Michael Marshall, Professor of Art
Professor Marshall is an artist and educator with a focus on building community through his academic work and community service.
Posted April 18, 2012; updated May 25, 2018, and June 18, 2024.
Michael Marshall, professor of art at University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo, arrived at the university in 1984. He is a master painter and print maker who juggles work on his own art for exhibitions with the demands of academic life. He is fully engaged in teaching his students, building and expanding the UH Hilo art department, and bringing visiting artists to campus. He’s also enriching the local art community with educational and cultural programs of his own creation.
The artist
Marshall is a nationally recognized artist. A work of his was selected by Shahzia Sikander (MacArthur Fellow, 2006) for New Prints 2012/Summer, the International Print Center New York’s 42nd New Prints show. The IPCNY was established in 2000 and is the first and only non-profit institution devoted solely to the exhibition and understanding of fine art prints.
Marshall’s work also has been exhibited at the Honolulu Museum of Art (formerly the Honolulu Academy of Arts).
In 2012, Marshall had a solo exhibition at the Skoto Gallery in New York. The Skoto Gallery was established in 1992 as a space where some of the best works by African artists can be exhibited within the context of a diverse audience.
“This series of prints began in response to images created by sculptor Albert Paley during his residency in the art department print studio at the University of Hawaiʻi Hilo [in] October, 2010,” says Marshall about the Skoto exhibit. “In my prior experience with mono print which was limited to the direct manipulation of color applied with brushes to a plate surface, the flatness of the final image left me with the impression that I had engaged in a poor substitute for painting. I had not considered the possibility of creating mono prints utilizing stencils until I witnessed Paley at work.”
From the gallery’s press release about Marshall’s exhibit:
Michael Marshall’s recent monoprints are characterized by a carefully structured and organized rhythm of dynamic lines and organic forms, mastery of the nuances of color and composition, deep sensitivity to texture combined with a display of emotional intensity. A highly inventive and renowned artist who uses complex procedures with oil-based media and overlapping stencils in his paintings, he has consistently explored the expressive possibilities of abstraction in his encounter with history and global transformation over the past three decades. His work is dense with visual overload that reflects an awareness of a vast array of both formal and inherited traditions, and employs a rich vocabulary of signs and markers that speak boldly and clearly to a universal audience.
More recent exhibition work:
- Collaborative UH Hilo group co-sponsors Korean art and history exhibition (May 7, 2024, UH Hilo Stories)
- UH Hilo artists explore “Fear of the Unknown” at Hawaiʻi State Art Museum exhibit (July 11, 2023, UH Hilo Stories)
- UH Hilo art professor Michael Marshall’s polyptych on climate change now on exhibit (March 3, 2022, UH Hilo Stories)
- Professor of Art Michael Marshall discusses role of artists during social upheaval (Aug. 21, 2020, UH Hilo Stories)
Service
In Hilo, Marshall devotes time and expertise to building and strengthening the local art community.
He continues to develop the Howard and Yoneko Droste Visiting Research Fellow Initiative. Through the program, Marshall brings distinguished multi-disciplinary teaching artists to UH Hilo for residencies that explore the art practice in a variety of genre and engage the Hilo artistic community. Among the distinguished artists Marshall has invited are visual artist Albert Paley, filmmaker Thomas Allen Harris, dramatist Paul Carter Harrison, sculptor Richard Hunt and Bay area artists Carlos Villa and Oliver Jackson.
Marshall also created the Poetry and Blues Project, which is a part of the Droste Initiative.
Marshall’s ongoing project, “Voices in a Nation,” is a cross-disciplinary humanities division initiative launched in February 2003 to acknowledge significant writers, visual artists, and performers from a pan-ethnic perspective. Marshall developed the project in collaboration with Jackie Pualani Johnson, retired professor of drama, and Seri Luangphinith, professor of English.
He also has been actively engaged with a number of community organizations including the Volcano Art Center, East Hawaiʻi Cultural Center, the Wailoa Center, the Haʻaheo Soccer Club, Big Island Futbol Club, Hilo AYSO, and Our Downtown Hilo.
Education
Marshall received his bachelor of fine arts in painting from the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, and master of fine arts in painting from Yale.
By Susan Enright, a public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.
