Tracy Grubbs

Website: https://www.tracygrubbs.com

Bio: Tracy Grubbs (b. 1964, Pittsburgh, PA) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores impermanence, interconnection, and the liminal space between self and other. She utilizes painting, mixed media and performance to create works that draw on her background in environmental conservation and her decades-long spiritual practice. Grubbs earned a BA in Environmental Studies and Political Philosophy from St. Lawrence University and has studied art and art history at U.C. Berkeley, The San Francisco Art Institute and the Academy of Art of Art University in San Francisco. She regularly attends workshops by the artist and educator duo Rosenclaire outside Florence, Italy. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, most recently at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. Other venues include the Headlands Center for the Arts, Round Weather Gallery in Oakland, the Morris Graves Museum of Art, and the Marin MOCA. In 2022, she was nominated for the SECA Artist Award sponsored by the San Francisco MOMA. And in 2023 she received an Artist Grant from the San Francisco Arts Commission. Her collaborative street performances with choreographer Hope Mohr were featured in the International Colloquium on Art History in Mexico City in 2021. She continues to work on The Gift, a project which shifts the cultural capital of art away from the market by finding alternative ways for paintings to circulate. Grubbs currently lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

Statement: I make paintings, collages, drawings and street performances that highlight the fundamentals of interconnection and impermanence, often exploring the liminal space between self and other. The Deer is a series of ink on paper drawings inspired by a poem by Laurie Sheck. In the poem, an encounter with an injured deer becomes an existential meditation on human life and on the slippery nature of perception. These ink on paper portraits are made using a wet-on-wet technique that is both unpredictable and exacting in its effort to capture the spirit rather than the precise likeness of an individual. The wet ink, like Sheck’s poem, asks me to wrestle with the slippery nature of the form until something like a deer emerges from the interplay of light and shadow.