ÌÇÐÄvlog

Biography

Michael Aaron Lee (born 1972, Cincinnati, OH) is a New York City based artist. He received a BFA from the University of Texas, Austin and an MFA from Hunter College, New York City. Lee has had solo exhibitions at Nightshift Gallery, The Painting Center (New York, NY) and Hudson County Community College’s Dineen Hull Gallery (Jersey City, NJ), and has been included in group exhibitions at Ulterior, Jason McCoy, and Calico galleries in New York City, the Museum of Drawing in Laholm Sweden, and the Luo Zhongli Art Museum at the Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, Chongqing, China among others. His work has been reviewed in Two Coats of Paint and mentioned in Hyperallergic, New York Magazine, Bomb Magazine, the Huffington Post, and The Austin Chronicle, among others. 

Lee was awarded residencies at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and The Cooper Union and received an artist support grant in 2023 from the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. The artist is an adjunct professor at Hudson County Community College and ÌÇÐÄvlog (New Jersey). In addition to teaching and making art, Lee has sought to build community and foster dialogue among New York area artists through the creation of The Artist Lecture Series and most recently Show & Tell.

Resume/CV

Download CV

Research

For the past decade I have been making works with paper: collage using poker cards, ink drawings and bas-relief paper sculptures meant to be hung on the wall. These are objects and images that straddle the divide between fine art and craft. I borrow patterns and pictorial forms from a diverse array of decorative art and folk traditions and combine them with my own to create new meaning. The new, hybrid images take the form of emblems or insignia, with their attendant symmetrical compositions, strong central elements and symbolic language. Unlike and emblem, however, they purposefully eschew definitive meaning. My project is shaped by a desire to build a personal lexicon as well as an effort to understand how our public narratives and mythologies are shared through visual language.