Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Installation, Video, Sculpture
Website: carriehott.com
Carrie Hott was born in Fort Collins, Colorado, and grew up across Arizona, Colorado, and California. She earned a BFA in Painting, with a minor in Psychology, from Arizona State University in 2003, then moved to the Bay Area to complete an MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2007. She has lived and worked in Oakland ever since, building a practice that moves between studio production, arts organizing, and teaching.
Hott co-founded Royal NoneSuch Gallery, an alternative art and community space in Oakland, and helped establish Ortega y Gasset Projects, an artist-run exhibition space in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She has taught at San Jose State University, the University of San Francisco, and UC Berkeley, and currently serves as an assistant professor of graphic design at the Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design at Indiana University Bloomington. Modern Painters magazine named her one of “24 Artists to Watch” in 2015, and she received the 2017 Artadia Award for the San Francisco Bay Area. Her work has been supported by residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Recology San Francisco, and, most recently, the Center for Spaceflight Research at UC Davis in 2024.
Hott continues to exhibit actively in the Bay Area. In 2025 she premiered “Our Shiver,” a three-year investigation into sustainable web infrastructure realized as a solar-powered web server, in a commission for The Lab in San Francisco. That project led directly into “years ago,” a solo exhibition at Et al. in San Francisco that opened in January 2026 and drew on her UC Davis spaceflight residency.
Hott’s practice is research-driven, following what she describes as a “quality of endlessness” — the way a subject can generate a “poetic web” of tangents and unexpected connections. Rather than resolve her research into a single object, she builds multimedia installations that combine drawing, sculpture, sound, video, printed matter, and, at times, functioning technical apparatus or performance, assembling an immersive, theatrical environment that invites viewers to retrace her research process alongside her.
Recurring subjects run through the work: artificial light and blackout, whales and the history of lamp oil, lace and nets as formal and conceptual models, and, more recently, the hidden infrastructure of the internet and outer space. She has built installations from vintage glass lamp covers wired for looped sound, deconstructed clocks and satellite imagery, and a solar-powered web server — pairing exacting technical research with handmade, sculptural forms.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.