Signe Stuart's professional history spans over fifty years, beginning in the early 1960's. Her approach to art making relies on experimentation with painting materials and forms, often breaking from the standard rectangle and concepts of framing. Stuart has lived and worked in diverse regions of the United States: East Coast, Pacific Northwest, Northern Plains, and Southwest: residing now in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Since 1972, Signe Stuart has had 18 solo museum exhibitions including those at the Sheldon Art Museum, Lincoln, NE; North Dakota Museum of Art, Grand Forks, ND; American Swedish Institute, Minneapolis, MN; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD and the Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM. Her work has also been included in many museum group exhibitions, among them the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE; the New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM; Burchfield Penny Art Center, Buffalo, NY and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN. Stuart's numerous solo gallery shows over this time range geographically from: Jan Cicero, Chicago; Peter M. David, Minneapolis; Kate Ganz, NYC; Anderson/O'Brien, Omaha; William Siegal Gallery and Pie Projects, Santa Fe. She is represented by Pie Projects Contemporary Art. Her six decade retrospective, Events in Time and Space was presented at the South Dakota Art Museum in 2023 and 24 as well as a major exhibition of works on paper, FLUX, at the Turchin Center for the Visual Arts in Boone, NC.
From 1989 to 2014, Stuart created several room size installations incorporating sound, light, and sensors, utilizing industrial materials styrofoam, tyvek, and vacuuforms. These environments focussed on implications of diverse connective systems and cultural interventions in nature. Installation effects ranged from meditative to sensory overload. Onomatopoeia, one of Stuart's 60 foot wide abstract narrative scroll paintings was the subject of a new music composition by composer Jonathan Chenette, (Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY.) Onomatopoeia premiered with a performance at the Albuquerque Art Museum in 2010 in conjunction with the exhibition Crossing Boundaries: Synesthesia in American Art.
During her career, Signe has been the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Painting Fellowship, two National Endowment for the Arts mural commissions, a South Dakota Arts Council Artist Fellowship and a New Mexico Experimental Glass Workshop Fellowship. She received several purchase awards including a Ford Foundation Purchase - Seattle Art Museum. Teaching, lectures and artist residencies include: Professor of Art, South Dakota State University; visiting artist, Williams College, MA; U-Cross Foundation Residency, WY and Cowles Visiting Artist at Grinnell College, IA.
Exhibition catalogs featuring Stuart's work include: SIGNE STUART: Events in TIme and Space, (MaLin Wilson, Mary Anne Redding and Leda Cempellin), South Dakota Art Museum; SIGNESTUART:FIFTEEN (Sara Woodbury) Roswell Museum and Art Center, 2015; Exhibitions 5 & 6 (Mary Anne Redding), Preston Contemporary Art Center, Mesilla, NM, 2011; Romantic Materialism , Untitled Artspace, Oklahoma City, OK, 2008; Patient Process (Don Doe, Leslie Wright), Faulconer Gallery, Grinnell, IA, 2001; Signe Stuart: Retrospective (James Yood), South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD, 1995; Signe Stuart (Laurel Reuter) Civic Fine Arts Center, Sioux Falls, SD, 1989. Press reviews/articles in newspapers and magazines include: Signe Stuart at William Siegal (Jan Adlmann) Art in America, 2014; Creative Trinity (Nancy Zimmerman) Santa Fe Trend; THE Magazine (several reviews from 1998 to 2016) and Chromatic Waves of Signe Nelson (Jan Van der Marck) Artscanada, 1971.