Camille Hoffman’s practice is a ceremony of reconfiguration and critical reflection on the romantic American landscape. Considering the embedded and latent meanings around light, nature, the frontier, borders, race, gender and power in influential American landscape paintings of past centuries, she uses materials collected from childhood and her everyday life, including holiday-themed tablecloths, discarded medical records, printed nature calendars, plastics and paint, to craft imaginary landscapes that are grounded in accumulation, personal narrative, and historical critique. Her paintings and installations are layered geographies, in which these fragments of cultural objects are chromatically twisted and blended into complex wholes. Taking inspiration from the Philippine weaving and storytelling traditions of her ancestors, along with traditional landscape painting techniques from her academic training, she interweaves image with refuse in order to reveal seamless yet textured transcultural contradictions. Disrupting visual perception, her scraps of materials take on new life, becoming a vehicle of territorial reclamation and spiritual agency for the artist amid the pressures of climate change as well as political and economic globalization.
Camille Hoffman (b. 1987, Chicago, IL) earned an MFA from Yale University (2015), a BFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and was a recipient of the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for excellence in painting from Yale University, a National Endowment for the Arts scholarship, a Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarship, and the Van Lier Fellowship from the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD). She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and in Europe, and has been featured in publications including Art in America and The New Yorker. Solo exhibitions include See and Missed at San Luis Obispo Museum of Art (2022), Landing For Lolo at NADA House Governors Island (2021), Excelsior: Ever Upward, Ever Afloat at the Queens Museum (2019), and Pieceable Kingdom at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2018). Prominent group exhibitions include Here We Land at Wave Hill (2019), A Thousand Plateaus at Jenkins Johnson Gallery, LifeWtr Open Gallery at Lincoln Center & Times Square, New York, NY (2017), and Music and Conversation at Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT (2015). Hoffman has been an artist-in-residence at Fountainhead, Miami, FL (2021); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council SU-CASA (2019); Artist in the Marketplace (AIM) at Bronx Museum, New York, NY (2018); Children's Museum of Manhattan, New York, NY (2018); Wave Hill Winter Workspace, Bronx, NY (2018); QueenSpace, Long Island City, NY (2017); Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY (2017); and the Yale University Office of New Haven and State Affairs, New Haven, CT (2015). Hoffman has also worked for 16 years as an arts educator and community organizer in Phoenix, the San Francisco Bay Area, New Haven, and New York City. She currently lives and works in New York, NY, teaches at The Cooper Union and Yale University.
