Squeak Carnwath
Artist Residency Season:
2014-15
Artist Name:
Squeak Carnwath
Profile:
Squeak Carnwath draws upon the philosophical and mundane experiences of daily life in her paintings and prints, which can be identified by lush fields of color combined with text, patterns, and identifiable images. She has received numerous awards including 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. Carnwath is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. She lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Squeak Carnwath mixes familiar and recognizable images-think New Image painting- within a smart, sharp fields of patterns built of numbers and colors then overlaid with words. Carnwath’s fields look conceptual; they are methodical in structure like an algebraic formula on a blackboard but then suffused with thoughts that stand out-a translation of her internal dialogue out loud onto the canvas for all to see. Like Mel Bochner’s recent language paintings and prints, or Joseph Kosuth’s room size neon sculpture, Carnwath has been using words for many decades. The broken phrases or private messages convey feelings, emotions, directions, observations and in one instance the outraged reply to her mate’s mumbling words while he slept: MY NAME’S NOT TINA she cried back. Hence a painting of the same name, loud, riotous lettering making it clear that there ain’t no Tina here. No she is not Tina and not anyone but Squeak a tough, thoroughly educated and aware former UC Berkeley teacher and full time artist who has built a forty year career yet without the kind of flamboyance and fan fare of other California painters such as her peers Ed Ruscha and his nomenclature of the everyday or Wayne Thiebaud and his personal diner aesthetic. Why one may ask? We no longer think of either Ruscha or Thiebaud as California painters. They are renowned across the US and abroad as well with exhibitions at galleries and museums nearly everywhere. Carnwath is the interpreter of the present. Like Ruscha and Thiebaud she borrows from the everyday but she does not stop there; she wants us to think about this everyday.
Works:
After receiving a Masters of Fine Arts from California College of Arts and Crafts in 1977, Squeak Carnwath began exhibiting her work in the San Francisco Bay Area where she continues to live and work. Carnwath taught at the University of California from 1982 to 2010; she is Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley.
Carnwath’s work is exhibited widely and is in the collections of major institutions such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and The Brooklyn Museum. In 2009, The Oakland Museum of California organized a large survey of Carnwath’s work, Squeak Carnwath: Painting is no Ordinary Object. Her work is shown at several galleries including John Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, CA.