HEATHER DAY

Early life and background

Heather Day grew up in Hawaii and along the East Coast of the United States before studying painting and art history at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2012. After graduating, she moved to San Francisco to develop her studio practice, later relocating to the Mojave Desert in Southern California, where the light and shifting desert conditions inform her approach to colour and duration.

Formative experiences of instability as a teenager led Day to art as a space to ‘create [her] own rules’, a sensibility that underpins her embrace of risk, improvisation, and structural disruption in painting. Alongside her studio practice, she has pursued residencies and collaborations, including an artist residency at the Vermont Studio Center and a project with Facebook’s Applied Machine Learning group to create augmented reality painting experiences.

Heather Day Artworks

Heather Day’s artworks combine painting, drawing, collage, and sewing, with scraped, smeared, and pooled fields of pigment accumulating on heavily worked canvases that are often cut apart and stitched back together. Exploring how the body translates sound, touch, and atmosphere into visual form, her paintings expand beyond the conventional frontal surface, treating edges, backs, and seams as active sites of composition.

Building large inventories of painted fragments that are repeatedly deconstructed and recomposed, Day creates lyrical structures in which opposing forces—rupture and repair, chance and control—are held in tension. Her chromatic fields often echo the colours and tempos of landscapes, from Pacific coastlines to desert skies, yet she resists straightforward depiction, instead synthesising the experience of shifting light and weather into layered, time-infused abstractions.

Cut, stitch, and recomposition

Day’s mature language coalesced as she began cutting into finished canvases, rearranging sections, and suturing them together, turning negative space, seams, and overlaps into generative compositional devices. This process-based approach is visible in exhibitions such as Cut, Split, Horizon at Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, where bodies of work stage a dialogue between horizon-like bands, voids, and bodily, biomorphic silhouettes.

Days use of stitching extends earlier experiments with sewing found fabrics during her time at MICA, when she worked for a furniture company and repurposed discarded textile samples. The resulting works carry a sense of layered memory, with visible joins and frayed edges signalling the history of each surface as it is pulled forward into new configurations.

Sensory and environmental references

Day often describes her paintings as visual analogues for phenomena that resist capture, such as sunsets, drifting clouds, or the changing colour of the sky over the course of a day. Rather than represent these scenes directly, she orchestrates gradients, stains, and gestural marks that compress multiple temporal moments into single compositions or series.

The work’s sensory charge is reinforced by her interest in synaesthetic translation, investigating what happens when a sound is felt as texture or a scent becomes a colour. In larger murals and immersive canvases, this emphasis on embodied perception invites viewers to navigate fields of colour and mark-making as spatial, rhythmic experiences.

Select awards and recognition

• Featured in Artforum ‘Must See’ (2020), highlighting key exhibitions on view.
• Named in Galerie magazine’s ‘Next Big Thing’ (2022) for emerging and mid-career artists to watch.
• Solo museum exhibition Woolgatherers: New Paintings by Heather Day, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana (2020), described as her first museum solo show.

To be kept up to date with news relating to Heather Day, follow her on Ocula.

Heather Day Exhibitions

Heather Day has presented solo exhibitions and participated in group shows at galleries across the United States and in Europe, including presentations with Berggruen Gallery, Almine Rech, The Pit, and Library Street Collective. Her work has also appeared at international art fairs such as Art Basel Miami Beach, The Armory Show in New York, and Art Brussels.

To be kept up to date with upcoming exhibitions featuring Heather Day, follow her on Ocula. You can also view her exhibitions on Ocula here.

Select solo exhibitions

• Hourglass, Almine Rech, Tribeca, New York, 2025
• Sinuous Bodies, The Pit, Los Angeles, 2025
• Echoes in Motion (two-person with Patrick Alston), Library Street Collective, Detroit, 2024
• Cut, Split, Horizon, Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco, 2024
• Woolgatherers: New Paintings by Heather Day, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana, 2020

Select group exhibitions and Art fairs

• Art Basel Miami Beach with Berggruen Gallery, Miami, 2025
• The Armory Show with Berggruen Gallery, New York, 2025
• Infinity’s Edge, Nazarian/Curcio, Los Angeles, 2025
• Art Brussels with Almine Rech, Brussels, 2025
• Group presentations with Almine Rech, Paris, and Berggruen Gallery, San Francisco (various exhibitions)

Sign up to Ocula to follow the artist and learn more about Heather Day’s art for sale.

Heather Day FAQs

Ocula | 2026