Signe Stuart: Evolution

Stuart’s work with sewn and acrylic stained canvasses began in the early 1960s. Her mesmerizing paintings offer subtle shifts of colors punctuated by incandescent lines or arcs which on close inspection reveal small ridges that have been meticulously stitched and painted.

Signe Stuart’s approach to art has evolved through more than six decades and mimics the way nature evolves through endless transformation and becoming. Since 1972, she has had more than eighteen solo museum exhibitions. The Museum of South Dakota will exhibit a major retrospective of her work in October 2023.

Stuart says of her work “I make art because I want to see what my ideas look like … ideas about the quantum world and how it creates Nature: life, consciousness, and the universe as we know it … Instead of quantum particles, my vocabulary is lines, colors, and shapes. I combine and recombine these into sewn canvas paintings and works on paper, forming different iterations of the same ideas. Ongoing experiments with tools and materials bring gifts of properties and use that transfer from one body of work to another. Chance, my constant teacher, and ally, informs and shapes the direction of my work. Canvas and paper surfaces are my metaphorical planes of time and space. I construct and paint events on them to conjure thinking about why things are the way they are.”

We are delighted to showcase Stuart’s work for their solo exhibition: Evolution.