Squeak Carnwath

Squeak Carnwath

Fellow: Awarded 1994
Field of Study: Fine Arts

Competition: US & Canada

California College of Arts and Crafts

Squeak Carnwath was born in 1947 in Abington, Pennsylvania. She has been an artist since age six, and an educator since she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in 1977. Before receiving her degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts, Carnwath attended Goddard College in Vermont. She exhibits regularly in several cities in the United States: in Seattle at James Harris Gallery, in Los Angeles at Peter Mendenhall Gallery, in Santa Fe at Turner Carroll Gallery, in Lincoln at Clark Gallery, and in Jackson at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, among others.

Her work is included in prominent collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Anderson Collection at Stanford University, the Rene and Veronica di Rosa Collection, San Francisco Fine Art Museums, and Yale University Art Gallery. Her paintings are held in museums and private collections internationally.

Carnwath’s first university teaching position in 1982 was at UC Berkeley. A year later, she successfully applied for a tenure-track position at UC Davis, where she taught for 15 years. In 1998, Carnwath returned to the Berkeley campus as Professor in Residence in the Department of Art Practice. Carnwath is now Professor Emerita of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. She is a founding member and current president of the Artists’ Legacy Foundation.

Carnwath’s accomplishments have been recognized with numerous grants and awards, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 1980 SECA award, two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, a 1994 fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a Flintridge Foundation award in 2002. She has also completed residencies at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, NY and at Djerassi in Woodside, CA. Her work has been the subject of articles in major periodicals, including ARTnews, Artforum, and New York Times. A monograph with nearly one hundred color reproductions of her paintings, Squeak Carnwath: Lists, Observations, & Counting, was published in 1996 by Chronicle Books. Her second monograph, Squeak Carnwath: Painting is No Ordinary Object, was published in conjunction with a 20-year survey at the Oakland Museum of California in 2009. In 2014, a survey entitled Horizons on Fire: Works on Paper 1979-2013 was published.

Recent shows include solo exhibitions at Tayloe Piggott Gallery, James Harris Gallery, Jane Lombard Gallery, Peter Mendenhall Gallery, College of Marin Fine Arts, Kentfield, Clark Gallery, and the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work was included in group exhibitions at the Long Beach Museum of Art, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Portland Art Museum, and the de Saisset Museum, among others.

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