Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Printmaking, Sculpture, Installation, Video
Website: carlafisherschwartz.com
Carla Fisher Schwartz is a visual artist and educator based in Oakland, California. She earned a BA cum laude in Studio Art, with a minor in History of Art and Visual Culture, from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 2009, having spent 2008 studying Japanese language, printmaking and art history at Temple University’s Japan Campus in Tokyo. In 2013 she completed an MFA in Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where she received the Bell Cramer Award in Printmaking along with the Thomas R. Blow Scholarship and a Sam Fox School graduate travel grant.
Fisher Schwartz built much of her early career in Chicago. She took part in The Center Program at the Hyde Park Art Center in 2014, held a studio fellowship at Spudnik Press Cooperative in 2015, and was a HATCH Projects artist-in-residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition in 2015–16, followed by an ACRE residency in Steuben, Wisconsin in 2017. During those years she taught at Harold Washington College, Chicago State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She later moved east, lecturing in design at New England College from 2020 to 2022 and in Graphic Arts at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University from 2021 to 2023. Since 2023 she has been Assistant Professor of Pictorial Art, specializing in Digital and Hybrid Processes, in the Department of Art and Art History at San José State University.
Her awards include the ONE: Annual Emerging Artist Exhibit award from the Cleve Carney Gallery in 2018, a Paris Studio Residency Award from Washington University in St. Louis in 2024, a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship in 2025, and a Faculty RSCA Assigned Time Program Award from San José State’s College of Humanities and Arts. Recent and upcoming residencies include the Contemporary Print Media Research Center at UC Santa Cruz and Stove Works in Chattanooga in 2024, the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City in 2025, an artist residency at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley in 2025–26, and a Paris studio residency at the Cité internationale des arts in 2027.
Fisher Schwartz’s studio practice investigates the relationship between the mapped image and contemporary notions of exploration, virtuality and the simulated environment, working across print media, sculpture and video installation. She treats maps less as neutral instruments than as pictures with authors, and her work repeatedly returns to the places where cartography breaks down: phantom islands that appeared on charts for a century without existing, the fourteenth-century myth of the Rupes Nigra at the North Pole, the glitches and gaps of satellite and street-level imagery.
The work tends to be assembled rather than framed — dye-sublimation and inkjet prints on fabric, polypropylene netting, vinyl, binder’s board, wood and screen-based video arranged into room-scale environments. In Sentinel (2018) a matte black vinyl floor piece enlarges the accidental shadow cast by the car-mounted camera that records Google Street View, stretching a byproduct of automated surveillance across the gallery floor. More recent series such as Aerial Mesh and Displacements push printed images off the wall and into draped, folded and propped constructions, so that the flat overhead view of the map is literally given a body and a ground. The tone throughout is dry and faintly comic: the desktop explorer, scrolling toward a place that was never there.
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