Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: marciwashington.com
Marci Washington grew up in the Bay Area and earned both her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. She lives and works in San Francisco, where she has built a career as one of the Bay Area’s most distinctive voices in works on paper. Her gothic-inflected paintings have been exhibited nationally and internationally, including solo presentations in the United Kingdom and Japan, and a monograph of her work, For Forever I’ll Be Here: The Art of Marci Washington — Selected Works, was published by Gingko Press with an essay by writer Nathaniel Rich.
Washington has been the recipient of awards from the Anderson Ranch Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation, and has held residencies at Yaddo and AS220. She has been represented by Rena Bransten Gallery in San Francisco for more than a decade, and her work has been included in group exhibitions at institutions including the Palo Alto Art Center and the Everhart Museum in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Her paintings have been featured in New American Paintings (Pacific Coast issues, 2007 and 2009) and in Juxtapoz magazine.
Washington works in watercolor and gouache on paper, building up flat washes of color to conjure grotesque faces, distorted figures, and uncanny still lives that draw on the iconography of Victorian gothic fiction, 19th-century horror literature, fairy tales, and contemporary fashion. Her palette is at once muted and saturated — deep blacks, blood reds, somber greens, and bone whites — creating images that feel both seductive and sinister. She has described her practice as “illustrating a novel that doesn’t exist,” constructing fictional narratives layered with references to moral crisis, spiritual anxiety, and the hidden codes of history.
Her recent work deepens this interest in the occult and the liminal: figures and plant forms emerge from darkness, the veil between the living and the dead grows thin, and the act of awakening — from a grave, from a spell, from complicity — becomes both subject and formal strategy. Washington’s imagery operates through repetition and accumulation, building a world of haunted manors, poisoned drinks, letters written in blood, and night-blooming plants that carry the weight of suppressed knowledge.
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