Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Drawing, Painting, Video, Installation, Photography, Poetry
Website: graciannekirsch.com
Gracianne Kirsch is an Oakland-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves across drawing, painting, video, installation, photography, and poetry. They grew up on an off-the-grid mountain homestead their father built atop a mountain in Redwood Valley, in rural Northern California — an unconventional upbringing that threads through much of their semi-autobiographical work. Kirsch earned a BA in Art Practice and Social Welfare from UC Berkeley in 2022, followed by an MFA in Art Studio from UC Davis in 2024, where they won the inaugural Letters & Science Prize for Excellence for their thesis installation Arms reaching.
Kirsch’s work is grounded in queer theory and what they call “queer temporalities” — the idea that queer people are not bound to linear timelines because those timelines were not written for them. Drawing on theorists including Paul Preciado, S Bear Bergman, and Jack Halberstam, they use memory as a language, filtering present experiences through the past and vice versa. The domestic objects and trans bodies that populate their work become repositories of accumulated time, tenderness, and transformation.
Kirsch works across drawing, video, installation, photography, and written poetry, often combining these in immersive environments. Their MFA thesis at the Jan Shrem and Maria Manetti Shrem Museum of Art took the form of a walk-through diorama integrating drawings, videos, and childhood objects — including a table from their childhood home inscribed with their name by a sibling. This blending of the personal and the theoretical characterizes their practice: the work is simultaneously rigorous in its engagement with queer scholarship and warm in its attention to “silliness and sweetness,” to bodies, rural landscapes, and the emotional weight of everyday things.
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