Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation, Video, Performance
Website: oliverhawkholden.com
Oliver Hawk Holden is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist working across kinetic sculpture, painting, installation, video, and performance. He was born and raised in Portland, Maine, where he attended Portland Arts & Technology High School and took night classes at the Maine College of Art before relocating to California. He earned a BFA in Sculpture from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2016, receiving Best in Show at the SFAI Senior Graduate Show and the Isaac Walter Award for Sculpture. Holden also co-founded Expert Art Workers, a Bay Area fine art services company, drawing on his deep familiarity with professional art handling and installation.
His work has been shown at institutions including SFMOMA, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), Eleanor Harwood Gallery, R/SF Projects, Gallery 16, Evergold Gallery, and Incline Gallery, among others. In 2022, he collaborated with artist Andrew Sungtaek Ingersoll on a vehicle for SFMOMA’s revival Soapbox Derby at McLaren Park, winning the “Most Alive” trophy. He completed a residency at The Space Program in San Francisco in July 2024, where he experimented with screenprinting across materials. His work has been featured in Juxtapoz magazine, and he has been nominated multiple times for the SFMOMA SECA Art Award (2019, 2021, 2023). In 2024 he exhibited at Pacifica Collectives in Tokyo.
Holden’s practice takes a satirical yet intimate look at everyday life, combining figurative imagery with humor, vulnerability, and play. Working across carved wood relief, oil paint, kinetic sculpture, video, and performance, he draws source material from barber shop portraiture, billboard advertising, and crowded street scenes. His works explore themes of distraction, “half communication,” and the charged ambiguity of ordinary human moments. He is known for large-scale carved murals — including a 9.5 by 26-foot carved MDF relief commission depicting San Francisco street life — as well as intimate portrait series and immersive, collaborative performance works such as “The Nun Race Through San Francisco” (2015), in which costumed participants raced through the city.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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