Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting
Website: andreahiggins.com
Andrea Higgins was born in 1970 in Kansas City, Missouri, and lives and works in San Francisco. She received a BA from Dartmouth College in 1992 — where she also received the P.O.D. Studio Art Award — attended the Yale Norfolk School of Art and the New York Studio School during her undergraduate years, and received an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1995. Upon graduation she received a Luce Scholars Fellowship, which brought her to Udayana University in Bali, Indonesia, where she spent a year teaching painting and completing a body of work for an exhibition. She is represented by Hosfelt Gallery in San Francisco. Her awards include the SECA Art Award from SFMOMA (2002) and an Artadia Award (2000). Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC, which holds Hillary (2002) from her Presidents’ Wives series as a gift from the Heather and Tony Podesta Collection.
Higgins makes paintings that are simultaneously abstract color-field compositions and intimate conceptual portraits, using the warp and weft of fabric as her visual and structural foundation. Each painting reproduces the specific textile pattern of a garment worn by a real person — her grandmother’s glen plaids and herringbones, the moiré and nubby Chanel weaves worn by American First Ladies, the costumes of literary characters from Oscar Wilde, Sinclair Lewis, and Lady Nijo’s 13th-century memoir — building the fabric’s structure through hundreds of thousands of brushstrokes, each one representing a thread. From a distance the work reads as luminous, vibrating abstraction; close up, the accumulated marks and three-dimensional surface reveal the labor of their making. Her sojourn in Bali, where she witnessed Hindu women weaving sarongs for temple and observed “power dressing” as spiritual and social practice, was formative and remains visible in all subsequent work.
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