Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, printmaking
Website: squeakcarnwath.com
Squeak Carnwath was born in 1947 in Abington, Pennsylvania — “Squeak” being a childhood nickname that stuck. She studied art in Illinois, Vermont, and Greece before attending the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, where she received her MFA in 1977. She has lived and worked in Oakland since 1970. She is represented by Jane Lombard Gallery in New York, pt.2 Gallery in Oakland, and has had a long relationship with John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco. Her work is in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, the Oakland Museum of California, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and many others.
Her awards span nearly five decades: an NEA Fellowship in 1980 and 1985, the SECA Award from SFMOMA in 1980, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1994, the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists in 2002, and the Lee Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation in 2018. In 2019 she was inducted into the National Academy of Design. She taught at UC Davis from 1983 to 1998 and was a tenured Professor of Art Practice at UC Berkeley, where she is now Professor Emerita. She is a founding member and president of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation. The 2009 Oakland Museum of California retrospective Painting Is No Ordinary Object — the first major West Coast museum survey of her work — was accompanied by a 160-page monograph co-published by Pomegranate Press with essays by poet and art critic John Yau.
Carnwath’s paintings are built up in meticulous layers of oil paint — layer upon layer, often dozens — that accumulate into rich, complex surfaces simultaneously diaristic and universal. Her vocabulary is deliberately simple: numbers, letters, lists, rabbits, hands, hearts, household objects, simple diagrams, fragments of observed or remembered text. Through obsessive repetition of these symbols across a lifetime of work, she has made them into something between mantras and hieroglyphs — a private iconography that opens into shared human experience. She describes painting as “a philosophical enterprise in which, through a kind of alchemy, inert material becomes something else — a document of being, a repository of the human spirit.” Her work sits at the intersection of 1970s movements that shaped her: Conceptual Art, New Image Painting, and Process Art, with its emphasis on pure human expression in the building up of an image. In recent years her work has taken on an increasingly urgent political dimension, responding to the state of the country through the same vocabulary of words, objects, and color.
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