Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Drawing, Photography, Installation
Website: elizabethsimsprojects.com
Elizabeth Sims is a fifth-generation Californian artist, writer, and activist based in Oakland. She received her BA from the College of Creative Studies at UC Santa Barbara (2003) and her MFA from Claremont Graduate University (2005). Rooted in a deep personal and political relationship to the California landscape, Sims built her practice at the intersection of prefigurative politics, environmental history, and embodied experience in the American West.
Her career has moved between studio art, community organizing, and writing. She was active in grassroots political work — including involvement with the Occupy movement — before returning to a full-time studio practice. Her essays and criticism have appeared in publications including X-tra Contemporary Art Quarterly, Art Practical, North American Review, and Ploughshares. An artist talk, “Taking the Cure,” was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize and cited as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays (2020). In 2023, she held a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship.
Her work has been exhibited widely across the Bay Area and California, with solo exhibitions at Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco, Interface Gallery and Arthur B. MacArthur Gallery in Oakland, and Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, among others. Group shows have included Radical Landscapes at di Rosa (2016) and Eureka! Creativity in California at the California State Governor’s Mansion (2021).
Sims works primarily in graphite on paper, watercolor, and photography, often incorporating found objects such as crystallized tumbleweeds and mineral pigments on non-absorbent surfaces. Her drawings are highly articulated renderings of geological phenomena — earth, water, and stone — that dissolve into abstraction through the uncontrolled behavior of watercolor and ink. The resulting works occupy a space between scientific observation and lyrical surrender to natural process.
Her practice is organized around pilgrimages to sites in the American West backcountry, particularly natural hot springs, which she treats as temporary autonomous zones — spaces where hierarchies break down and intimate exchange between body and environment becomes possible. Recurring themes include the permeability of self and landscape, the politics of access to wild spaces, and the potential for collective life outside normalized social structures. Named series such as The Wandering Ecstatic — whose drawings are titled after radical historical and fictional figures who retreated into wilderness — give this political dimension a documentary, almost hagiographic quality.
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.