Location: Bay Area, CA — teaches in Sausalito; lived in San Francisco as of 2006 (current city unconfirmed)
Medium: Sculpture, assemblage, painting — found and foraged materials
Lucas DeGiulio was born in 1977 in Dearborn, Michigan, and earned a BFA in Mixed Media from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design in 2000. His early sculptural work, small objects built from found materials like aluminum cans and barnacles, drew wider attention in 2006 when he was included in the Whitney Biennial. He also showed in New York at Guild & Greyshkul, in the 2009 group exhibition On From Here.
He returned to school more than a decade later, earning an MFA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 2017 and showing at BAMPFA’s annual graduate exhibition that spring. That same year, Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito named him the recipient of its Tournesol Award, a stipend and studio residency for an emerging Bay Area painter, and he stayed on as a Headlands affiliate through 2019. His residency statement centers on pareidolia, the tendency to see faces and familiar forms in random patterns, which he traced to observations made by his own students.
DeGiulio now teaches ecology, environmental studies, and fine art at an elementary school in Sausalito. His recent work centers on coastal cleanups led by his students, who build collection tools from materials found along the beach. In spring 2025 he showed new work, including a piece made from a cormorant breastplate and ceramic buttons, in Give Me Light, a group exhibition at Personal Space in Vallejo.
DeGiulio works mostly in small-scale assemblage, using whatever material is on hand: aluminum cans and barnacles early on, plastic and dirt in his Berkeley thesis piece, embossed marbled paper and a cormorant breastplate in his most recent work. At Headlands, he extended that found-object instinct into painting, using pareidolia as a way of turning carved wood panels and rock formations into images of faces and figures. The same attentiveness to overlooked material carries into his classroom, where he and his students build cleanup tools from what they find on the beach.
*Per the artist’s own bio; no specific show title or date turned up independently — see research notes.
Provisional entry compiled from publicly available sources for the Bay Area Artist Wiki.