Michael Winkler's visual/conceptual art has been exhibited in galleries and museums including: Kansas City Art Institute; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; The Aldrich Museums's Soho Center Gallery, New York; Kassel Art Museum, Germany, Academy of Fine Art, Poznan, Poland; Kaus Australis Foundation, Rotterdam; and Rosenwald Gallery, University of Pennsylvania (Retrospective of work from 1982-2004). Limited edition books and documentation of his ongoing project are archived in the Special Collections of prominent libraries and museums including: The New York Public Library, The Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Smithsonian, Yale, Stanford, UCLA, University of Chicago, and University of Pennsylvania. His work has appeared in publications dealing with both art and experimental literary work. It was featured in the IMAGINING LANGUAGE Anthology (Ed: Rasula & McCaffery), MIT Press. Awards include Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.
From Reviews of Michael Winkler's Art: Word shapes: what we mean as what we see. -LIGHTWORKS It's impossible not to try to read meaning into the shapes....With the plain lines, the shapes become dimensional; with the arrows, the letters become like forces in a subatomic particle chamber. -AFTERIMAGE ... many of the word images seem to look like their meaning; 'replicate, ' for instance, is fairly symmetrical, and 'axial' makes a neat 'x' right through the middle of the circle. -THE PRINT COLLECTORS NEWSLETTER Michael Winkler's semiotic sentence paintings sparkle with a sentient specificity.... His way of representing words as spatial shapes is more than a little extraordinary. -PORTLAND PRESS HERALD