How This Catalogue Is Organized

About This Catalogue

The catalogue brings together, for the first time in one place, a complete and continuously updated record of Michele Oka Doner's work across every medium she has worked in. Each entry documents a single work as fully as current research allows; where research is incomplete, an entry shows only what is actually known rather than an estimate presented as fact.

The catalogue is a living document. Records are added, corrected, and expanded as the studio's research continues — a work's entry today may carry more documentation a year from now.

Searching & Browsing

The Browse the Works page is the main index of the catalogue. Use the search field to look up a work by title or MOD CR number, or narrow the list with the Series, Medium, and Decade filters — these can be combined with one another. Advanced Search adds fields for title, provenance, date range, keyword, and related-work lookup.

Sort the results by date, MOD CR number, or title, and switch between a thumbnail grid and a list view using the controls above the results.

When a Series has an accompanying curatorial essay — Early Clay, for instance — selecting it opens a Context panel above the results with an overview, an image gallery, and citation lists for exhibitions, literature, and press specific to that series.

Catalogue Entries

Each work has its own entry page, reached by selecting its thumbnail or list row. An entry gathers everything on record for that work: an image, a title and date, its MOD CR number, its Series and Medium classification, dimensions, inscriptions, title source, current collection, and — where documented — a descriptive text, provenance history, exhibition history, literature citations, curatorial remarks, and a log of entry revisions.

Only sections with actual content are shown; a field left blank on a given work simply doesn't appear on its page. A jump list in the left sidebar of each entry links to whichever sections are present for that work.

Where a work has been photographed at more than one stage of its making — in the studio, at a foundry, during patination — those process photographs appear in a separate Process section of the entry, distinct from the work's primary image.

Medium & Series

Every work is classified two ways, independently of each other.

Medium

Medium refers to the material a work is made of, drawn from a fixed, deliberately curated list: paper, ceramic, bronze, gold, silver, diamonds, stone, concrete, organic material, glass, steel, canvas, painting, photography, and video. This list changes rarely, and only when a genuinely new material becomes a recurring part of the work — as concrete did, once it began appearing across several sculptures. The Medium filter on Browse the Works draws on this same list.

Series

Series is open-ended by comparison and is expected to keep growing as more of the artist's output is organized into bodies of work. It operates at two levels: broad category buckets — Early Clay, Jewelry, Works on Paper, Public Installations, Commissions, Sculpture, Fables, Editions, Publications — and, within some of those, more specific named sub-series identifying a particular group of related works (Thorn Men, Terrible Chairs, Talisman, Radiant, Pollinators, Hominim Relics, Tattooed, and others as they are catalogued). A work's Series is always the more specific of the two tiers that genuinely applies to it.

A work may also carry a Secondary Series — for instance, a jewelry piece that is also part of a limited-edition run — so that it appears under either series' filter without changing its primary classification.

Any ceramic work dated before 2000 is additionally cross-categorized under Early Clay, regardless of its own assigned series, reflecting that period's material and historical significance to the artist's early practice.

Series & Sub-Series

Where a broad series such as Early Clay contains one or more specific named sub-series — a distinct body of work made within that period — those sub-series are grouped under it rather than listed separately in the main Series filter on Browse the Works.

Opening a series' Context panel surfaces a Sub Series dropdown next to the series name whenever that series has one or more of these groupings. Choosing a sub-series narrows the results to that specific body of work while keeping the parent series' overview and image gallery in view; clearing the dropdown returns to the full parent series.

MOD CR Numbers

Each work carries a unique catalogue number, written as MOD CR followed by an integer (for example, MOD CR 14). The numbering is intended, eventually, to reflect the chronological order in which the works were made — MOD CR 1 the earliest, and so on.

That full chronological ordering is not yet finalized: a number of works, including a body of early student work, are still being researched and may need to be placed earlier than anything numbered so far. Rather than assign numbers that would later have to be renumbered wholesale, works newly entered into the catalogue that aren't yet placed in the final chronological sequence are given a provisional number of 100 or higher — assigned in the same earliest-to-latest order the eventual final numbering will follow. Numbers below 100 are reserved for the one-time full chronological renumbering that will take place before the catalogue is considered complete.

Until then, any MOD CR number of 100 or above should be understood as provisional and subject to change.

Titles

A work's title reflects the title on record from the studio, an exhibition, or the artist's own designation, in that order of preference where more than one source exists. The Title Source line on an entry page identifies which of these applies; where no specific source is documented, it reads "MOD Studio" by default.

Images & Credits

The primary image on an entry page is the best available photograph of the finished work. Photographs are credited to their photographer where known; where no photographer is credited, an image is understood to be courtesy of MOD Studio.

Dates

Dates are given as they are documented — a specific year, a range, or "c." (circa) where a work's date is estimated rather than confirmed. The Decade filter and chronological sort on Browse the Works use each work's recorded year.

Dimensions & Collection

Where documented, an entry lists a work's physical dimensions, any inscriptions present on the work itself (a signature, a dedication, a foundry mark), and its current Collection — most often "The artist's collection," but a private, corporate, or institutional collection where the work has been placed elsewhere.

Provenance, Exhibitions & Literature

These sections record, respectively: a work's ownership history; the exhibitions in which it has been shown, each dated; and its citations in published literature — catalogues, articles, and books referencing the work.

A Remarks section, where present, carries curatorial notes that don't belong under the categories above. An Entry Revisions section logs dated, studio-authored notes on substantive changes to a work's record — it is a curated history, not an automatic change log.

How to Cite

Cite an individual catalogue entry as:

For example: