Best known for her abstract colourfields incorporating text patterns and familiar icons, Squeak Carnwath is an established American painter and art academic. A recipient of the Lee Krasner Lifetime Achievement Award, the Oakland-based artist's career spans almost half a century.
Read MoreBorn in Abington, Pennsylvania in 1947 Carnwath picked up the name 'Squeak'—which the artist exclusively goes by today—as an unshakeable nickname growing up. Following high school Carnwath studied art in Illinois, Vermont, and Greece. In 1975 she attended the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, completing her MFA in 1977.
Carnwarth's art is a blend of 1970s movements prevalent at the time, including Conceptual Art, New Image painting, and Process Art. Of particular influence was Process Art with its emphasis on pure human expression in the building up of an image. Her early work included a series of 'My Own Ghost' paintings—semi-figurative representations of a ghost accompanied with text and colourful patterns.
Squeak Carnwath's paintings and prints are identifiable by their luminous fields of colour accompanying a shuffle of trompe l'oei 'scribbled' text and recognisable symbols that prompt personal thoughts and memories, both for artist and viewer.
In the early 1980s Squeak Carnwath set her focus on painting and works on paper. While shifting in content, her art has consistently incorporated visual elements and text that not only present the observations and experiences of the artist but are also intended to provoke thoughts and specific emotional responses on the part of the viewer.
Images from the 1980s include stylised figures, interiors, furniture, mugs, trees, dog toys and bones, balls, and the night sky. Painted in a colourful style, within abstract patterns and fields of colour, these images are often accompanied by enigmatic words and phrases, and mathematical equations seemingly scrawled in pencil or pen. In reality they are very carefully and deliberately painted in this way.
Later works in the early 2000s, Carnwarth populates with Portland vases, Etruscan mourner figures, and LPs, among other icons, repeating them until, in her own words, she gets 'sick and tired of them.'
In the 1990s Carnwath expanded the use of text in her practice with her 'List' paintings. In works such as Dick & Jane (1996); Things Green (1995); and What is Red (1994), she produces anthologies of word associations linked to subjects such as gender and colour.
Expanding on the textual evocations of her 'List' paintings, Squeak Carnwath's 'Songs' series, plays with the ability of language and music to connect to memory. Carnwath presents lists of titles of love songs, each written in a different colour, on blocks of colourfields creating a patchwork of colour and nostalgia.
Other works from the late 2010s focus more on the present, such as her vivid gouache series 'Alphabet for a Season of Corruption' (2018—2019) which carries, with cynical humour, her personal exasperations at America under the late presidency of Donald Trump.
In parallel to painting, since the 1970s Carnwath has produced a number of mixed-media constructions. An early instance, Virginia Woolf's Last Letter (1977) is a sobering reference to Virginia Woolf's tragic last moments. Other examples include old cigar boxes and sardine cans filled and thickly encrusted with paint, glass bottled samples of everyday materials, room installations like Her Room (1979) and My Own Ghost (1980), and the text-based, chalk and blackboard work Pants on Fire (2017) that ties into an eponymous series of paintings.
Squeak Carnwath has produced a number of artworks for public spaces. In 1999 she completed a large porcelain mural for the San Francisco International Airport, commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission. The following year she produced COW-A-BUDDHA for the New York edition of the roving international public art event, CowParade. In 2004, she produced a heart for the annual HEARTS in San Francisco installation.
In 2018 Carnwath received the Lee Krasner Award from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the following year was inducted into the National Academy of Design. Among other accolades, Carnwath was awarded the Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SECA) Award in 1980 and in 1996 the Office of the Mayor of Oakland awarded her the Hometown Heroes Award. Carnwath is also a founding member and president of the Artists' Legacy Foundation, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkley.
Squeak Carnwath has been the subject of both solo exhibition and group exhibitions.
Solo exhibitions include: Squeak Carnwath: How the Mind Works, Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu (2019); Squeak Carnwath, American University Museum at the Katzen Arts Center, American University, Washington, DC (2016); Squeak Carnwath, Lux Art Institute, Encinitas CA (2015); Legends of the Bay Area: Squeak Carnwath, Marin Museum of Contemporary Arts, Novato CA (2014); Squeak Carnwath: Painting Is No Ordinary Object, Oakland Museum of California, Oakland CA (2009); Squeak Carnwath, Oakland Art Gallery, Oakland, CA (2004); Equations: The Paintings of Squeak Carnwath, Bank of America World Headquarters, San Francisco CA (1995); Squeak Carnwath, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (1994); Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art (SECA) Award 1980,Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (1980); Squeak Carnwath, Richmond Art Center, Richmond, CA (1975).
Group exhibitions include: Next to You, McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, San Francisco CA (2021); Branches From the Same Tree: Russian and American Printmaking Exhibition, Guanlan Printmaking Museum, Shenzhen, China (2020); Rise Up!, San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose, CA (2018); In Passionate Pursuit, Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (2014); Fifty Years of Bay Area Art - The SECA Awards, SFMOMA, San Francisco (2011); The Missing Peace: Artists Consider the Dalai Lama, Nobel Museum, Stockholm, Sweden (2010); American Printmaking Now, Zhejiang Art Museum, Hangzhou, China (2010); Celebrating a Centennial: Contemporary Printmaking at CCA, de Young Museum, San Francisco (2007); Rotation, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2003); Outward Bound: American Art at the Brink of the Twenty-First Century, The Museum of Fine Arts, Hanoi, Vietnam (1999); The Magic of Numbers, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany (1997); ART CONTACT, March 18 - April 15, Central Exhibition Hall, St. Petersburg, Russia (1992); The Figure: A Celebration, November, Art Museum of South Texas, Corpus Christi, TX (1981); Northern California Clay Routes: Sculpture Now, SFMOMA, San Francisco CA (1979); Mixed Media on Paper: 30 East Bay Women, Berkeley Art Center, Berkeley CA (1978).
Squeak Carnwath's website can be found here. Squeak Carnwath's Instagram can be found here.
Michael Irwin | Ocula | 2022
