Acrylic pen and watercolor
19 x 19 x 2
Courtesy of the Artist and Sarah Shepard Gallery
Lena Wolff links the iconography of American quilts with symbols for democracy, motifs from nature, and the universe at large. In keeping with her practice over the last two decades, Lena re-contextualizes lyrical and geometric quilt patterns in a wide range of unexpected mediums. Accessing the attention-demanding practices of craftsmanship, akin to those of a traditional quiltmaker, Wolff employs these slow, labor-intensive processes in order to produce pen and watercolor drawings.
Lena Wolff is an interdisciplinary visual artist, craftswoman, and activist who has lived and worked in the San Francisco Bay Area since the early 1990s. Wolff’s work extends out of American folk-art traditions while being rooted in minimalism, geometric abstraction, Op art, social practice, and feminist and political art. Her broad, interconnected artistic output includes drawing, collage, sculpture, text-based works, music, and public projects. In recent years, she has generated several projects that contribute to civic engagement, including a widespread anti-hate poster campaign and a public art initiative to boost voter participation that gained national reach in the past three election cycles in the US. Her work has been exhibited nationally and collected by ONE National Lesbian and Gay Archives, the Berkeley Art Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Oakland Museum of California, the San Francisco History Collection at San Francisco Public Library, San Francisco Arts Commission, Alameda County Arts Commission, Cleveland Clinic, University of Iowa Museum and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, among others. She lives with her wife, artist, teacher and illustrator, Miriam Klein Stahl, and their daughter in Berkeley, California.
Artist Website@lenawolffstudio
