Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Photography, Sculpture, Video, Installation
Website: lizhickok.com
Liz Hickok is a San Francisco-based artist working across photography, sculpture, video, and installation. She earned a BA in Art History from Tufts University and a BFA in Photography, Installation, and Video from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in 1997, and lived and worked in Boston for over a decade before relocating to the Bay Area to pursue an MFA in Photography at Mills College in Oakland, which she completed in 2005.
Hickok first gained wide recognition for Fugitive Topography: Cityscapes in Jell-O, in which she cast scale models of San Francisco neighborhoods and landmarks out of gelatin, lit them from below, and photographed and filmed them as they wobbled and decayed. The project drew coverage from The New York Times, NPR’s All Things Considered and Talk of the Nation, and CBS’s The Early Show, and was exhibited at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She has gone on to complete numerous public art commissions across the Bay Area, including projects for UCSF Mission Bay Hospital, Google, Facebook, the City of Palo Alto, Sunnyvale Civic Center, and Arts Los Altos, several of which incorporate augmented reality in collaboration with creative technologist Phil Spitler. Her work is held in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Mills College Art Museum, and the Joaquim Paiva Collection at the Museu de Arte Moderna in Rio de Janeiro, among others. She has received awards and support from CODAworx, the Kala Art Institute, Dominican University, and Mills College, and has held residencies at Mass MoCA, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Santa Fe Art Institute, and the Center for Arts, Design and Social Research in Spoleto, Italy, among other institutions.
Hickok continues to live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area, where she teaches digital photography and develops new sculptural and installation-based work exploring the intersection of science, nature, and the built environment.
Hickok’s practice begins with the hand-built miniature: architectural models, chemical crystal formations, or flower forms constructed at small scale, then transformed through unstable materials — gelatin, liquid crystal solution, light — before being fixed in photographs or video. The resulting images hover between document and invention, capturing structures mid-transformation as they glow, dissolve, or crystallize, so that the final photograph or film is often the only remaining record of a sculpture that has since collapsed or dried out.
Across bodies of work like Fugitive Topography, Ground Waters, and Regeneration, recurring themes emerge: the instability of the built environment, ecological and geological anxiety (particularly earthquake risk in her adopted city of San Francisco), and the strange beauty of decay and regrowth. In recent years she has extended this sensibility into large-scale public commissions and augmented-reality murals, layering interactive digital elements over photographic surfaces so that flowers appear to grow and crystals appear to spread in real time for viewers on-site.
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