Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Textiles, Sculpture
Website: joshfaught.com
Josh Faught was born in 1979 in St. Louis, Missouri. He received a BA in Art History and English from Oberlin College (2001), an AAS in Textile and Surface Design from the Fashion Institute of Technology (2004), and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2006). He is based in San Francisco, where he serves as Associate Professor and Chair of the Textiles department at California College of the Arts.
Faught has built a sustained practice around fiber art as a medium for political and historical inquiry. He has had solo presentations at SFMOMA’s Neptune Society Columbarium (2013), the Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco (2022), and the Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (2025), and has shown at Frieze London and Art Basel Miami Beach. His work is held in the permanent collections of SFMOMA, the ICA Boston, the Oakland Museum of California, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, the Henry Art Gallery, and the Rubell Family Collection.
He has received the Betty Bowen Award from the Seattle Art Museum (2009), the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Award (2011), the SECA Art Award from SFMOMA (2012), the Artadia Award (2016), a San Francisco Arts Commission Individual Artist Grant (2021), and a Guggenheim Fellowship (2025).
Faught creates monumental woven, knitted, and crocheted works that fuse craft tradition with political imagery, archival materials, and objects drawn from queer culture. He dyes fibers using both organic sources — cochineal and other natural extracts — and synthetic materials including spray paint, and frequently embeds found objects, printed ephemera, and woven pockets into the structure of his sculptures. The resulting pieces function simultaneously as tactile archives and political statements.
His work returns persistently to the archives and lived experience of queer communities, particularly in San Francisco — the AIDS crisis, the spatial politics of queer survival, coded language and collective memory. Works often reach monumental scale, functioning as memorials, community banners, or site-specific interventions that transform institutional interiors into spaces of witness and resilience. The labor intensity of weaving is itself central to the work’s meaning, aligning craft with care, activism, and the slow accumulation of history.
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