPS1) in Long Island City.^[5]

In the 1980s, Michod branched away from pattern painting toward a more surrealistic style of painting incorporating found objects like toy Tonka tractors, farming equipment (plows, etc.), hair dryers, squeegees and paneled household doors. Writing in the March 1983 issue of Artforum, the critic Judith Russi Kirshner wrote that Michod's "orchestration of two and three-dimensional fauna objects that extend the painted characters into our space recalls the mood of Walt Disney’s Fantasia"; "fueled by [...] the accoutrements of domesticity and motherhood", the paintings are "populated by children's playthings and animated by a child's spirit of fantasy."^[4]

In 1997, Michod exhibited a series of paintings at the Chicago Cultural Center called "Fragile Landscapes". The paintings were based on the artist's experience living through a rare brain tumor called an oligodendroglioma that she suffered in 1992. The paintings, landscapes "dominated by a forest motif in neo-expressionist style", were hailed by the Chicago Tribune as being "repositories of feelings" in which "each of the forest pictures has a spectator who reacts in various ways to Michod's maelstrom of strokes and blaze of light. The figure is a stand-in for actual viewers, that is, a member of the audience; but it is also the artist herself serving us as Virgil did Dante in the forest of the Inferno, as a guide."^[6]