In her exhibition at the Schneider Museum of Art in Ashland, Underdone Potato, Michelle Grabner demonstrates the richness of themes and forms she has explored throughout her career: repetition and patterns, quotidian objects and the routines that go into both domestic labor and art. Here are paintings on burlap, several three-dimensional pieces in a range of materials as well as 100 plaster panels painted using the fresco secco technique. Although it has the scope of a retrospective, the show includes only works Grabner has completed in the last six years, many as recently as 2025. There are upwards of 40 pieces in the show. The quirky title, Underdone Potato, hints at the unexpected surprises in this exhibition, which is fascinating, beautifully installed, and worth a trip to Ashland.

Grabner, whose career as an artist spans more than thirty years, is also a distinguished curator, writer, and professor of painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute, in Chicago. She and her husband, painter Brad Killam, are the founders of the Suburban Gallery and of the Poor Farm, an artist residency program in Wisconsin, where they live. Grabner has connections to the Pacific Northwest as well. She was the guest curator for the Disjecta (now Oregon Contemporary) 2016 Biennial, which unfolded in multiple venues around the state, her work was exhibited at Upfor Gallery, and she was a visiting artist at Bullseye Glass. This spring, she is the artist-in -residence at Southern Oregon University. A residency at Pilchuk Glass School in Stanwood, WA, is on her schedule for next year.  

Grabner has said she considers all art political and concerned at its core with the power structures that exist in nearly every aspect of society, from daily and domestic life to the realms of art history and the market and museum. Approaching her paintings and sculptures with that thought in mind, concordances begin to emerge between these worlds: her work holds a place in each, as she simultaneously investigates both the stuff and the routines of quotidian existence and the materials and tenets of modern art and decorative arts and crafts.

I Work from Home, the deceptively simple title of Grabner’s 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art Cleveland, hints at this complexity. Perhaps this is most evident in Grabner’s gingham paintings that riff on the checkered fabric reminiscent of folksy textiles like tablecloths and aprons. It’s a pattern Grabner has investigated for several years in paintings and other media. The Ashland show includes a series of 21 works from 2019 painted on burlap: an even humbler fabric than gingham. Its rough, erratic grain catches paint unevenly, thereby emphasizing the process of painting and disrupting the verisimilitude of the image and its symmetries. These ruptures ask us to consider both the painted grid—a stalwart of modernism– and the woven grid beneath, with its crisscrossed threads of stiff jute.

As a kind of footnote to these paintings, the exhibition includes three wooden wall plaques on which are mounted bronzed and silver-leafed can and jar lids, including several from Smucker’s and Bonne Maman jams, their gingham prints serving as a point of reference, a source material. The presentation gives these disparate throwaway objects a formal status, as if they were commemorative medals or important coins. 

In 2014, Grabner began taking some of the knitted and crocheted textiles from her house and studio—dishrags, doilies, blankets—from which she had derived patterns for her paintings and prints and casting them in bronze. The material transformation memorializes and valorizes these abject, humble objects. The most impressive of these works in the show is the largest: an afghan, 45 inches high and 27 inches across, draped against a wall and sagging to the ground. All utility gone, its eloquent gesture recalls the hands that held it at two corners as it was dipped into wax as part of the casting process.

Over the years, Grabner has benefited from a number of artist residencies: the most fruitful of these have been through the Kohler Company’s Arts/Industry and Maker/Space programs, in which visiting artists can use the equipment, materials, and technology of the company, known for its industrial and domestic sinks, toilets, and related faucets and fittings. Through this access, Grabner has been able to expand her vision and the scope of her materials to include ceramic and plaster pieces. It’s intriguing to consider the links between Grabner’s aesthetic concerns and her readiness to adapt industrial materials and techniques.

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Secco Fresco, 2024-25, is made up of one hundred variously sized plaster plaques, none larger than 20 by 22 inches. At the Schneider they are mounted, salon-style, on the rear two walls flanking a door and spilling onto the side walls in an exuberant array of colorful plaids and stripes, made with loosely brushed and translucent mineral paint. As with the gingham paintings, these panels betray the artist’s hand in their irregularities: blotches where bubbles have burst, streaky brush marks, and areas where the pigment has bled beyond the lines Grabner scored on the plaster’s surface. She noted that producing this many plaster panels would be challenging in her studio; at Kohler, the process was streamlined because of their industrial facilities. While, like every work in the exhibition, they can be seen as individual objects, Grabner conceived of them as a multipiece unit, as she has done with the paintings on burlap. These too were made in a relatively brief period of time, and they are linked by a repeating palette of colors.

A series of sculptures that suggest a simple meal of canned ham, cabbage, and potatoes are a counterpoint to the works in paint and bronze. They are displayed on low plinths at the Schneider; Grabner has also exhibited them directly on a gallery floor. By taking steel tins that once held Hormel ham and applying silver leaf to their curled lids and bodies, Grabner has made them into precious objects: a sort of riff on the notion of silver serving dishes. Both the cabbages, arrayed in a grid, and the mass of potatoes, heaped in a pile are made of slip-cast porcelain, in which a thin liquified clay is poured into a plaster mold, resulting in a hollow object. At Kohler, slip-casting produces what is called “sanitaryware” in the trade–toilets, sinks, and tubs—glazed with powdered glass. As with the silvered ham cans, there is a decorative art equivalent to these most humble of vegetables in the form of porcelain tureens and other vessels that delicately mimic their shapes.

Underdone Potato is evidence of Grabner’s prolific and expansive practice, as is Hello, Hello, Hello, the small exhibition that accompanies it. Curated by Grabner, this show brings together the works of thirteen artists who are interested in the notions of repetition and, as she writes, a “perpetual disorientation of the familiar.” These ideas might just as aptly describe her own works, and seeing this ancillary show helps reveal Grabner’s concerns.

Underdone Potato: Michelle Grabner and Hello Hello Hello are on view at the Schneider Museum of Art through August 9th. The museum is located at 555 Indiana Street in Ashland and is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am -4 pm.