Kija Lucas is an artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She uses photography to explore ideas of home, heritage and inheritance. She is interested in how ideas are passed down and seemingly inconsequential moments create changes that last generations.
Her work has been exhibited at Oakland Museum of California, Anglim Gilbert Gallery, Headlands Center for the Arts, San Francico Arts Commission Galleries, California Institute of Integral Studies, Palo Alto Arts Center, Intersection for the Arts, Mission Cultural Center, and Root Division, as well as Venice Arts in Los Angeles, CA, La Sala d’Ercole/Hercules Hall in Bologna Italy, and Casa Escorsa in Guadalajara, Mexico. Lucas has been an Artist in Residence at Montalvo Center for the Arts, Grin City Collective, and The Wassaic Artist Residency. She is a member of 3.9 Art Collective and the Curatorial Council at Southern Exposure. Lucas received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and her MFA from Mills College.
Features and Highlights
“The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy”
48hills.org
March 5, 2021
San Francisco artist Kija Lucas’s work upends the idea of “value” in art by focusing on the deep meaning and memory we attach to those special objects in our lives—a carved wooden sparrow, a $2 bill, an anime lunchbox, a ’90s mixtape—that help define our sense of self.
Lucas’s ongoing project, The Museum of Sentimental Taxonomy (formerly Objects to Remember You By: An Index of Sentiment), asks participants to share these intimate artifacts with her, which she then arranges and photographs against a plain black background, as the participants relate the stories attached to each personal totem.