AIRYKA ROCKEFELLER PHOTOGRAPHY

BIO

Airyka Rockefeller is a San Francisco-based artist, photographer and mother originally from a small island in the Pacific Northwest. She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in New York with a Bachelor in cultural studies and filmmaking, and received her Masters in Fine Arts from California College of the Arts in 2005.

Whether it’s a personal project or an assignment, she is a multidisciplinary thinker and brings curiosity, thoughtfulness and twenty years of experience to collaborations large and small. Airyka’s commissioned photographs span diverse fields of art & design, food & beverage, and interiors & gardens to create compelling, editorial images. Her empathy, eye for detail and quiet observational skills help her to create evocative imagery for many artists + creative organizations, businesses + brands.

Airyka wandered a circuitous path to photography and wears many hats. In her twenties she spent time living and photographing in India, Lithuania and the Czech Republic, later working in the culinary, publishing and design worlds in San Francisco. She is the founder of REALM, an interview-based project exploring concepts of home, and co-founder of Amending, an ephemeral retail shop featuring functional items for home and body. Her longstanding artworks, spanning collage, film and self-portraiture, can be explored here.

Her work has included commissions and collaborations with Auteur Wines, BK Interiors, Bryan Jones Catering, California Closets, Cooper Hewitt, Cottages & Gardens Magazine, Design Within Reach, Edible Magazine, Fern, Godfrey Dadich, Grey Magazine, Headlands Center for the Arts, Liis Frangrances, Luxe Magazine, Montalvo Arts Center, ParkLife, The Petaler, Presqu’ile Wines, Preston Farm and Winery, Neu Haus Press, Julia Sherman, San Francisco Art Book Fair, Scribe Winery, TALC Studio  - and others.

Her ongoing series of self-portraits, Between Or Before, is included in Auto Focus: The Self-Portrait in Contemporary Art, a publication by Thames & Hudson. She is a recipient of a Photographic Center Northwest grant and completed artist residencies at Montalvo Arts Center (Saratoga, CA), Milkwood International (Czech Republic) and The Barli Institute for Rural Women (Indore, India).

Rockefeller's personal artwork has been shown in San Francisco at Silverman Gallery, New Langton Arts, Intersection for the Arts, and Jack Fisher Gallery; in NYC at Sara Tecchia Roma Gallery and Capricious Space; in Los Angeles at The Laguna Art Museum and The Outpost For Contemporary Art, in New Mexico at Central Features, and in Washington state at the Northwest Film Forum, Secluded Alley Works, the Seattle Art Museum, Lawrimore Projects, The Photographic Center Northwest, The Bellevue Art Museum and Bainbridge Island Arts & Humanities Gallery.

Rockefeller has lectured at UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, Sarah Lawrence College and the European Humanities University. She has led photography workshops at Peabody Essex Museum in Salem and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco and screened short films in Berlin, San Francisco, and Seattle.

Rockefeller's art works turn attention to repurposed landscapes, worldly metamorphosis, and paradigms between the symbolic and factual value of things and places. Long fascinated by the popular tendency to monumentalize particular landscapes, architectures or objects, while determining others as insignificant, her work investigates the overlooked and the poetic.