Catherine Wagner (artist)

Catherine Wagner is an American conceptual artist whose process involves the investigation of what art critic David Bonetti called "the systems people create, our love of order, our ambition to shape the world, the value we place on knowledge, and the tokens we display to express ourselves." Wagner has created large-scale, site-specific public artworks for the cities of San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Jose, and Kyoto, Japan. She is currently working on commissions for the cities of Santa Monica and Seattle, as well as an installation for the San Francisco Arts Commission's Central Subway Public Art Program. In addition to being a practicing artist, Wagner has been a professor of art at Mills College in Oakland, California, since 1979. She has received many major awards, including the Rome Prize (2013–14), a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships, and the Ferguson Award. In 2001, Wagner was named one of TIME Magazine's Fine Arts Innovators of the Year. Her work is represented in major national and international collections, including those of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.