Location: Oakland, CA
Medium: Painting, Drawing, Installation
Website: yuliapink.com
Yulia Pinkusevich was born in 1982 in Kharkiv, in the former Ukrainian SSR. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, her family fled as refugees, eventually settling in New York City and later New Mexico and California. She went on to earn a BFA with high honors from Rutgers University’s Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2006 and an MFA with high honors from Stanford University in 2012.
Pinkusevich lives and works in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a studio on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. Since 2014 she has held the Joan Danforth Professorship of Studio Art at Mills College of Northeastern University in Oakland. In 2024 she was named a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C., where she spent a research residency examining declassified Cold War aerial-surveillance archives for a project titled “Inscribing Fallout: Visualizing Casualties of the Cold War.” Her other honors include residencies at Autodesk’s Pier 9, Recology’s Artist in Residence program, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, the Headlands Center for the Arts, and the Wassaic Project.
Her work is held in the public collections of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (de Young Museum), Stanford University, Meta headquarters, Google headquarters, Recology, and the City of Albuquerque, and she has completed permanent public commissions including a sculptural bench at Stanford’s McMurtry Art and Art History Building. She has exhibited widely in the Bay Area and nationally, as well as internationally in Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Athens, and Singapore, and is represented by Marlborough Gallery (New York and London) and Kutlesa Gallery.
Pinkusevich works across painting, drawing, and large-scale installation to examine the psychological and political dimensions of built and natural environments. Much of her recent output unfolds across two ongoing bodies of work: the Isorithm Series, which reworks declassified Cold War military manuals used to map nuclear casualty zones into dense, obsessively hatched charcoal and graphite compositions, and the Sakha Series, which draws on her maternal Siberian ancestry and shamanic traditions to explore lineage, spirituality, and decolonial aesthetics. Earlier work engaged architectural layering and perspectival illusion, and during the COVID-19 lockdown she produced the meditative Q Series, in which one mark stood for one breath, the marks linked by red lines evoking biological and ecological networks.
Across these series, Pinkusevich holds together opposing registers — the rational geometry of scientific and military diagramming against the emotional and historical weight of what those diagrams represent. Her practice is shaped directly by her own displacement as a Ukrainian-American who came of age at the end of the Cold War, and by a broader interest in ecological systems, indigenous knowledge, and the built environment as a site where politics and psychology collide.
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