Catherine Wang McMahon

(b. 1999, San Francisco, CA) is an artist whose practice explores the complexities of kinship through ecological and transgenerational landscapes. Their work challenges dominant narratives and legacies of extraction, exploitation, and destruction across borders and barriers. Through site-responsive works, they engage relationships between land, memory, and inheritance, rooted in a belief in the vital life force of nature (氣, qi, प्राण, prana, força vital).

Shaped by Catherine’s multicultural family history, with parents who are immigrants from China, India, and Brazil, their practice moves across traditions and borders rather than inheriting a single dominant lineage. Drawing from ritual and craft traditions, they reimagine painting through a diasporic lens that decenters the Western canon, informed by Asian landscape scrolls, Indian miniatures, and the decolonial hybridity of Brazilian Tropicália. Working exclusively with plant-based materials and hand-made earth and mineral pigments on handmade paper and grommeted linen, Catherine finds in this rootlessness a deeper belonging to the land, to one another, and to the shared futures we are called to tend.

EMAIL
catherinewmcmahon (at) gmail (dot) com

Curriculum Vitae

GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2026 Future Finds, Bathers Library, Oakland, CA, USA
2025 ART FWD: 5x5x5, MarinMOCA, San Rafael, CA, USA
2025 Benefit Art Auction, ICA San José, San José, CA, USA
Adobe Books Fundraiser, Adobe Books & Arts Cooperative, San Francisco, CA, USA
Americana Landscape, Parts Peculiar, San Francisco, CA, USA
Lay of the Land, Root Division, San Francisco, CA, USA
2024 Hot Mess, Developing Environments, San Francisco, CA, USA
Truth As A Necessity, Galleria Boheme, San Francisco, CA, USA
2023 Pyramid Scheme, Bass & Reiner, Minnesota Street Project, San Francisco, CA, USA
2022 Will There Really Be A Morning, NYU The Commons and Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY, USA
Retro/Intro, NYU IFA Curatorial Collaborative, New York, NY, USA
Natural Habitats, Cabrillo Gallery, Aptos, CA, USA (Juried by Seagar Gray Gallery)
2021 Queer Art, FUZE, New York, NY, USA
2020 BFA, Serving the People, Augmented Reality
2019 Dinner Party, NYU Rosenberg Gallery, New York, NY, USA

SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2025 The Land Bears Witness, MADSEN, Los Altos, CA, USA
2023 California Nature, Four Chicken Gallery, San Francisco, CA, USA
2019 Portraits from Home, Pacific Felt Factory, San Francisco, CA, USA

ART FAIRS
2026 San Francisco Art Fair, with MADSEN Gallery (Los Altos, CA), Fort Mason Festival Pavilion, San Francisco, CA, USA

PUBLIC PROGRAMS
2026 (forthcoming, May 29, 2026) Artist Talk, Speaker Series: Friends of China Camp (FOCC), China Camp State Park, San Rafael, CA, USA
Artist Workshop, Handmade Pigments from Natural Materials, Bathers Library, Oakland, CA, USA

EDUCATION
2022 BFA, Studio Art, New York University, New York, NY
2019 Study Abroad, New York University, Paris, France

ROLES
Present AIR Program Specialist, Recology San Francisco Artist in Residence Program, San Francisco, CA
2026 Juror, San Francisco Women Artists (SFWA), Parched: A Show About Water, San Francisco, CA
2025 Juror, David Brower Center, Art/Act: Local 2025, Berkeley, CA
2022-23 Gallery Manager, Micki Meng Gallery (Friends Indeed), San Francisco, CA
2021-22 Painting Restoration Apprentice, Chelsea Restoration Associates, Inc., Bronx, NY

SELECT PRESS
2025 Purohit, Shrey. “Lay of the Land: Observations from an Immigrant Viewer.” Roborant Review, 6 July 2025.

Bravo, Tony. “Get the ‘Lay of the Land’ at Root Division.” San Francisco Chronicle – Datebook, 6 June 2025.

2021 Harshaw, Pendarvis. “OK, But... What is Solidarity?”, KQED. 20 May 2021.

GRANTS, ETC.

2021 SNF Grant, Intersection for the Arts, San Francisco, CA
2020 Alternative Exposures Grant, Southern Exposure, San Francisco, CA
Artistic Practice Award, New York University, New York, NY
Global Pathways Scholarship, New York University, Paris, France
2017-22 Steinhardt Studio Art Scholarship, New York University, NY

Work

© 2026 Catherine Wang McMahon. All Rights Reserved.