Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Collage
Website: gregrick.com
Gregory Rick was born in 1981 and grew up in South Minneapolis, Minnesota. His father was imprisoned for murder when Rick was eight years old; before leaving, his father gave him two books, one on history and one on art, that set the direction of his life’s work. Rick later served with the U.S. Army in Iraq, and has said that art became “a bastion of light” after he returned home, helping him process his guilt about the war.
Rick first came to the Bay Area in 2001 and has lived and worked here since 2012, now based in Oakland. He earned a BFA from California College of the Arts (CCA) in 2019 and an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University in 2022, where he held the Nathan Oliveira Fellowship and later returned to teach. His work has been recognized with the SFMOMA SECA Art Award (2022), an Artadia Award (2022), a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture (2022), the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award, and the Hamaguchi printmaking scholarship, along with a residency at Kala Art Institute in Berkeley.
He is represented by Jenkins Johnson Gallery in San Francisco and Johansson Projects in Oakland, and has also shown with Hair + Nails in Minneapolis and Beyond the Streets in Los Angeles.
Rick calls his practice “History Painting” — large-scale, densely layered works in Ronan sign paint, acrylic, oil bar, and collage on canvas and panel that place personal memory in dialogue with historical and political narrative. His compositions favor high-contrast, cartoon-inflected figuration: crowds battling, protesting, and communing across canvases that revisit the 1992 LA Riots, Black incarceration in the United States, Charlottesville, and other episodes of American racial and state violence.
He describes his aim as producing “moments of corrective alteration towards a more just and honest story,” reworking familiar historical flashpoints — a refought battle, a thwarted assassination, a community uplift program — to center figures and events typically pushed to the margins of dominant history. Recurring throughout is an attentiveness to what he calls “the lumpen,” the economically disenfranchised whose presence artwork and history alike tend to render invisible.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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