Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Performance, Video, Social Practice, Installation, Artist Books
Website: reneearhodes.com
Renée Rhodes is an artist, writer, gardener, and arts organizer based in San Francisco, where she lives about four miles from the Pacific Ocean on unceded Ohlone land that was once part of a rolling range of sand dunes. Originally from Largo, Florida, she earned a BFA from the University of Florida and an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied video art, installation, and performance. She has also completed certificates and trainings in ecosystem restoration design and compost and garden education.
Rhodes was an affiliate artist at Headlands Center for the Arts in 2015–2016, and has held residencies with Signal Fire in the Mt. Hood wilderness of Oregon, the Vesper Meadow Education Program (as an artist-in-partnership, 2021–2022), and the Lucid Art Foundation in Inverness (2022). Her work has been presented at Southern Exposure, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, SOMArts, di Rosa in Napa Valley, and Headlands, as well as internationally at the B_tour Festival in Berlin and The Guesthouse in Cork, Ireland.
Alongside her studio practice, Rhodes has worked across Bay Area arts and environmental nonprofits, including as Studio Manager in New Genres at the San Francisco Art Institute and on staff at Creativity Explored, Root Division, and the Occidental Arts & Ecology Center. She has served as Commissioning Editor of The New Farmer’s Almanac for the Greenhorns, apprenticed on farms and landscape restoration projects throughout the Bay Area, tends a native plant nursery in her backyard, and helps steward a grassland meadow in a nearby park.
Rhodes makes social sculptures, videos, books, gardens, and walks that explore what she calls geological empathy, mimicry, and the creation of place-based memory through somatic practices. Her early performances—guided hikes, walking tours for one, and durational solo actions—use the body as a tool for mapping and remembering landscape, proposing “less efficient forms of togetherness” as an alternative to the mobile, technologically mediated way many people relate to the places they live.
Since the late 2010s her work has centered on San Francisco’s sand: tracing its source-to-sea journey from the Sierra Nevada through the San Joaquin and Sacramento Rivers to Ocean Beach, and how that cycle is interrupted by dams, irrigation, sand mining, and concrete production for the city’s skyline. Using printed-fabric camouflage costumes, souvenirs made of portable dunes and recycled concrete, native dune plants, and artist books, she treats the human body and geological systems as kin—“sand is skin, a messy porous place that buffers the land from the big energies of sea and wind.”
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