Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, sculpture, installation, public art
Website: amytrachtenberg.com
Amy Trachtenberg was born in 1955 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for decades. She received a BA in French and Liberal Studies from California State University, Sonoma, then spent six years in Paris, where she received the Diplôme des Arts Plastiques from L’École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. She has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2021, and was previously represented by Brian Gross Fine Art for many years. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, the Achenbach Foundation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the San José Museum of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the De Menil Collection in New York, and the Haitian Embassy in Paris. She has completed major permanent public commissions including a ceramic tile passenger platform for BART in Silicon Valley, the façade of the C.G. Jung Institute in San Francisco, and the interior of Hillview Branch Library in San José. She was a 2023 Fellow at LABA Bay, a Laboratory for Jewish Culture, exploring the theme of Taboo through Torah and Talmud. Her residencies include Lucas Artists at Montalvo Arts Center, KALA Arts, and the Symposium of Contemporary Art in Angoulême, France.
Trachtenberg’s work spans a multidisciplinary practice grounded in painting that extends into sculpture, installation, public commissions, and collaborative works in theater and literary zones. She works with a range of dyeing and printing techniques, building up layered combinations of manufactured textiles with fragments of clothing, bike tubes, upholstery, bedding, and construction materials — often erasing the divide between traditional painting and sculpture. A lifelong habit of repairing, patching, collecting, and upcycling the discarded remains of material excess feeds her artistic practice. The tension between politics and poetics — combining the primacy of color, the handcrafted, and the celebratory function of pattern and ornament — drives her work. A deep engagement with Jewish culture and literary poetry has also woven through her practice, manifesting in collaborations with poets and writers including Norma Cole, Robin Tremblay McGaw, and Myung Mi Kim.
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