Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, collage, public art
Website: lindageary.com
Linda Geary was born on February 14, 1960, in Santa Rosa, California. She earned a double major in Studio Art and English from the University of San Diego (1982) and an MFA in Painting from the University of Delaware (1986), with additional study at Richmond College in London. After completing her graduate studies, she returned to the Bay Area, where she worked as a printmaker at the influential Crown Point Press in San Francisco before establishing her painting practice in Oakland.
Geary has been a faculty member at California College of the Arts in San Francisco since 2015, where she served as Chair of the Painting and Drawing department from 2011 to 2024. She co-founded Painting Expanded, a contemporary painting symposium at CCA. She has also served as visiting faculty at Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, Colorado. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, the San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and Art Practical.
She has received major awards including a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2021 and 1995), the MacDowell Kendall Fellowship (2022), an SF Arts Commission Award (2020), an Elizabeth Foundation grant, and the Alma B. Shapiro Fellowship at Yaddo (2017). Her residencies have taken her to Art Omi (Ghent, NY), the Millay Colony, the Bau Institute (Otranto, Italy), the Kriti Residency (Varanasi, India), and Sanskriti Museum Kendra Foundation (New Delhi, India).
Geary works primarily in large-scale abstract painting, using acrylic, oil, gouache, and flashe on canvas and panel, alongside collage on paper. Her practice draws on what she calls “material processes of cutting, revision and repair”—techniques that reference sewing, quilting, and construction, and that situate her work in textile and craft traditions as much as in the history of painting. Layers of paint are built up and then partially erased or washed away, creating what she describes as “ghosting within the composition,” where earlier marks remain visible but transformed beneath translucent subsequent layers.
Her work explores the interplay between visibility and camouflage, examining how shapes emerge or recede depending on surface relationships. Recurring formal concerns include loopy grids, flat biomorphic forms, and geometric patterns rendered in elastic, gestural strokes. The palette shifts across series—from psychedelic intensity to muted, weathered tones—but the underlying inquiry into body, space, and proprioception remains constant. Her large-scale public commissions extend these concerns into architectural contexts, translating her collage logic into permanent ceramic and glass mosaics.
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