Glen Michaels
Glen Michaels (July 21, 1927 – October 17, 2020) was an American sculptor and painter. He was born in Spokane, Washington. He studied piano at Yale from 1950 to 1952 but did not finish his degree. After a stint in New York City with Harper’s Magazine, he returned to Spokane to attend Eastern Washington College of Education, earning a B.A. in Art Education in 1957. He taught art at a local public school for two years before moving to Michigan to pursue an MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he majored in painting with a ceramics minor. After graduation, he stayed at Cranbrook to work at the Young People’s Art Center (1958–1965) and later taught at Wayne State University (1966–1968) and the University of Windsor (1970–1971).
Michaels had first hoped to become a cartoonist. While at Yale, his cartoons appeared in the Yale Daily News and the Yale Record, and he published a book of cartoons, Oh! You’re a musician, in 1951. He left Yale in 1952 and moved to New York City to pursue illustration, but financial success was limited, so he decided to continue his education and start anew at age 26. The landscapes of the Pacific Northwest, especially basalt columns, influenced his sculpture, and he often used chipped tiles to echo those forms. The art and calligraphy of Japan also shaped his work; a two-month stay in Japan in 1960, including time at a Zen temple, left a lasting impression.
His public works include a site-specific screen for Frank Lloyd Wright’s Bloomfield Hills, Michigan house. Early exhibitions appeared at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery in New York City (1960 and 1962) and he received a favorable review from The New York Times in 1962. He was featured in the 1968 Museum of Contemporary Crafts show “Objects Are…?” where attendees’ objects were turned into an on-site collage by him, and he was highlighted in The New Yorker.
Michaels created installations for the Detroit People Mover at Bricktown Station, the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the IMF in Washington, D.C., and Ford’s 1964 New York World's Fair exhibit (now housed in the Henry Ford Centennial Library). He was honored by the Scarab Club in Detroit around his 90th birthday. In 2017, when asked about his favorite sculpture, he said it was always the most recent one. He was mentioned by author Elmore Leonard in the novel Out of Sight (a character was played by Steve Zahn in the film adaptation).
Glen Michaels died on October 17, 2020, in Birmingham, Michigan, at the age of 93.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 20:15 (CET).