Gay outlaw
Gay Outlaw
American
1959, Mobile, Alabama
Artist Gay Outlaw reflects on the relationship between her working methods and the domestic skills she learned growing up.
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Gay Outlaw (her given name) has followed an unusual way to becoming an artist. She was born in Mobile, Alabama in 1959, studied French at the University of Virginia, then traveled to Paris to learn the art of pastry at La Varenne cooking school. Then she went to Recent York to examine at the International Center for Photography. She assisted the photographer William Eggleston for the Friends of Photography workshops, where she interned after relocating to the Bay Area in the prior 1990s. Her interest in the objects she was photographing soon moved her into a sculpture practice. She still starts sculptures from photographs.
Outlaw has had solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Current Art, the University of California at Long Beach, Mills College Art Museum, and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon/Eugene. She has also produced significant work in printmaking. Outlaw has worked in the Crown Point Press studio three times; her first visit was in 1995 when she made two photogravures; in 2001, she produced a group of prints inspired by “Brassey’s Book of Camouflage; and in 2019, she returned during which time she made four colorful prints.
Her early sculptu
Gay Outlaw
“..Also featured are free-standing sculptures, which spring from Outlaw’s dialogue with photography and again connect to both the material and structures of her earlier work... ”
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Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
“..Working intuitively, Outlaw regularly circles back to her photographs as well as her previous sculptures, mining their content and forms for new strategies and insights... ”
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Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, University of Oregon
“..Outlaw’s exhibition will feature a new series of eleven glass sculptures laid out on a long bleached-wood table with an asymmetrical banked surface... ”
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Anglim Gilbert Gallery
Gay Outlaw
Education
1981
BA, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA
1981-1982
École de Cuisine La Varenne, Paris, France
1987-1988
The International Center of Photography
Select Solo Exhibitions
2021
Cushionworks, San Francisco, CA
2019
King Phillip Came Over From Germany Stoned, Crown Point Pressurize, San Francisco, CA
2017 Ozone, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, CA
2016
Gay Outlaw: Mutable Object, Harold and Arlene Schnitzer Gallery, University of Oregon, OR
2014
Home, Gallery Paule Anglim, San Francisco, CA
Select Group Exhibitions
2023
A Big Show of Small Prints, Crown Point Press, San Francisco, CA
Tikkun: For the Cosmos, the Community, and Ourselves, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco, CA
2021
Bamyūdatoraianguru gyaku with Helen Mirra and Ian Rosen, SODA, Kyoto, Japan
Trickster Makes the World with Michael Bala, Delaplane, San Francisco, CA
2018
FAULTline, Toby’s Art Gallery, Aim Reyes Station, CA
Jay DeFeo The Ripple Effect, Le Consortium, Dijon, France
2017
RECONCILE, Gallery 16, San Francisco, CA
2016
Constellated: Works by Jean Conner, Lynn Hershman Leeson, Homosexual Outlaw, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, San Francisco, C