Michael Brewster

Michael Brewster, Professor of Art at Claremont Graduate University’s School of Art, is a visual artist who works with sound’s spatial effects to promote sculptural sensations of space. He has been making sound art since 1970. His pieces have been exhibited widely throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Europe, and Australia. His two main series, the Sonic Drawings and the Acoustic Sculptures, both use sound in space to generate expanded experiences of drawing and sculpture ideas.

Mr. Brewster’s work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Monica Museum of Art, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art, Ace Contemporary Exhibitions, and Artist’s Space in New York City, as well as at sites in Australia, Canada, Holland, Austria, and Italy.  In addition to his Guggenheim Fellowship, he is the recipient of four Artist’s Fellowship Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1978, 1984, 1990 ), and a City of Los Angeles Artist’s Grant (COLA 1996 ). His works are in the permanent collections of the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, the Orange County Museum of Art, MOCA Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Three of his sound installations are on permanent public display in the Panza Villa in Varese, Italy.

He has worked on several public art projects. Most notable were the Geneva Switzerland Highway project which he won in 1992-93, and the proposed remodel of Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center with Skidmore Owings and Merril’s New York office in 2002. Alas, due to politics, none came to realization. In 1986 he served on grants panels for the National Endowment for the Arts and the Wisconsin Arts Commission.

A graduate of Pomona College, Michael Brewster grew up as an expatriate kid in São Paulo, Brazil, where his father was in charge of South American operations for a New York–based corporation (Borden Chemical). He is fluent in English, Portuguese, and Spanish, and reads French and Italian. He is the father of three young women, all in the arts. He is an amateur gardener who collects bamboos, and dabbles with orchids and fuchsias. He is also an amateur sailor and diver. Some exemplars of his artwork, and several essays or interviews can be found on the website www.acousticsculpture.com.