Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Printmaking, Drawing, Textiles, Artist Books, Performance, Curatorial
Website: antheablack.com
Anthea Black (b. 1981) is a Canadian artist, art publisher, and curator based in Oakland, California and Toronto, Canada. She received a BFA with Distinction in Drawing from the Alberta College of Art and Design (2003) and an MFA from the University of Western Ontario (2012). Black has been a faculty member at California College of the Arts since 2012, where she serves as Associate Professor of Printmedia, Artists Books, and Graduate Fine Arts, and holds the Yozo Hamaguchi endowed Curator of Printmedia position.
Her work has received support from the Canada Council, Ontario Arts Council, Toronto Arts Council, Alberta Foundation for the Arts, and the Centre for Craft. In 2015 she was named the ACAD Board of Governors Alumni of Excellence. Black completed a fellowship at Kala Art Institute (2020–21) and has held residencies at the Banff Centre (Canada), Small Projects (Norway), Anima Casa (Mexico), the Van Abbe Museum (Netherlands), and In Cahoots (Sonoma County, California).
Black’s artist publishing work is held in over 60 libraries and collections internationally. Her writing has appeared in Art Journal, FUSE Magazine, Bordercrossings, and RACAR: Canadian Art Review, and she co-edited The New Politics of the Handmade: Craft, Art and Design (Bloomsbury Press, 2020). Her work has been exhibited in Canada, the United States, South Korea, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and Norway.
Black’s studio practice moves across printmaking, drawing, textiles, video, and performance, with a sustained focus on artist publishing as a form of political and community-based work. Her work addresses feminist and queer history, collaboration, archival labour, and the relationship between materiality and meaning. She frequently engages with historical documents — letterpress reproductions of UNESCO texts, collaborative newspapers on HIV activism, and handbooks for queer and trans students — as a way of foregrounding how printed matter has long operated as a vehicle for social change.
Her curatorial projects extend and complement this studio practice, exploring queer geographies, craft politics, and the artists’ book as a site of abstraction and identity-making. Whether creating letterpress multiples or curating exhibitions of queer and transgender artists’ books spanning the 1950s to the present, Black consistently foregrounds what she describes as “the political dimensions of the handmade,” and positions the printed object as both an artwork and an argument.
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