Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Performance, Film, Printmaking, Social Practice
Website: freddewitt.com
Fred Marque DeWitt was born in Oakland, California in 1959 and grew up in Berkeley, where he attended Berkeley High School. He earned a BA in Cinema Production from San Francisco State University, and worked for many years as a systems engineer and software trainer before a disability at age 25 prompted a significant life reassessment. He subsequently spent more than two decades teaching filmmaking, theater, and after-school arts programs in Oakland, Richmond, and San Francisco public schools. Inspired by Barack Obama’s 2008 election and by the photographer Gordon Parks, DeWitt returned to formal art education later in life, completing his MFA at the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. He lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves as a Lecturer in Painting at UC Berkeley’s Department of Art Practice.
DeWitt received the Murphy & Cadogan Contemporary Art Award and a Cadogan Scholarship in 2020, awarded to outstanding MFA candidates across Bay Area programs. He was selected as the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at Platform Artspace, the Department of Art Practice’s public-facing outdoor venue at Bauer Wurster Hall, where he created site-specific work throughout the pandemic. He has subsequently been an artist in residence at Black [Space] Residency in San Francisco, a community founded to support Black creatives working across disciplines.
DeWitt describes himself as a research-based, narrative history painter who draws parallels between 19th-century American artistic traditions and contemporary realities—particularly the ongoing violence against Black bodies and the persistence of white supremacy embedded in early American art. His practice is deliberately interdisciplinary, moving across painting, drawing, printmaking, ceramics, sculpture, performance, horticulture, and filmmaking. His most recent paintings fuse Asian woodblock printing techniques with Western oil painting, using ink, oil, and natural pigments applied to paper, wood, silk, and canvas to produce hybrid compositions that are at once decorative and politically charged.
Materials serve as conceptual anchors in his work. DeWitt uses substances with loaded cultural histories—coffee, cotton, gold, clay, sugar, ground pigments, and plants such as collard greens, sweet potatoes, okra, and tobacco—as what he calls “cornerstones of cultural liberation and renewal.” Rather than depicting racial violence explicitly, he works through abstraction, camouflage, pattern, and symbolic imagery to honor lives and implicate audiences in historical complicity. His practice ranges from intimate ceramic vessels to large-scale installation and live performance, unified by a commitment to what he calls the “joy and beauty of our collective human conquest.”
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