Anna Sew Hoy New Zealand, b. 1976

Anna Sew Hoy utilizes sculpture, ceramics, public art and performance to connect with our environment, and to demonstrate the power found in the fleeting and handmade. Her work has been at the forefront of a re-engagement with clay in contemporary art and is identified with a critical rethinking of the relationship between art and craft. 

Sew Hoy’s work is in the collections of the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego. Solo presentations of Sew Hoy’s work have been mounted at the Aspen Art Museum, Colorado; the MOCA Storefront, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Koenig & Clinton, New York; LAXART; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the California Biennial 2008 at the Orange County Museum of Art. Most recently, Sew Hoy was recipient of the 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman Award. In 2018 she was the inaugural Martha Longenecker Roth Distinguished Artist in Residence at UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts. She was awarded a Creative Capital Grant for Visual Art in 2015 to support her public sculpture Psychic Body Grotto. She was awarded the California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists in 2013, and the United States Artists Broad Fellowship in 2006. Sew Hoy’s largest public sculpture to date, Psychic Body Grotto opened at the Los Angeles State Historic Park in Spring 2017. She is Associate Professor and Ceramics Area Head at University of California, Los Angeles.