squeak carnwath

Squeak Carnwath (b. 1947, Abington, PA) is a painter who lives and works in Oakland, CA. An artist whose career has spanned five decades, Carnwath has cultivated a distinctive blend of disparate 1970s art movements, including New Image painting, Conceptual Art and Process Art. Her paintings speak several languages at once. Areas of flat color are adrift with abstract and representational elements as well as writing — passing thoughts, the news, quips — often partly submerged in the shuffle of erasures and new additions. Despite a loose, improvisational appearance, there are secret moments of trompe l’oeil: pencil writing and charcoal scribbles are rendered in paint. Carnwath’s idea of process is all-inclusive: it combines the physical making of the painting with her thoughts, the world at large and also life in the studio.

Carnwath received her MFA from California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, CA (1977). The artist has received numerous awards including a Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award, the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award from San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, two Individual Artist Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Award for Individual Artists from the Flintridge Foundation, and inducted into the National Academy of Design. Her work has been exhibited at several renowned national institutions, including the Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Eugene, OR; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, CA; Oakland Museum of California, Oakland, CA; Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, HI; among many others. Her work has also been included in exhibitions worldwide, such as the Ballinglen Museum of Art, Ballycastle, Ireland; Guanlan Printmaking Museum, Shenzhen, China; SFMoMA, San Francisco, CA; Shanghai Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Heckscher Museum of Art, Huntington, NY; Rubin Museum of Art, New York, NY; Fundacion Canal, Madrid, Spain; Brukenthal National Museum, Sibiu, Romania; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; MFA Hanoi, Vietnam; The Singapore Museum of Art, Singapore; Jakarta Arts Center, Jakarta, Indonesia; MFA Boston, Boston, MA; Alaska State Museum, Juneau, Alaska; Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY. Her work is included in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York, among others. Carnwath is Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a founding member and current president of the Artists' Legacy Foundation.

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