Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, printmaking, photography
Website: gayoutlaw.com
Gay Outlaw was born in 1959 in Mobile, Alabama, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for more than thirty years. She received a BA in French from the University of Virginia in 1981, then studied pastry at the École de Cuisine La Varenne in Paris in 1981–82, before studying photography at the International Center for Photography in New York. Her unusual path — French degree, Paris pastry school, photography program, sculptor — is exactly the kind of lateral logic her work enacts. She is represented by Anglim/Trimble Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Achenbach Foundation at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, and the Berkeley Art Museum. She received the SECA Award from SFMOMA in 1998 and has completed public art commissions for San Francisco International Airport and USA Children’s and Women’s Hospital in Mobile.
Outlaw makes sculptures, prints, and photographs through a process of rigorous material investigation, asking what each substance intrinsically does and then following that logic wherever it leads. Her early works were made from perishable food — caramelized sugar, fruitcake bricks, pastry — embracing the transformations of time-sensitive materials as both subject and form. In 1995 she installed a 34-foot wall of fruitcake bricks at Yerba Buena Gardens. Since then she has worked in plaster-filled dishwasher hose, bronze, aluminum, pencil, and ballistic foam, consistently finding unexpected formal and conceptual territory in mundane materials. Art critic Kenneth Baker described her practice as demonstrating a “rigorous literalness” and a “slapstick physics.” Her work at SFO — three sculptures titled Bird Plane House, Intersection, and Shell installed in Terminal 1’s South Courtyard in 2020 — is her most publicly visible commission.
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