Madelaine Shellaby has been a practicing artist in California, Louisiana, and New Jersey. Shellaby has received Dodge foundation grants as artist-in-residence at the Headlands Center for Creative Arts in California, and at the Virginia Center for the Visual Arts; she has received three Artist Fellowship grants from the NJ State Council on the Arts, has received an NEA Services to the Field grant, and an NEH teachers grant.
Shellaby’s recent work updates the Vanitas tradition, combining material from multiple sources into a digital collage of drawings, photographs, paintings, scans and more. She has worked similarly making artist books and installations. “Fablestones,” her Stone Stories Archive, is an installation of her museum, and has been shown in different configurations in France, California and New York. She has imagined a curator and donors in support of a collection of stones and stories which she has discovered to emerge atavistically within contemporary thought.
Internationally she has been artist-in-residence in France, has worked in Mongolia on temple restoration, and has co founded a non-profit in support of educational initiatives in Haiti. She has recently been a docent at the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Culture in New York City and curates art exhibitions in the Princeton, NJ area.