BIO

Airyka Rockefeller is a San Francisco-based artist originally from a small island in the Pacific Northwest. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York with a BA in cultural studies and photography, and received her MFA from California College of the Arts in 2005. She has lived abroad in India, Lithuania and the Czech Republic.

Her ongoing series of self-portraits, Between Or Before, is included in Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Art, a publication by Thames & Hudson. She is a recipient of a Photographic Center Northwest grant and completed artist residencies at Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA), Milkwood International (Czech Republic) and The Barli Institute for Rural Women (Indore, India).

Rockefeller's work has been shown in San Francisco at Silverman Gallery, New Langton Arts, Intersection for the Arts, and Jack Fisher Gallery; in NYC at Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery and Capricious Space; in Los Angeles at The Laguna Art Museum and The Outpost For Contemporary Art, in New Mexico at Central Features, and in Washington state at the Northwest Film Forum, Secluded Alley Works, the Seattle Art Museum, Lawrimore Projects, The Photographic Center Northwest, The Bellevue Art Museum and Bainbridge Island Arts & Humanities Gallery.

Rockefeller has lectured at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College and the European Humanities University. She has led photography workshops at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and screened short films in Berlin, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Rockefeller's art works turn attention to repurposed landscapes, worldly metamorphosis, and paradigms between the symbolic and factual value of things and places. Long fascinated by the popular tendency to monumentalize particular landscapes, architectures or objects, while determining others as insignificant, her work investigates the overlooked and the poetic.

For commissions, inquiries, or information on limited edition archival prints please email: airykarockefeller@gmail.com.

Exhibitions