New Work: Anna Sew Hoy

Los Angeles–based sculptor Anna Sew Hoy’s Growing Ruins rise from the floor in a mesmerizing tangle of hand-built clay arches, found metal cages, and detritus ranging from charging cords to denim scraps. They recall the ruins of a lost city or shelters assembled from the shiny, tech-laden remains of a land destroyed. Three of these towering forms take center stage in Sew Hoy’s New Work exhibition at SFMOMA, alongside coiled clay vessels that recall giant, cartoonish organs and vast fabric webs created by stripping office shirts down to their seams. Taken together, the sculptures embody Sew Hoy’s interest in turning things inside out to explore the relationship between the exterior world (of bodies, buildings, and objects) and interior space (of psyches, emotions, and souls)—and the inevitable porousness between them.

About Anna Sew Hoy:

Sew Hoy is represented in museum collections including SFMOMA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego. She has had solo exhibitions at the Aspen Art Museum; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Hammer Museum; the San Jose Museum of Art; and the Orange County Museum of Art. Honors include the Guggenheim Fellowship for Visual Art (2022); Anonymous Was A Woman Award (2021); Creative Capital Grant for Visual Art (2015); California Community Foundation Grant for Emerging Artists (2013); and the United States Artists Broad Fellowship (2006). In 2017, she was the inaugural Martha Longenecker Roth Distinguished Artist in Residence at the UC San Diego Department of Visual Arts. Sew Hoy is currently Associate Professor and Ceramics Area Head at the University of California, Los Angeles.