Michelle Favin (b. 1989) is a mixed-race Korean American painter based in California. Working in intuitive layers of natural pigments, oil, and ink, she builds paintings that are less made than accumulated. Each mark becomes a record of time and attention, a push and pull between impulse and memory, presence and passage.

Guided by inherited Buddhist teaching from her ancestry, her paintings push against the fragmentation of her contemporary experience. But rather than resolving the tension of clock time passing, she unfurls it. Through depth that opens inward and light that seems to arrive continuously from within, her paintings become sites of contemplation: threshold spaces where past, present, and potential futures become, briefly, indistinguishable.

image by Colleen Phan-Eversman

solo exhibitions

2024,Following the Footsteps, Glass Rice, San Francisco, CA

group exhibitions

2025,Never Left Unsaid, The Faight, San Francisco, CA
2025,The River Never Runs Dry, Glass Rice, San Francisco, CA
2024,residency group 43, PADA studios, Barriero, Portugal
2023,Pyramid Scheme, Bass & Reiner, San Francisco, CA
2022,Animus, Arcana Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2022, Small Works, Soft Times Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2017, love in the time of, Gutman Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2017, herCreative, Gutman Gallery, Cambridge, MA
2016, exist, American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, MA

education and residencies

2024, Residency Group 43, PADA studios, Barriero, Portugal
2017, Artist-in-Residence, Project Zero, Harvard University
2017, M.Ed., Arts in Education, Harvard University
2011, B.A., Sociology of Race and Education, New York University


publications

i wrote this to heal by Alysha English, Elizabeth Co., 2021
Designed layout and book cover.

—of Earth, 10th Floor Studio, 2020
Contributed artwork from “beautiful time” series

of Juliet, Juliet Mediaverse, 2019
Contributed custom artwork and illustrations

 

Overview of an interactive and collaborative art-making and storytelling event series about radical, inclusive, expansive and socially-conscious love. Arts in Education Action Collective. Cambridge, MA.

For inquiries, to say hello, email below or message here.

michelle@byfavin.com