Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, installation, public art
Website: catherinewagner.org
Catherine Wagner was born on January 31, 1953, and has lived and worked in San Francisco her entire life, with a studio in the Dogpatch district. She was a Professor of Art at Mills College in Oakland from 1979 to 2017, and is now Professor Emerita. She is represented by Jessica Silverman in San Francisco and Gallery Luisotti in Los Angeles. Her work is in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, LACMA, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Modern, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, and the Museum of Modern Art Bologna. She was named one of Time Magazine’s Fine Arts Innovators of the Year in 2001. Her awards include the Rome Prize (2013–14), the Andy Warhol Foundation Grant (2025), the Guggenheim Fellowship (1987), and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships.
Wagner works in photography and site-specific installation to investigate the relationship between systems of knowledge and the institutional environments that house them — art museums, science laboratories, classrooms, theme parks, homes. Her practice rests on the question art critic David Bonetti articulated: “the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves.” She works in typologies, producing serial photographs of classes of objects — rows of school desks, laboratory equipment, splints and prosthetics, film canisters, light bulbs — that reveal the hidden architecture of institutional thinking. Her most recent work, Blue Reverie (2025), merged her long investigation of the color blue with a site-specific residency at the David Ireland House at 500 Capp Street, where she forged connections between her own conceptual practice and Ireland’s through photographs, window filters, and wall drawings.
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