Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, drawing, music
Website: gordonrobichaux.com
Stephanie Crawford was born in 1942 in Detroit, Michigan. In 1968, while working on a Chrysler assembly line, she underwent gender-affirming surgery through a program at the University of Michigan, becoming one of the earliest documented participants in such a procedure in the United States. She had studied jazz vocals with bebop pianist Barry Harris in New York, and at 36 received a scholarship to study painting at Pratt Institute, where she formed a close friendship with East Village artist Greer Lankton. Through the late 1970s and 1980s she performed regularly in New York at venues including The Blue Note, Sweet Basil, Jazzmania, the Barry Harris Jazz Cultural Theatre, and Wigstock.
From 1989 to 1997, Crawford lived in Paris, teaching vocal jazz at Le Centre d’Information Musicale and L’Institut d’Art, Culture, et Perception and performing at clubs including The Duc des Lombards, The Sunset, and New Morning. In 1993 she won the Django d’Or award for Best International Jazz Vocalist. She relocated to the Bay Area in 1997, settling in Oakland, where she has lived and worked since, supporting herself for two decades in the Bay Area wine industry while continuing to paint, sing, and teach — including a run as vocal jazz instructor at the California Jazz Conservatory in Berkeley from 2014 to 2019.
In recent years Crawford has been increasingly recognized for her visual art, with representation by Gordon Robichaux in New York and Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco. She has held solo exhibitions with both galleries and been included in group shows at Karma, apexart, and Parker Gallery, among others. Her practice threads together the two strands of her life, drawing equally on her decades as a jazz vocalist and her lived experience as a Black trans elder.
Crawford paints and draws still lifes — flowers, candy boxes, fruit, and other collected objects arranged in her home studio — in watercolor, alongside charcoal and pencil self-portraits on newsprint. Her brushwork is loose and gestural, with color allowed to pool and bleed across the paper; she and her galleries have described the improvisational quality of her watercolor technique as a visual counterpart to her work as a jazz vocalist. Her more recent self-portraiture turns explicitly toward her own history, revisiting her years performing in drag and as a jazz singer to construct a vulnerable, personal reckoning with identity across time.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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