Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: sculpture, installation, textiles, ceramics, public art
Website: danahemenway.com
Dana Hemenway was born in Central California and raised in Petaluma. She earned her BA from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and her MFA from Mills College in 2010, where she studied under Ron Nagle, Hung Liu, and Catherine Wagner. She has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since, maintaining a studio at the Minnesota Street Project and teaching part-time at Stanford University.
Hemenway has received significant recognition for her work, including a 2024 Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, an Individual Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission, and an Alternative Exposure Grant from Southern Exposure. She co-directed Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland from 2015 to 2017, an artist-run project space that supported emerging Bay Area artists. In 2020, she completed a major public art commission, The Color of Horizons, installed at Harvey Milk Terminal 1 at San Francisco International Airport.
She has undertaken artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (Omaha, NE), ACRE (Steuben, WI), SÍM (Reykjavik, Iceland), Joya: arte + ecología (Spain), The Wassaic Project (Upstate New York), and Recology San Francisco. She is represented by Eleanor Harwood Gallery in San Francisco.
Hemenway’s practice is rooted in the excavation and elevation of utilitarian objects — extension cords, HVAC components, electrical lighting, subflooring — to make visible what has become habituated in the built environment. She employs fiber arts techniques such as weaving, macramé, and rug hooking, but substitutes industrial and domestic materials for traditional yarns: cords are woven through handbuilt ceramic forms, aircraft cables are encased in industrial tubing, and fluorescent bulbs are cradled in coiled clay. The resulting sculptures, which move fluidly between wall and floor, challenge conventional hierarchies separating craft from fine art and the domestic from the institutional.
Her work carries a quiet critique of Minimalism while honoring the women sculptors — Eva Hesse, Harmony Hammond — who incorporated fiber and process into sculpture adjacent to that movement. In her 2024 series Endless…, inspired by Constantin Brâncuși’s Infinite Column, her columnar structures are threaded and permeable, with patterns that unfold as succession rather than repetition, leaving the logic of assembly deliberately legible. Across all her work, the question of how value is assigned — to materials, to labor, to domestic versus industrial space — remains central.
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