Life • Work • Ethos

Michael Fortenberry is an interdisciplinary artist and art educator based in the Hudson Valley. He received his BFA at University of Puget Sound in Tacoma, WA and is currently working on his Master of Fine Arts at SUNY New Paltz with an emphasis in sculpture. Michael has exhibited work throughout the United States with works in private collections on display in Washington, Colorado, and New York. He just concluded his residence at Glasshouse Art.Life.Lab resulting in a permanent outdoor installation and had work published in the Art and America Guide in the Spring of 2022. Michael is exhibiting at the Rosekill Art Farm, Unison Art Center, and beginning to install at the Kaatsbaan Cultural Center opening mid-May. Currently, he is the Instructor of Record of Basic and Introduction sculpture courses at the State University of New York New Paltz. 

Michael manipulates raw materials, allowing for its affordances, potentials and limits to guide his engagement. Captivated by creating objects that appear to be in constant movement through rigid and organic forms of nature, Michael creates a meditative experience by emulating the intricate patterns seen all around us. Michael’s work is committed to acts of resistance to increasing levels of shared anxieties in our modern reality. The work is in conversation to sensory somatic objects that induce personal and communal meditation with efforts to slow down and be with each other.