Angela West

Eighth Grade Dance (May 1985), 2005

Angela West Biography Angela West (b. 1971) captures the delicate interplay between time, memory, and place in her evocative body of work. With a 25-year history at Jackson Fine Art, where she has been featured in six solo and six group exhibitions, Angela West is celebrated for her ability to navigate the intimate and communal aspects of life in the South. Her recent work merges photography and painting, reflecting a personal exploration of domesticity and its historical impact on women’s artistic expression. In each project, Angela West ’s attention to life, landscape, and the passage of time conveys affection and unsentimental realism. Born and raised in Dahlonega, Georgia, Angela West earned her BFA from the University of Georgia in 1995 and later received her MFA from Yale University in 2000, where she was awarded the George Sakier Memorial Award for Excellence in Photography. Angela West ’s deep connection to her hometown and her role as a female artist in the South have been central to her artistic practice. Her work often explores how the limitations of domestic life, particularly after marriage and children, shape a woman’s ability to explore the world. This realization prompted her shift to combine photography, an art form requiring a physical presence, with painting, to underscore the historical constraints on women’s exploration. Angela West ’s photography has been featured in numerous high-profile exhibitions, including at the Pinchuk Art Centre in Kyiv, Modern 07 in Munich, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. Her work is held in major collections such as the High Museum of Art, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Hirshhorn Museum, and the Sir Elton John Collection. Angela West was the recipient of a 2009 Artadia Award for her contributions to contemporary photography. In her most recent body of work, Angela West continues her investigation into women’s roles within the home, blending romantic, symbolically feminine imagery with titles inspired by feminist literature and mythology. Her paintings, created with acrylic on high-gloss photographs, question the boundaries between photography and painting, creating a dialogue between the hand and the machine. Angela West ’s work is currently included in the traveling exhibition A Long Arc - Photography and the American South since 1850, which originated at the High Museum of Art in 2023 and is now on view at the Addison Gallery of American Art and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.