About

Laura Harden is a visual artist working in both painting and photography. For the past two decades, her work has concentrated on the landscape as metaphor and the abstract qualities of nature and color. Noted by the late San Francisco art critic Kenneth Baker, Harden’s painting is rooted in color as its dominant structural force. Her work has been widely exhibited, including in Values: Drawing and Photography, Surface and Substance: Works on Paper, and The Nature of Landscape at the SFSS Gallery in San Francisco. She participated as a panelist alongside curator Peter Selz, discussing The Commoditization of Art and Its Significance to the Authentic Artist Today. Her work was also featured in the 2020 Small Wonders exhibition by the Maryland Federation of Art, juried by Linda Crocker Simmons, curator emerita at the Corcoran Gallery of Art.

As a photographer, Harden was a semi-finalist at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies for her project Images From Arkansas and a finalist in Photographer’s Forum Magazine’s Best of Photography 2004. Photographs from her Arkansas project have appeared in numerous juried exhibitions, reviewed by notable jurors such as Sue Brisk of Magnum Photos, Robert Fitzpatrick, former Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Karen Haas of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Anne Wilkes Tucker, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. In 2003, Harden won the Arthur Griffin Legacy Award. From 2007 to 2014, she served on SFMOMA’s Photography Accessions Committee.

Among others, Harden has authored papers on The Working Methodologies of Alberto Giacometti and Sir William Coldstream, An Analysis of Albrecht Altdorfer’s Battle of Alexander at Issus, and The Sublime, Beauty, and Picasso’s Guernica. Since 2006, she has held the position of Director of the San Francisco Studio School and is currently developing special studies in the relationship between contemporary painting and art history.