Bio
Éamon McGivern (b.1990) is an artist from San Francisco who has spent the past eight years in the Bay Area painting portraits of queers, punks and poets. Éamon holds a BFA with honors in Painting from the Pratt Institute and an MA in Fine Arts from the Chelsea College. While at Pratt, he spent a formative semester abroad at Musashino Art University in Tokyo studying traditional Japanese painting and printmaking techniques.
Éamon has exhibited his work internationally and had solo shows at the Tenderloin Museum and GLBT Historical Society Museum here in San Francisco. He has been an artist in residence at the Bemis Center in Omaha, Tom of Finland Foundation in Los Angeles, Residency 11:11 in London, and now Root Division in San Francisco.
I am a visual artist based in San Francisco. For the past two years I have been developing a series of paintings using archival images from queer archives and the private collections of our elders. As a gay trans man who grew up in San Francisco at the height of the AIDS epidemic, I often wonder how my generation has been affected by the death of so many who would now be our teachers and mentors. By juxtaposing images of the past with paintings of my contemporary queer and trans community in the Bay Area I seek to restore right relationship between past and present. Blending signifiers of archival photography into the paintings allows me to play with the tension between time and timelessness.
Selected Work
