Primarily a painter, I use a hybrid visual language that is both abstract and figurative, and fuse domestic and landscape imagery. I build eccentric formats which promote an improvisational attitude toward composition and playfully references the disruption and dislocation characteristic of contemporary life.
In my work, as in life, the past permeates the present and the commonplace collides with the enigmatic and inexplicable.
I make short experimental films using stop motion technique that incorporates sound as well as written and spoken poetic text. Film making significantly broadens the content of my work, and naturally cross pollinates with my on going painting projects.
Drawing is the core of my studio practice and the engine that drives everything I make.
About
Miriam Hitchcock is a painter and experimental filmmaker whose work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. In 2021 her paintings were profiled and featured on the cover of the book, Artists of the Bay Area Volume 1, published by Jen Tough Gallery. Her most recent short film No Time, with soundtrack by Zoe Keating, was featured in the Mill Valley 45th Film Festival. Angels, They Say, (another of the eight short films that she has completed to date), based on the Duiño Elegies of Rainer Maria Rilke, was awarded Best Experimental Film in the Annual International Copenhagen Film Festival in 2018. Miriam is also the recipient of a Mid Atlantic/NEA Grant in Painting, and her works on paper are available to view or purchase in the Pierogi Gallery Flat Files in Brooklyn, New York.
Born in San Francisco, Miriam grew up in a nature-loving family on the peninsula at a time when there was still plenty of open space to enjoy. She completed a BFA at University of California at Santa Cruz and received an MFA in Painting from Yale University.
She is a seasoned instructor of studio courses in painting, drawing and design at all levels. Her teaching career began at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, where her daughter, now a screenwriter and filmmaker in Los Angeles, was born. As an Assistant Professor of Art at Cornell University she first led studio courses in Rome, Italy and years later created and taught a summer studio program that partnered the American University in Rome with U.C.S.C..
Returning to California to live in Santa Cruz in 1992, Miriam taught studio courses at Stanford University and San Jose State University and was a continuous member of the Art faculty at University of California Santa Cruz from 1992 until 2012. She now works full time in her studio in Santa Cruz.