Amy Trachtenberg (b. 1955) was raised in the rustbelt city of Pittsburgh, PA. Her work spans a multidisciplinary practice based in painting and expanded to sculpture, collage, installation, public commissions, and collaborative work in performance spaces. Beyond their abstract leanings, the tactile qualities of the work are characterized by a tension between politics and poetics.
Her work has been shown at and is held in the public collections of Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, The San Jose Museum of Art, The Crocker Museum, The Achenbach Collection of the Fine Arts Museums in San Francisco, The Haitian Embassy in Paris, and The DeMenil Collection in New York. She has exhibited in solo and group exhibits at Catharine Clark Gallery, Anglim Gilbert, Brian Gross Fine Art, The Luggage Store, and Right Window in San Francisco. Designs for theater, opera, and dance have been seen at ODC, The Magic Theater, Langton Arts, and The Lab in San Francisco, and in Chartres, Vézelay, and Dijon, France. Her permanent public art projects include Verdigris, the façade design for The C.W. Jung Institute on Mission Street in San Francisco, and Ecstatic Voyaging, the tiled passenger platform of the Milpitas BART Station in Silicon Valley; an accordion book for Pixar Studios in Emeryville; collaborations with Jeffrey Miller on Songs of Four Motions at UCLA Olive View Mental Health Clinic; Groundwork at Hillview Library in San Jose, CA; and The Creekside Studio at Montalvo Arts Center in Saratoga, CA. Trachtenberg has been awarded residencies at Lucas Artists at Montalvo Arts Center, KALA Arts, The Mesa Refuge, InCahoots, the Symposium of Contemporary Art in Angoulême, France, and was a 2023 Fellow at LABA Bay. Upcoming exhibits include a group show at Anglim Gilbert, and solo exhibits at 500 Capp Street and at Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, where she has been represented since 2021. Trachtenberg has lived in the Pacific city of San Francisco since 1983.
