Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Public Art
Website: sarahhotchkiss.com
Sarah Hotchkiss received her B.A. from Brown University in 2007, followed by an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco in 2011, also attending the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2010. She has lived and worked in San Francisco ever since, becoming a central figure in the Bay Area art community both as a studio artist and as a writer and editor. From 2015 to the early 2020s she served as visual arts editor and senior associate arts editor at KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR and PBS affiliate, where she covered the local visual arts and film scene. In 2019 she received the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation grant ($50,000), a nationally competitive award recognizing visual arts journalists making significant contributions to cultural discourse, and in 2020 she received a Society of Professional Journalists–Northern California Excellence in Journalism Award for arts and culture reporting.
Hotchkiss has attended residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2008), ACRE (2014), the Wassaic Artist Residency (2015), the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska (2022), and Jentel in Wyoming (2024). From 2020 to 2023 she co-ran Premiere Jr., an artist-run exhibition space operated on a 6-by-12-foot billboard above Irving Street in the Inner Sunset, commissioning and presenting work by local artists on the street-level scale. She has been represented by Romer Young Gallery in San Francisco.
Hotchkiss works primarily in gouache on canvas over panel, producing hard-edged, high-contrast paintings that begin with found objects — vintage board games, puzzle toys, optical illusion books, and graphic design ephemera sourced from flea markets and used bookstores. She enlarges and distills these printed sources, using saturated gouache to isolate and intensify their graphic logic until the resulting images function as shorthand for play and visual investigation. Her palette is bold and her compositions deliberately simple, recalling the visual language of early childhood development materials, game design, and signal systems.
Recurring across her work is an interest in how images communicate below the threshold of narrative — the universal symbols of parcheesi, the knight’s move in chess, illuminated manuscript borders, the bold black-and-white patterns made for newborn eyes. The series High Contrast (begun 2021), a group of paintings designed to stimulate early infant vision, exemplifies this strand of her practice, as does the Rotator series (2024), which draws on sources as varied as a Tenderloin corner-store sign and medieval manuscripts. Hotchkiss also makes artist books and publications through Colpa Press, extending her visual research into printed form.
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.