Martin Venezky

Martin Venezky is an artist, photographer, and designer who examines the relationships between objects, form, drawing, and images. Join us as he explores his work, which ranges from intimate gatherings of discarded items to expansive installations that cover entire walls.

Meet our guest speaker:

Martin Venezky is an artist, photographer, and designer exploring relationships between objects, form, drawing, and the image. His work shifts scale from intimate gatherings of discarded objects to expansive wall-sized installations.

In 2001 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art honored Venezky with a solo exhibition, and in 2005 his monograph It Is Beautiful...Then Gone was published by Princeton Architectural Press.

Venezky has an undergraduate degree in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College and, in 2024 Venezky completed a second MFA in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art, thirty years after receiving his first MFA in 2D Design from the same institution.  

He has taught at RISD and CalArts and, for more than thirty years, at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, where he is currently Professor Emeritus in the MFA Design Program. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, and San Francisco’s Letterform Archive.

Venezky continues to lecture, offer workshops, and display his work to a wide international audience. Most recently he was awarded a three-week residency in Halsnøy, Norway, and a three-month residency at the University of Arkansas Fort Smith, both of which resulted in exhibitions of the work made on site.

In 2018 Mike Slane and his studio, Practice, filmed a short documentary about Venezky's photo and design work, as well as his studio and collections. Watch it here.