Lexa Walsh

Lexa Walsh

Lexa Walsh

Creator Bio

LEXA WALSH IS AN ARTIST, CULTURAL WORKER AND EXPERIENCE MAKER BASED OAKLAND, CA.

Walsh makes projects, exhibitions, objects, and some music, employing social engagement, institutional critique, radical hospitality and community building in her practice. She works as an arts laborer, organizer, curator and archivist, too. She is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department. She was a recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant, the de Young Artist Fellowship, and Kala’s Print Public Residency Award. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions and performances locally at the de Young, di Rosa, Exploratorium, Kala, Oakland Museum of California, NIAD, SFMOMA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. She has shown nationally at Apexart, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Portland Art Museum, Smack Mellon, Walker Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, and has done several international artist residencies, tours and projects in Europe and Taiwan.

Her upbringing as the youngest child of fifteen informs her work, as does practicing collectivity while coming of age in the Bay Area post punk cultural scene of the 1990’s. She founded the experimental music and performance venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. Walsh co-founded and conceived of the all women, all toy instrument ensemble Toychestra. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects. She has recently launched the Bay Area Contemporary Arts Archive (BACAA).