Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation
Website: emmaspertus.com
Emma Spertus lives in Berkeley, has a studio in Oakland, and works in Richmond. She received her MFA from Hunter College, New York in 2008. She is a studio member and gallery manager at NIAD Art Center in Richmond, a progressive studio supporting artists with developmental disabilities, where she has worked since 2017 and curates exhibitions. She has also guest curated exhibitions at San Francisco City College's Rosenberg Library and Hayes Valley Art Works, and was an artist in residence at Headlands Center for the Arts and the Kala Art Institute. Her work has been exhibited at White Columns in New York and in numerous Bay Area independent and artist-run spaces.
Note: Spertus maintains a low public profile. This entry is based on limited publicly available information and would benefit from the artist claiming and updating this page directly.
Spertus makes sculptures and architectural interventions that bring attention to two- and three-dimensional space in humorous or unexpected ways. Working with the formal and psychological languages of architecture, urban planning, and corporate design, her work draws on the built environment of the Bay Area — particularly Oakland's landscape of economic transformation, from abandoned car dealerships along fading auto-row to the generic interiors of corporate space. Her installations juxtapose the optimism of early modernism's fixation on rationality and the grid with the contemporary American landscape of vacancy and foreclosure, generating a sense of foreboding that is as funny as it is unsettling. She has worked collaboratively with NIAD artists on exhibitions that put her spatial and conceptual practice into dialogue with the direct, expressive work of artists with developmental disabilities.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.