Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Social practice, public art, video installation
Website: hqcreative.net
Heidi Quante is an interdisciplinary artist based in San Francisco who has been designing environmental and human rights public engagement initiatives since 2003. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Cultural Anthropology and a Bachelor of Science in Ecology from the University of California, Berkeley, a dual grounding in culture and environmental science that has shaped a practice moving fluidly between personal artmaking and large-scale participatory projects.
In 2013 Quante founded Creative Catalysts, a collaborative venture bringing together artists, scientists, and community organizers to design new initiatives around social and environmental challenges. The following year, she co-founded The Bureau of Linguistical Reality with artist Alicia Escott, a participatory project that invites the public to coin new words for feelings and experiences generated by a rapidly changing climate — work that has traveled from BAMPFA to the Contemporary Jewish Museum to COP21 in Paris. Her work has been recognized as a finalist for the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Award (2015), the C.O.A.L. Art & Environment Prize in France (2016), and the YBCA Social Practice Award (2016), and she received the Maker Muse Award from the Kindle Project (2017), along with grants from the Compton Foundation, the Whitman Institute, RSF Finance, and San Mateo County.
Quante’s current major body of work, WeAreWater, is an immersive audio-video project tracing San Francisco’s buried relationship to water, sited along foot-trafficked routes above the city’s historic water sources. She continues to lecture on art’s role in cultural and climate awareness at institutions including UC Berkeley, Cornell, and NYU.
Quante’s practice splits between an intimate personal exploration of her physical relationship to a changing environment — through swimming, writing, and photography — and consciously public, participatory works built to be completed by the people who encounter them. Her signature move is linguistic and civic invention: rather than depicting climate change, she builds structures — a bureau, a field office, a listening walk — that ask the public to name what they are feeling and to leave a trace of that naming behind.
Recurring formats include the temporary “field office” or workshop set up inside museums and civic spaces, mobile field studies conducted along coastlines and waterways, and immersive audio-video installations that layer recorded sound and image of water and glaciers onto everyday urban routes. Across these forms, the through-line is an insistence that ecological grief and wonder need new, collectively authored vocabulary — and that art’s job is to build the room where that vocabulary can be spoken.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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