Signe Margaret Stuart

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Signe Margaret Stuart (born December 3, 1937) is an American artist known for abstract paintings and works on paper that draw on Minimalism, quantum physics, and the study of consciousness. She is a first‑generation Swedish American; her parents were born in Sweden.

She was born in New London, Connecticut, and grew up in nearby rural Flanders. Stuart was valedictorian of New London High School in 1955. She earned a BA from the University of Connecticut in 1959 (summa cum laude, University Scholar, Phi Beta Kappa), attended Yale Norfolk Summer Arts School, and earned an MA in painting and art history from the University of New Mexico in 1961. Early mentors included Yngve Soderberg, Cynthia Reeves Snow, Walter Meigs, Bernard Chaet, and Lez Haas.

Stuart began making sewn and acrylic-stained canvases in the early 1960s, created constructions on paper in the 1980s, and produced scroll paintings starting in 2000. She also explored recycled glass, vacuuforms, and Tyvek, which led to large temporary installations, InSilence 1 and 2.

In 1971 she joined the visual arts faculty at South Dakota State University, teaching there until retiring as professor emerita in 1994. She was a visiting artist at several colleges and programs, including Williams College and Grinnell College. In 1994 she moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Critics have noted how nature, especially the Great Plains, and Japanese aesthetics influence her work. She often uses traditional Japanese papers and sumi ink, and she emphasizes negative space. From 1989 to 2014 she created room-sized installations with sound, light, sensors, and industrial materials like Styrofoam, Tyvek, and vacuuforms.

Her works have appeared in more than 100 juried and invitational exhibitions. She has had solo museum shows at institutions such as the Sheldon Art Museum, the North Dakota Museum of Art, the Plains Museum, the American Swedish Institute, the South Dakota Art Museum, and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, and solo gallery shows in Chicago, Minneapolis, Omaha, Santa Fe, and other cities. Her notable work Onomatopoeia, a 60-foot scroll, inspired a chamber music piece by Jonathan Chenette that premiered in 2010.

Stuart received several honors, including a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship (1976), two NEA mural commissions (1977 and 1985), a South Dakota Arts Council Artist Fellowship (1986), and a New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop Fellowship (2012). She was married to artist and museum director Joseph Martin Stuart from 1960 until his death in 2016, and they had one daughter. In 2014 she established the Stuart Artist-in-Residency Program at SDSU.