Michael LeVell: Salient Forms

Tierra del Sol Gallery presents Michael LeVell: Salient Forms, the most comprehensive survey of the artist’s five decades of artmaking. LeVell is a founding artist of Tierra del Sol Art Studios program launched in 1989. About Michael LeVell: Salient Forms includes LeVell’s sketches, still-lifes, interiors and detailed furniture studies, landscapes, abstract ceramics, vases as well as small ceramic furniture works, curated from over 5000 works made at Tierra Art Studios. All point to LeVell’s passion for transforming his encounters with the built world into objects of desire. This love of making was inspired and encouraged by his artist mother before his participation in the nascent Tierra del Sol Arts Studio program. Sarann LeVell was an accomplished painter, and what started as a form of entertainment for the youngest of her six children, drawing pictures of her daughter Kim’s doll house furniture for Michael at the kitchen table, evolved into the way Michael understands his world. Sarann painted at home and her works were featured in galleries and the homes of her extended family. Several of these important works were lost in the Altadena fire, yet it speaks to the rich relationship between making and community that Sarann modeled and fostered for her son, where Michael experienced her contributions to cherished interiors that structured meaningful aesthetics in his life. When the Tierra del Sol Art Studio pilot program was announced, it gave the LeVells an opportunity to extend Michael’s community and his practice. Together with founding artist Helen Rae, Michael discovered a unique environment in the Southern California adult disability care community at the time. The Art Studio was designed with purpose to identify and encourage creativity in its participants, moving programming beyond care to studio practice. In this thoughtful directed space, LeVell and Rae became artists whose passion for discovery and making helped shape the Studio program into a responsive ecosystem that supports artists with different needs and aesthetic intentions. What began with a group of nine artists has grown to 170 artists working in two studio locations today. The undeniable dynamism of the artworks of Michael LeVell and Helen Rae has made both known to the larger art world through feature exhibitions and articles about their practices. Their commitment to the program has made Tierra del Sol Studio Art Studios and Gallery a model for inclusive creative communities that continues to be celebrated, including in the 2019 exhibition Vanguard: Origins of Tierra del Sol Arts in Claremont at the Claremont Museum of Art, in Claremont, CA that prominently featured LeVell and Rae. Despite their proximity, LeVell and Rae each approached their practice in unique ways. While Rae filled her compositions with color forms of abstracted details, LeVell focused on salient lines and shapes of the studied imagery, creating works that are architectural microcosms and moments that reveal a deep understanding of the elemental building blocks of forms. Layered and saturated compositions of colored pencil and paint, as well as redacted linework and hand-formed ceramic pieces comprise LeVell’s immersive oeuvre of magnified and cherished facets of interiors and landscapes. In these works, he explores the geometric relationship of formalism and sensory awareness experienced in large and small ways in our built environment. The exhibition highlights LeVell’s command of multiple mediums, mastery undeterred by being legally blind. Drawn particularly to Architecture Digest for inspiration, he has a collection of editions that he uses for reference material. LeVell’s close attention to the periodical’s pages, and to furniture during scouting trips with his sister Kim, attunes his process of intimately rendering specificities of the built environment. This engagement compels slow looking to reveal the distinctly emotive quality of LeVell’s work, a dimensional poetics grounded in his relationship to family, place, touch and creativity. His mark making, repetition of lines and spatial sensitivity evidence his connection to tactility as language and material understanding of architectural design. The survey brings together works from LeVell’s 37 years at Tierra Del Sol, including works and studies never previously exhibited, compositions that translate his sensing and rhythm of life into visual language. The installation replicates his immersive style with two-dimensional works often grouped according to subject matter framed by walls in hues essential to LeVell’s palette. The center of gallery is occupied by a collection of his ceramics that draw the viewer into his call and response with the paintings and drawings. Today at 62, Michael LeVell has paused his participation in the Art Studios program, but he continues to be an encouraging and forceful presence for the Tierra Del Sol artistic community. In 2024, he was the gallery’s featured solo artist at the Armory Fair in New York, and has been included in several important exhibitions nationwide including a solo show at White Columns in New York and Mojo Rising , a homage to Betye Saar’s influence on local artists at California State University, Los Angeles. Organized by Tierra del Sol Gallery Director Paige Wery and independent curator jill moniz, Salient Forms represents the largest and most significant collection and exhibition of Michael LeVell’s work to date. The exhibition is accompanied by a full color catalog. Salient Forms opens at Tierra del Sol Gallery, September 19 through October 30, 2026. Read more Toggle Sculpture Drawing Painting