Chronology
A chronology of the life, work, exhibitions, awards, and key milestones of Michele Oka Doner — artist, author, and public sculptor whose practice spans eight decades.
Michele Oka Doner was born in 1945 in Miami Beach, Florida, to a family deeply embedded in the civic and cultural life of South Florida. Her father, Sherwood Oka, served as Mayor of Miami Beach; the natural environment of her childhood — coral reefs, mangrove shores, the tidal margins of Biscayne Bay — became a foundational vocabulary for a lifetime of making.
She received her B.F.A. from the University of Michigan in 1966 and her M.F.A. from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1968. Through the 1970s Oka Doner worked primarily in Detroit, exhibiting at the Gertrude Kasle Gallery and developing a sustained relationship with the Detroit Institute of Arts. Her landmark 1979 exhibition Image & Object, shown at the DIA and then at PS1 in New York, established her national reputation.
The 1980s brought the first major public commissions — Celestial Plaza for the American Museum of Natural History (1986) — and a sustained engagement with furniture and functional objects through Art Et Industrie. The signature work of the 1990s is A Walk on the Beach (1995), Miami International Airport — over one mile in length, comprising more than 9,000 individual cast bronze forms.
Subsequent decades brought further major commissions, including Talisman for Park Avenue, New York (2019) and Palm Goddess for Malta (2022), sustained gallery relationships with Hauser & Wirth and Marlborough, and continued authorship. She lives and works in New York.