Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, installation, printmaking, mixed media
Website: rodneyewing.com
Rodney Ewing (b. 1964, Baton Rouge, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in San Francisco. He received his BFA in Printmaking from Louisiana State University (1989) and his MFA in Printmaking from West Virginia University (1992). Over a career spanning more than three decades, he has built a research-driven practice that examines overlooked histories, objects, and individuals of the Black Diaspora, layering documentary evidence with personal narrative to probe the psychological and physical terrain of race in America.
Ewing has been recognized with a Pollack-Krasner Foundation Award (2022–24), a National Art Club Fellowship (2023–24), and grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Demil Art Fund, and the FST Studio Projects Fund. His work is held in the permanent collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, the Harvard Art Museums, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, among others. He has completed residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts (Marin, 2019), the de Young Museum, Recology San Francisco, Djerassi Resident Artists Program (Woodside, 2018), the Kala Art Institute (Berkeley), Fountainhead (Miami, 2022), and the NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, 2021).
Ewing works across drawing, silkscreen, installation, sculpture, and mixed media, often centering works on paper as the primary vehicle for his research. He describes his approach as the need to “intersect body and place, memory and fact,” building immersive presentations that ask viewers to slow down and engage with histories that mainstream culture has allowed to recede. His work frequently departs from once-common but now little-known objects and documents—fingerprint identification cards, military blankets, family maps—reanimating them as carriers of personal and collective trauma. The resulting works are visually restrained but conceptually dense, demanding that the act of looking become an act of witnessing.
Recurring themes include Black survival and spatial autonomy, immigration and belonging, and the bureaucratic systems that classify and surveil people. His public art practice extends this inquiry into civic space, collaborating with communities directly affected by the issues his work addresses.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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