Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing
Website: steuartpittman.com
Steuart Pittman is a Midwest-born painter based in Oakland, California. He earned a BA from Knox College in 2007 and an MFA from Mills College in 2009, where he received the Jay DeFeo MFA Prize. Early in his career he worked as a studio assistant to artists Ron Nagle, John Fraser, and Hung Liu, and his background as a frame maker has remained a persistent influence on his compositional thinking.
Pittman has been represented by Traywick Contemporary in Berkeley since 2016 and has shown work across the Bay Area, Chicago, Portland, and internationally including a 2010 exhibition in Bogotá, Colombia. His paintings are held in the collections of the Rockford Art Museum, Knox College, and private collections including Neiman Marcus and Bloomingdale’s. He has lectured and performed at SFMOMA, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), di Rosa, Mills College Art Museum, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Southern Exposure.
He received the Peter S. Reed Foundation Award in Painting in 2016 and has been nominated for the SFMOMA SECA Award three times, in 2010, 2012, and 2018.
Pittman works in oil on panel and on paper, producing intimate abstractions that draw on a recurring vocabulary of elemental, loosely geometric forms — rounded shapes, arcs, and silhouettes isolated against flat, carefully layered grounds. His color choices are deliberately surprising: neither naturalistic nor purely decorative, they are arrived at through what he describes as a search for “compelling and unanticipated color scenarios.” Constructed frames are a signature element of his presentation, functioning as an extension of the composition rather than a neutral container.
His subjects are drawn from daily life in Oakland — abandoned architectural details, skate and surf culture, 1950s guitar aesthetics, and fragments of the natural world — though the imagery is reduced to near-abstraction. More recent work has turned toward memory and personal history, translating childhood landscapes and family places into simplified, slightly distorted shapes. He describes his paintings as “distilled glances blurred and softened by age and nostalgia,” and his practice as meditations on a small set of core ideas revisited through an ongoing formal language.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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