Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, watercolor, performance, theater
Cliff Hengst is a painter and performance artist who lives and works in San Francisco. He received his BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, where he has also taught in the New Genres department. He is married to the painter Scott Hewicker. His work has been presented at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Hauser & Wirth (Los Angeles), Machine Project (Los Angeles), the Francis Young Tang Teaching Museum at Skidmore College, Southern Exposure, the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries, and Gallery 16. He has performed at The Lab, Minnesota Street Project, and many other Bay Area venues. He is a writer and editor for SFMOMA’s Open Space platform and has lectured on the state of art and performance in the Bay Area.
Hengst works across painting, watercolor, drawing, and live performance, maintaining a practice defined by wit, directness, and a refusal to take on a fixed identity or medium. His performances often operate as durational monologues or lectures that circle questions of creative motivation, labor, failure, self-doubt, and the peculiarities of art life in San Francisco. His visual work — concentrated watercolors on paper, often intimate in scale — operates with a similar quality of candor. He has collaborated with playwright and director Asher Hartman and the Los Angeles organization Machine Project, and his work has consistently spanned the space between theater, performance art, and painting without fully belonging to any of them.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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