Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Medium: Painting, photography, film/video
Website: kimanno.com
Kim Anno (b. December 19, 1958, Los Angeles, California) is a Japanese-American artist and educator known for her work as an abstract painter, photographer, and filmmaker. She received her BFA from San Francisco State University (1982) and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (1985). Anno has been a professor at California College of the Arts since 1996, where she served as chair of the painting department.
Her work is held in major public collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, Brooklyn Museum, Honolulu Museum of Art, Crocker Art Museum, Oakland Museum of California, Getty Research Institute, Newberry Library, Walker Art Center (Minneapolis), and the Koopman Collection (The Hague), among others. Anno received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2024—one of 188 fellows selected from approximately 3,000 applicants—and has been recognized with the Eureka Fellowship from the Fleishhacker Foundation, the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Purchase Award, the Western States Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship, a Knight Foundation Fellowship at Yaddo, and numerous San Francisco Arts Commission public art commissions.
Anno’s painting practice is rooted in abstraction, approaching the canvas as a site for investigating perception, ecology, and history. Working in oil on aluminum, canvas, and linen, her canvases engage the language of abstraction as it appears in religious and ritual art while tracking the consequences of climate change on landscape and ecology. She also makes documentary and experimental films and works across video, sound, and book arts.
Her documentary A New World (2016) focuses on young African American women at Bennett College in North Carolina. In 2016 she directed Crisis, a live staged reading of her adaptation of Dante’s Purgatorio (Canto 32), in collaboration with Brazilian composer Saulo Laudares, and Drought 1200, a live contemporary dance performance presented in San Francisco. Her ongoing film series Men and Women in Water Cities (2011–2019) imagines life under rising sea levels across sites including Berkeley, Durban, Ipswich, and Key West.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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