Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Installation
Website: kijalucas.com
Kija Lucas is a San Francisco Bay Area–based artist and educator originally from Palo Alto, California, who uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage, and inheritance. She received her BFA in Photography from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2005 and her MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in Oakland in 2010. Her work investigates how ideas and cultural frameworks are passed down across generations, and how seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that endure for lifetimes. In addition to her studio practice, Lucas has taught photography at Foothill College, California State University East Bay, and Northeastern University’s Oakland campus, and has served as curator of the arts at the California Institute of Integral Studies.
Lucas’s practice gained broad recognition through a series of major solo exhibitions and prestigious awards. She was a 2017 Artist in Residence at the de Young Museum, a 2020 recipient of a Nancy Graves Foundation grant, and received a 2022 Peter S. Reed Foundation grant and a San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grant. In 2023 she was awarded a Creative Work Fund grant, and in 2024 she became a Lucas Artist Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center, where she had participated in residencies dating back to 2015. Her work is held in the collections of the Mills College Art Museum, the International Center of Photography in New York, the California Institute of Integral Studies, and Montalvo Arts Center.
Lucas works primarily in archival pigment photography, often combined with installation elements such as botanical wallpaper, vitrines, and found objects. Her practice is rooted in a sustained engagement with Carl Linnaeus’s 18th-century taxonomic system, which she critiques for embedding racial hierarchy into the supposedly neutral language of science. By treating cultivated plants, weeds, native species, and non-native species with equal visual weight and care, she challenges inherited definitions of what counts as “natural,” “beautiful,” or “useful.” Her photographs are quiet and exacting — formally reminiscent of scientific specimen documentation — yet charged with personal and political meaning drawn from her family’s history, her father’s career as a gardener, and the emigration patterns of her ancestors across thirteen U.S. states.
A second strand of her practice is participatory and itinerant. Her ongoing project the Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy invites community members to contribute objects of personal significance, which Lucas then photographs and arranges in composite images organized by aesthetic intuition rather than geography. The project has traveled to Pittsburgh, Tulsa, upstate New York, and across the Bay Area, activating spaces through gatherings, workshops, and conversation. Whether working from found specimens or shared heirlooms, Lucas consistently mines the overlooked and the discarded for the layered histories they carry.
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