Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Video
Website: hughenstarkweather.com
Hughen/Starkweather is the collaboration of San Francisco-based artists Amanda Hughen and Jennifer Starkweather, who have worked together as a team since 2006. Hughen holds an MFA from UC Berkeley and has been an artist-in-residence at the de Young Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, Oxbow, and Yaddo. Starkweather holds an MFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and has been an artist-in-residence at Ucross, Skowhegan, Oxbow, and Ragdale. Both live and work in the Bay Area.
Over nearly two decades, the duo has built a research-based practice centered on specific Bay Area places and, more recently, the broader impacts of climate disruption on landscapes where water meets land. Each project begins with sustained fieldwork: visits to archives, historical sites, and restoration areas, and conversations with historians, scientists, farmers, and other specialists. They have applied this method to subjects including the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, the Asian Art Museum’s permanent collection, San Francisco’s shifting shorelines, and the San Francisco Bay Delta Estuary’s water systems.
Hughen/Starkweather received a 2019 San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant and have completed major public commissions for SFMOMA at the Chase Center and for the San Francisco Arts Commission’s Central Subway program at the Union Square/Market Street Station, among others. Their work has been exhibited at institutions including the Asian Art Museum, the Bolinas Museum, the Contemporary Jewish Museum, the Public Policy Institute of California, and the University of San Francisco.
Hughen/Starkweather make layered, research-driven abstract paintings, sculptures, and videos built from gouache, ink, acrylic paint, graphite, gold leaf, and materials sourced directly from the sites they study — sand, salt, dirt, ash, borax, and water. Historic and current maps, data, photographs, and interview transcripts are embedded and dissolved into the finished compositions, so that present-day street grids give way to past marshlands, shipping infrastructure gives way to migrating birds, and hard data gives way to memory and language.
The resulting works sit between cartography and abstraction, using visible traces of their source materials to reveal the built and natural systems layered beneath a given place. Recurring themes include sea-level rise, shoreline erosion, water infrastructure, and the tension between engineered and natural systems, with the goal, in the artists’ words, of prompting “curiosity, uncertainty, and new perspectives in the viewer.”
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.