"Still seeing my way"
Solo Exhibit by Sonya Michel
Sandy Spring Museum, Sandy Spring, Maryland
March 18th-April 16th, 2026
Public Reception on Sunday, April 12th from 1-3pm
“My work makes use of ‘the stuff of everyday life’,” says artist Sonya Michel. Her most recent solo exhibition, “Still Seeing My Way,” which from March 18 to April 16, 2026 at the Sandy Spring Museum, featured a variety of colorful, mixed-media artwork executed
between 2018 and 2026. Ranging in size from 12” x 12” to as large as 60” x 48,” the pieces shown in in the exhibit were primarily works on canvas, incorporating materials such as acrylic paint, paper, cardboard, plastic, metal, textiles and wood.
Art was a first love for Michel, but she set it aside to build a career in women’s history and Gender Studies. She returned to making art upon retirement in 2016, and over the decade since, she has woven her love of abstract expressionism, feminist art, fiber art,
history, and materiality into her craft. The works on view touch on the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and climate change, and they reveal her inspiration from Richard Diebenkorn, Robert Rauschenberg, Lee Krasner and Joan Mitchell.
“There is,” Michel concedes, “inevitably, a certain tension in my work. By engaging in current events or transforming waste into art, I allow that some of my pieces are not conventionally beautiful, and this is intentional. By refusing to aestheticize reality, I
engage with the lived experiences of the world around us. Some viewer discomfort is,
therefore, to be expected.”
This is Michel’s second large solo exhibition. Her first, “Seeing My Way,” was held at the Touchstone Gallery in Washington, D.C., in 2020. Currently she belongs to the Maryland Federation of Art and participates in group shows at their Circle Gallery in Annapolis.This is Michel’s second collaboration with the Sandy Spring Museum. In 2024, she co-curated the exhibition “A Paean to Paper” with fellow artist Holly Stone.
Seeing My Way
Friday, April 1, 2022 - Sunday, May 1, 2022
Touchstone Gallery
901 New York Avenue NW
Washington, D.C 20001
“Seeing My Way,” an exhibit of work by Sonya Michel, opened at Touchstone Gallery on April 1, 2022. Michel, a noted historian of U.S. women and social policy, began her career in art after retiring from a professorship at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016. She joined Touchstone several years later and presented some of her work in a virtual solo show in 2020. This was her first in-person solo exhibit.
According to Michel, the title of her show has two meanings. The first refers to the process by which she became an artist. After many years of teaching and publishing (she is the author or editor of some thirteen books and dozens of articles), she decided to return to her “first love”: making art. Since then, she has been exploring and experimenting with many different media as she develops ways to express how she sees the world and responds to it.
The title’s second meaning emphasizes Michel’s effort to “find her voice,” to see things her way. She began her new career with painting but soon found herself drawn to less conventional materials—what she calls “the stuff of everyday life”: packaging and labels; textiles, paper and plastics; “found objects,” large and small. She incorporates these things into her work as-is or prepares them by tearing, painting, crunching or otherwise modifying them. The results take the form of collages and assemblages as well as works on canvas.
Michel points out that her artwork is not unconnected to her previous output as a scholar. There, she addressed women’s experience and how it has been shaped not just by the ideologies, laws and policies of their day but also by the built environments in which they live and work. These days, she says, she is “intrigued by modern domesticity and the colors, textures and shapes of items that compose it—not just the products themselves but the packaging in which they arrive.” At the same time, she notes, “I can’t help seeing the perils of abundance: the stuff that enables our lifestyles also clutters the world and poisons our air and water. To borrow a phrase from William Butler Yeats, it is a terrible form of beauty.”