Laura Harden is a painter and photographer based in San Francisco.
Harden’s paintings engage the American colorist tradition which uses color as a strong basis and dominant force in structuring abstract imagery. Her work originates in the landscape with her canvases ranging from small works to larger-scale diptychs and triptychs. Similarly, Harden works with both the single image and diptychs in her photography, concentrating on light and shadow to visually structure her subject matter. She strives for mastery of the visual language, relevant expression of her individual sensibility, and an authentic contribution to the expanded field of art today.
In recent years, Harden’s paintings have been included in exhibitions including “Values: Drawing and Photography,” “Surface and Substance, Works on Paper,” and “The Nature of Landscape” at the SFSS Gallery, San Francisco. Her photography has been in exhibitions whose jurors include Sue Brisk of Magnum Photos; Robert Fitzpatrick, Director of Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Karen Haas, Museum of Fine Arts Boston; and Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. Harden was a semi-finalist at the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University and a finalist in Photographer’s Forum magazine’s “Best of Photography 2004.” She also won the “Arthur Griffin Legacy Award” in 2003.
Harden received her Bachelor of Arts from the American University in Washington, DC, and her MFA in photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco where she subsequently was a full time member of the graduate faculty. She has been noted by San Francisco art critic Kenneth Baker and has served as a member of the SFMOMA’s Photography Accessions Committee from 2007-2014. She also served as a panelist with curator Peter Selz discussing, “The Commoditization of Art and Its Significance to the Authentic Artist Today.”
Harden has a strong commitment to art education, has taught painting and photography for over a decade, and is co-founder and
Director of the San Francisco Studio School.