Signe Margaret Stuart

She established the Stuart Artist-in-Residency Program at South Dakota State University in 2014.

Onomatopoeia, one of Stuart’s 60-foot-wide abstract narrative scroll paintings was the subject of a chamber music composition by composer, Jonathan Chenette (Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY). Onomatopoeia premiered with a performance at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History in 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition Crossing Boundaries: Synesthesia in American Art.

Donald Doe, curator, patient process 2001 exhibition at Grinnell College Museum writes, “For Stuart, who reads on topics ranging from the process of evolution to sub-atomic motion, her real enterprise seems a process of exploration that is not easily made verbal, a way, she says, of offering a “meta language that uncovers the nature of materials.”

Over 100 juried and invitational art exhibitions, mainly in the middle west and southwest regions of the United States. Solo museum exhibitions include: Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, NE; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; Plains Museum, Fargo, ND; American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, MN; South Dakota Art Museum (retrospective exhibition 1995), Brookings, SD; Sioux Falls Civic Fine Arts Center, SD; Montgomery Museum of Art, AL; and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. Solo gallery shows include: Jan Cicero, Chicago; Peter M. David, Minneapolis, MN; Anderson/O’Brien, Omaha, NE; and William Siegal, Santa Fe, NM.

From 1989 to 2014, Stuart created several room size installations incorporating sound, light, and sensors, utilizing industrial materials of Styrofoam, Tyvek, and vacuuforms. These environments focused on diverse connective systems and cultural interventions in nature.

James Yood said of Stuart’s South Dakota years: “The space of nature began to loom larger and larger in Stuart’s work as her time in South Dakota advanced, and it is not too much to see in her work of the 1980s some of the expanse of the Great Plains, the grand sweep of a panoply of nature.”

During her career, Stuart has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship (1976), two National Endowment for the Arts mural commissions (1977 and 1985), a South Dakota Arts Council Artist Fellowship (1986) and a New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop Fellowship (2012). Art critics and gallery directors place Stuart’s work in a broad context beyond the geographic residency of her career. “She emphasizes continuity, endlessness, surge, and strives for a broader concept of form through a-compositional devices and a tough, sometimes subliminal, and always subsidiary use of color,” Jan van der Marck observed in artscanada.

In 1971, she joined the visual arts faculty at South Dakota State University, (Brookings, SD) where she taught until her retirement in 1994 as professor emerita. She was a visiting artist at Williams College, MA, Kansas State University, Moorhead State University, MN, Connecticut College, West Texas State University, Ucross Foundation Residency, WY, and Cowles Visiting Artist at Grinnell College, IA. In 1994, she moved to Santa Fe, NM.

Stuart’s work with sewn and acrylic stained canvasses began in the early 1960s, constructed works on paper in the 1980s, and scroll paintings in 2000. While focusing on these three bodies of work she expanded concepts and expressive forms in explorations of recycled glass, found and fabricated vacuuforms and collaged Tyvek. The latter resulted in large temporary walk-through installations - InSilence 1 and 2.

She spent her early life in rural Flanders, Connecticut. She was valedictorian at New London High School in 1955. She continued her studies and graduated with a B.A. degree summa cum laude, University Scholar, and Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Connecticut, 1959; Yale Norfolk Summer Arts School, 1959; M.A., painting and art history, University of New Mexico, 1961.

Signe Margaret Stuart (née Nelson) (born 1937) is an American artist best known for her abstract paintings and works on paper that are informed by Minimalism, quantum physics and the study of consciousness.

She was married to Joseph Martin Stuart (1932–2016) in 1960. He was an artist and museum director. Together they had one daughter.