Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Performance, conceptual art, photography, installation
Website: lucasmurgida.com
Lucas Murgida was born in 1976 in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and has lived and worked in San Francisco for most of his adult life. He received a BFA with honors in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2002, completed a two-year teacher training program at the Iyengar Yoga Institute of San Francisco in 2008, and received an MFA with honors from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2021, where he was a Regents Fellow and was awarded a post-graduate Teaching Fellowship. He has taught and lectured at San Francisco State University, California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford University, and Saint Mary’s College in Moraga.
His work has been reviewed in Artforum, the New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times. His photographic works are in the permanent collection of the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. He was an artist in residence at the Vooruit Center in Ghent, Belgium (2010) and at Grand Central Art Center at California State University, Fullerton (2018–19), funded by a grant from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He was co-founder and teacher of the Conceptual Oregon Performance School (C.O.P.S.) from 2010 onwards. His work has been presented internationally in performance, gallery, public, and museum contexts.
Murgida creates situations that provide audiences the opportunity to experience very private moments in very public settings — works rooted in his employment history, which he describes as artistic research. Having professionally worked as a cabinetmaker, busboy, fine-dining server, locksmith, yoga teacher, and production assistant for adult-fetish films, he mines each profession’s under-appreciated skills, social dynamics, and tacit knowledge as the raw material for conceptual projects. His best-known body of work emerged from nine years as a professional locksmith: a sustained investigation of locks, keys, privacy, security, and access that generated performances, workshops, and photography exploring the physical and conceptual relationship between locks and the bodies and spaces they govern. Later work examined intimacy, safety fetishization, and the utility of the body as a tool of capitalism through the lens of yoga instruction and adult film production. His work is influenced by John Baldessari’s I Am Making Art, Jennifer Locke’s Black/White series, and Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose — artists who likewise dissolve the boundaries between life and practice.
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