Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Books and prints, installation, research, social practice
Website: alexarzt.com
Alex Arzt is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and gardener based in Oakland, California. She earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design (2010) and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University (2015). From 2018 to 2022, she served as an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, and she is a longstanding member of Real Time and Space, a studio collective in Oakland. From 2015 to 2023, she taught courses in photography, time-based media, and bookmaking at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute, and VCU.
Arzt’s publishing projects are held in the collections of SFMOMA, Stanford University, the Getty Research Institute, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has received grants from the Puffin Foundation (2018, 2022), the East Bay Community Foundation (2018), and a Ucross Foundation Residency (2024). In 2026, she received the Art Bae Award, a finishing grant for Bay Area artists. Her first book, on California’s feral cabbages, is forthcoming from Heyday in 2028.
She operates A Magic Mountain, a Risograph printing press she founded that publishes artist books and supports collaborative printing projects. Her work has been presented at Fruitlands Museum, Platform Artspace, Royal NoneSuch Gallery, the Prelinger Library, and SFAC Galleries, and she has completed residencies at PLAYA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Ucross Foundation, Hambidge Center, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Mildred’s Lane.
Arzt’s practice centers on the long-term relationship between humans and the natural world—particularly how intervention, migration, and time reshape ecologies, communities, and landscapes. Working through artist books, installation, video, workshops, group performances, and experimental gardens, she conducts research-driven projects that function as much as natural history as they do as art. Her Risograph press, A Magic Mountain, serves as both a personal studio practice and a collaborative publishing service that helps other artists produce limited-edition books and prints.
Her projects frequently take archival and documentary forms that blur disciplinary boundaries. The Positions and Situations Project involved five years of postal correspondence with 1970s back-to-the-landers who had placed classified ads in magazines like The Mother Earth News. Her ongoing Feral Cabbage project combines field research, plant breeding, and personal narrative to examine migration, domestication, and climate resilience—yielding contributions to the California Academy of Sciences Herbarium and a forthcoming trade book.
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