Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Sculpture, Installation, Drawing, Ceramics
Website: stephanierohlfs.com
Stephanie Rohlfs (b. 1984, San Jose, CA) is an Oakland-based artist whose practice centers on sculpture, installation, and mixed-media works on paper. She received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art (Temple University) in Philadelphia and her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Since completing her graduate studies, she has been an active presence in the Bay Area arts community as both an exhibiting artist and an organizer: she co-directed City Limits Gallery in Oakland from 2014 to 2016, co-directed the Diego Rivera Gallery in San Francisco from 2012 to 2013, and co-founded The Stipend, a Bay Area microgrant supporting exhibiting artists, in 2017.
Rohlfs has shown widely across the region and beyond, with exhibitions at Bass & Reiner and Root Division in San Francisco, Royal Nonesuch Gallery in Oakland, and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Her work has traveled to national and international venues including Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center and the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art in New York, and Toast in Manchester, England. She has held a residency at the NES Artist Residency in Skagaströnd, Iceland, where she expanded her sculptural and written practice.
Beyond the studio, Rohlfs has written occasionally about art and co-founded SFICA, a collaborative curatorial project bridging CCA and SFAI MFA programs. She is a committed participant in the infrastructure of Bay Area contemporary art, contributing to grant-making and alternative exhibition spaces as well as her own ongoing body of work.
Rohlfs makes sculptures, installations, and mixed-media works on paper that examine how humans and animals relate to designed objects. Her practice is grounded in an interest in the social life of things — animal enrichment devices, product design, functional objects — and in the way forms carry implicit instructions for use. Her recent body of work investigates American doomsday prepper and new-age wellness cultures, producing sculptural objects intended to be activated “in case of emergency.” At the NES residency in Iceland she continued this series with small ceramic and painted works, and with short stories loosely inspired by doomsday prepper acronyms.
These objects combine minimalist, colorist, and humorist impulses. Rohlfs keeps formal gestures precise and contained, so that each element — a field of color, a drooping form, a slab of shelving — assumes an outsized expressive weight. The resulting works feel like characters and situations at once, inviting recognition without full anthropomorphization, and reflecting a wry, self-deprecating view of human folly.
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