Two CCA faculty win SFMOMA’s SECA Art Award
Congratulations to Illustration faculty member Lauren D’Amato and Associate Professor of Critical Studies and Graduate Fine Arts Angela Hennessy.
In April, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) announced the three artist recipients of the prestigious SECA Art Award. Among them are members of the California College of the Arts community. Congratulations to CCA faculty member in Illustration Lauren D’Amato and alum and Associate Professor of Graduate Fine Arts Angela Hennessy (BFA Jewelry and Metal Arts 2001, MFA Textiles 2005) who won the award alongside fellow Bay Area artist Rupy C. Tut.
The SECA (Society for the Encouragement of Contemporary Art) Award has honored Bay Area artists with an exhibition at SFMOMA and an accompanying exhibition since 1967. The award honors Bay Area artists whose work has not, at the time of nomination, been accorded substantial recognition from a major institution. Later this year, they will present new and recent work in an exhibition at SFMOMA’s Art of California galleries (December 14, 2024–May 25, 2025).
The faculty members’ artistic practices vary across mediums in a diverse range of themes and subject matter.
Lauren D’Amato. Photo by Chris Longyne. Courtesy of SFMOMA.
Lauren D’Amato is a pinstriper and painter living and working in San Francisco. At CCA she teaches hand-lettering in the Illustration program. D’Amato is a second-generation sign painter and is drawn to decorative folk arts, hand-lettering, and the iconic imagery tied to her upbringing and experience pinstriping and lettering on lowriders.
D’Amato is currently the Headlands Center for the Arts Tournesol Awardee for 2023–24 where she is building on her body of work that draws from the visual landscape of San Francisco. She holds a BFA in Painting (2016) from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Angela Hennessy. Photo by Pat Mazzera. Courtesy of SFMOMA.
Angela Hennessy is an Oakland-based artist and associate professor at CCA where she teaches courses on visual and cultural narratives of death in contemporary art. She also teaches courses in the Textiles program. In her own work, she constructs sculptures and installations with everyday domestic labor—washing, wrapping, stitching, knotting, brushing, and braiding.
In 2015 she survived a gunshot wound while interrupting an assault in front of her home. In the months following her recovery, she wrote “The School of the Dead,” her manifesto which alternates between poem and prayer.
Her work has been featured in exhibitions at McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, Museum of the African Diaspora, Oakland Museum of California, and Pt. 2 Gallery, and is in the collections of the de Young Museum and the Crocker Art Museum. She holds a BFA in Jewelry and Metal Arts (2001) and an MFA in Textiles from CCA (2005).
Additionally, CCA alumni Libby Black (MFA Painting and Drawing 2001), Trina Michele Robinson (MFA Fine Arts 2022), and Arleene Correa Valencia (BFA Individualized Studies 2018, MFA Fine Arts 2020) were also among the 16 SECA Art Award finalists announced earlier in the year. Congratulations!
