Location: Berkeley, CA
Medium: Painting, Video, Installation
Website: naomiekremer.com
Naomie Kremer was born in Tel Aviv, Israel, in 1953 and moved with her family to Brooklyn, New York, at the age of eight. She earned a BA from the University of Rochester in 1975 and an MA in Art History from Sussex University in Brighton, England, in 1977, writing her thesis on Abstract Expressionism. After working as a graphic designer through the 1980s, she returned to art school, completing an MFA with High Distinction in Painting and Drawing at California College of the Arts in Oakland in 1993.
Kremer lives and works in Berkeley, California, with an additional studio in Paris. She has taught painting and drawing at California College of the Arts, the San Francisco Art Institute, and California State University, Hayward, and has lectured and been a visiting artist at institutions including Oxford University’s Ruskin School, Syracuse University’s Florence program, and the Pont-Aven School of Contemporary Art in Brittany. Her early recognition includes the Cadogan Art Fellowship Award from the San Francisco Foundation (1992) and the Bay Arts Exhibition Award (1991).
Over three decades, Kremer’s practice has expanded from painting into video, digital animation, and large-scale stage design, including video-based sets for opera and dance productions such as Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle (Berkeley Opera), Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde, the world-premiere opera The Secret Garden (San Francisco Opera/Cal Performances), Handel’s Alcina (Acre, Israel), and Light Moves, a collaboration with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Company. Her work is held in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Berkeley Art Museum, the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, SFMOMA, the Brooklyn Museum, and the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.
Kremer is best known for what she calls “hybrid paintings” — wall-based works that fuse oil painting with synchronized video projection, blurring the boundary between static paint and moving light until a viewer can no longer tell which part is which. Her imagery is largely abstract but rooted in real-world source material: architecture, landscape, language and letterforms, and the human figure, filtered through references to art history, music, poetry, and literature.
Across painting, animation, and stage design, her work returns to questions of memory, perception, and time — bodies of work have drawn on family history (including her father’s prewar Warsaw), classical music and opera, and the shifting textures of landscape and light. The result is a practice that treats the canvas as a permeable, animated surface rather than a fixed image.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
Claim this page → to update your own profile.