Troy Michie was born in El Paso, TX. He received a BFA from the University of Texas at El Paso in 2009 and an MFA from the Yale School of Art in Painting/Printmaking in 2011.[2]
On December 3, 2017, Michie held his first solo exhibition Fat Cat Came To Play through Company Gallery, which lasted until January 21, 2018.[4] In the solo exhibition, Michie explores the significance of zoot suits, which are “broad-shouldered suits that were popular with Italian, black, and Latino men in the United States in the 1940s”.[5] The installation was inspired by the Zoot Suit Riots, which took place in 1943 after white servicemen attacked a group of Mexican Americans wearing Zoot suits.[5] Unlike his earlier works, which dealt with sex, Fat Cat Came To Play focused on exploring “blackness, queerness, and sexuality within an assemblage” by expressing socio-economic traits on to the Zoot Suit.[6] In many of his installations, Michie cuts out the faces of photographs from this era to address that these histories of the minorities are still relevant today.[4] A notable piece of the exhibition was “Disruptive Patterns”, which aimed to remind people that police officers were among the attackers in the Zoot Suit Riots.[4] The exhibition stayed true to Michie's philosophy of representing the cultural expressions, specifically through fashion, of “historically marginalized American male figures”.[7]
