Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, photography, video, film, artist books
Website: kimanno.com
Kim Anno was born in Los Angeles, California, and has lived and worked in San Francisco and the Bay Area for most of her career. She received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, where she has taught for many years. She is represented by Anglim/Trimble Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA (acquired through the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Honolulu Academy of Art, the Crocker Art Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the Getty Research Institute, Columbia University, the University of Texas at Austin, and the Walker Art Center, among others. She has also completed a large-scale private commission for a member of the SFMOMA board.
Her awards include the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award, the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation (2003), the Zellerbach Foundation (2010–12), the Open Circle Foundation (2013), the Berkeley Film Foundation Award (2014), the Kala Art Institute Master Artist Award (2015), the Creative Work Fund Grant from the Walter and Elise Haas Foundation, and a Knight Foundation Fellowship at Yaddo. She was the 2022–2023 Holt Visiting Scholar at Stanford University. She has collaborated on artist’s books with poet Anne Carson, published by St. Benedict’s/One Crow Press: The Mirror of Simple Souls (2003), Albertine’s Work Out (2014), and Sleep (2019). Her documentary film A New World (2016) focuses on young African American women at North Carolina’s Bennett College.
Anno works in painting, photography, multi-channel video installation, film, and artist books, with a practice united by a sustained concern for the environment, water, ecology, and the bodies — human and non-human — that inhabit threatened landscapes. Her paintings are richly colored, sensual, and visceral, deploying color as both formal language and philosophical argument about the physical world. Her video installations have explored water cities — coastal and flood-threatened urban environments — across Cuba, South Africa, London, and the Bay Area, presenting them as interconnected bodies in ecological crisis. Her films and staged readings adapt canonical Western texts — Dante’s Purgatorio, for instance — to find and excavate environmental content embedded within them, democratizing inherited literary narratives. She has described her practice as concerned with “alternative ways of rethinking history to see how we can find our path back to integrate the biosphere in our life.” Her work also has a strong social dimension: public murals in her early career, a documentary on Black women’s education, and ongoing cross-cultural collaborations across Cuba, South Africa, and beyond.
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