BIOGRAPHY
SHORT BIOGRAPHY
Christina McPhee makes collapsing and regenerating landscapes that blend technological precision with notions about place-making, spirituality, and more-than-human community. Recent solo exhibitions include: Museum of Contemporary Art-MCASB, Santa Barbara, CA, 2026; Performing Arts Center, San Luis Obispo, CA, 2024-25; KinoSaito Art Center, Verplanck, New York, 2022; and Irenic Projects, Pasadena, CA, 2020. Recent group shows include include Grief Work at Material, Salt Lake City, 2026; Echoes of Voynich: Coded Systems in Contemporary Art, at Wonzimer Gallery, Los Angeles, and Atmospheres of Sound: Sonic Art in Times of Climate Disruption, at UCLA's Sci-Art Lab with the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide, 2024; Here in a Homemade Forest: Common Reading Connections, at Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, Pullman, 2023-24; Otherwise/Revival at Bridge Projects, Los Angeles, 2021; among others. Carbon Song Cycle, a collaboration with Pamela Z for voice, electronics and expanded cinema, most recently was staged at the Exploratorium, San Francisco, in 2023. Her work is held in the public collections of the International Center of Photography, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Thresholds Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art; Great Plains Art Collection and Sheldon Art Museum, University of Nebraska - Lincoln; Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College, Claremont; Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit; among others. Born in Pomona, California, she lives as an uninvited guest on unceded lands of the Northern Chumash and Salinan communities in central coast California.
Through drawing as a trans-disciplinary practice, Christina McPhee grounds her work engages embodied knowledge and the sense of the open work. Across painting and drawing, as well as animated single and multichannel video, common ground is generated through serrated thresholds, linear pathways and iterative fields of nuanced color. Tension and resonance between spirituality and sense of place, handwriting and drawing, indeterminacy and the finite are dynamic folds in her work. Collage and transcription of literary texts develop a syntax around subversive beauty, strangeness, and joy in the face of struggle. Her work is motivated by Fluxus historically, and participates in reparations and healing through visual art practice at the crossovers and proximities of music, graphical scores, literary texts, and landscape research.
Solo museum exhibitions include KinoSaito Art Center, upstate New York; American University Museum / Katzen Art Center, Washington, DC; and Bildmuseet, Umeå, Sweden; among others. Her work has recently been exhibited in group exhibitions with Art/Science Lab, University of California-Los Angeles as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide; Wonzimer, Bridge Projects, and Beta Epochs, all in Los Angeles; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Washington State University, Pullman; Great Plains Art Museum at University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Museo de Arte Moderno, Medellín; Documenta 12, Kassel; Bucharest Biennial 3, Bucharest; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; among others. McPhee is the recipient of awards and grants including for Carbon Song Cycle (Pamela Z/Christina McPhee) from the National Endowment for the Arts via the Cinematic Arts Program Exploratorium, San Francisco (2023); Ucross Foundation Fellowship (2019); the MAP Fund for Carbon Song Cycle (2012); among others. Her work has been written about in publications including LUMart, Artspace Magazine, BOMB, Leonardo, Digicult, San Francisco Chronicle, LA Weekly, Los Angeles Times, and Artillery.
Christina McPhee's work is held in collections of the International Center of Photography, Rhizome Archive at the New Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, in New York; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; Thresholds Artspace, Perth, Scotland; Detroit Institute of Arts Museum, and others. Her writing appears in book and monograph collections published by Punctum, CTheory, and Intellect Books. After studies in art history and humanities at Scripps College, Claremont and the University of Nebraska, she received her BFA from Kansas City Art Institute, in painting and printmaking, and her MFA in painting from Boston University School of Visual Arts where she was a student of Philip Guston.
A descendent of Sorbian, Saxon, and Frisian immigrants to the midwest of Turtle Island, in the nineteenth century, Christina McPhee was born in Los Angeles County and grew up on the Great Plains of Turtle Island. She lives at tsɨskikiye, unceded traditional YTT Northern Chumash lands.
ARTIST RESUME: 2011-2026 3 PAGE SUMMARY