Bringing together public projects and studio works that span Michelle Angela Ortiz’s 25-year career for the first time, Michelle Angela Ortiz '00: STORIES OF US explores how the artist’s pioneering collaborative approach centers stories of family, immigration, and community as powerful tools of visibility and resistance. Ortiz’s work in Philadelphia and around the world reveals how individual narratives and collective experience become inextricable from one another in the pursuit of freedom, dignity, and belonging in the face of oppression. From intimate works reflecting on her familial heritage to publicly sited largescale interventions, Ortiz—a celebrated Moore alum—questions and reclaims whose stories are told, believed, and venerated. By doing so, she asks us to become active participants in the production of history through the lens of our own experiences. Join us for the opening reception on Friday, October 9th 2026.
About Michelle Angela Ortiz
Michelle Angela Ortiz is an award-winning visual artist, skilled muralist, community arts educator, and filmmaker whose work centers the stories of people and communities whose histories are often lost or co-opted. Based in Philadelphia, her community-based art practices, painting, documentary filmmaking, and public art installations are vehicles for social change—creating spaces for dialogue, reflection, and healing. Her work transforms public spaces into visual affirmations that honor resilience and cultural memory. Over the past 25 years, Ortiz has completed more than fifty public art projects nationally and internationally. Since 2008, she has led art-for-social-change initiatives in Costa Rica and Ecuador and served as a Cultural Envoy through the U.S. Embassy in Fiji, Mexico, Argentina, Spain, Venezuela, Honduras, and Cuba. Ortiz has exhibited her works in many galleries and museums that include the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, CNN, and the New Yorker. Ortiz is a Hearthland Foundation Artist National Fellow, a Philadelphia Cultural Treasures Fellow, a Pew Fellow, a Rauschenberg Foundation Artist as Activist Fellow, a Kennedy Center Citizen Artist National Fellow, and a recipient of the Americans for the Arts Public Art Award which honors outstanding public art projects in the nation. She earned a BFA from Moore College of Art & Design and currently serves as the board Co-chair of Monument Lab, a nonprofit public art, history, and design studio based in Philadelphia.
This exhibition is curated by Erica F. Battle, BATTLE Projects, for The Galleries at Moore, Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia.
Funding for this exhibition was provided by the Hearthland Foundation.
Image: WE ARE HUMAN BEINGS, 90-foot painting installed in front of the
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) building, 2015. Photo by Steve
Weinik, courtesy of the artist.
