Carl Heyward is a Benicia-based contemporary artist whose paintings and collage works explore ideas of fragmentation. When manipulating materials in his process-focused practice, Heyward favors an instinctive approach that results in highly expressive works.

“I relate this process, this seeking, as revealing a sort of weather report of the soul and it is not always sunny and bright. There is who and what I think I am and there is this sort of printout of what is really happening.”

About his “Marking Time” series Sloan Miyasato says, "This work exists at the intersection of want and need; the subtle and the exuberant; the ethereal and the concrete.”

“SF like most art centers around the world and the USA is cliquish, self-important, myopic, and exclusive as far as access or real organic inclusion goes though it touts exactly the opposite of itself. It is ghettoized into cultural communities that rarely intersect except in the sense of appropriation or controlled "celebration" of diversity that foments the difference and ‘the other.’ While I lament this process across the board, I also understand it and do not depend upon it. For these reasons and others, I draw from other sources.”

In 2012 Carl was among a group of six international artists that developed GLOBAL ART PROJECT, a collaborative collective of what has grown to 78 working artists based in 17 countries. The resultant residencies, workshops, exhibitions, and actions allow artist-generated activity created by practitioners in all media as well as critics, gallerists, performers, curators, and educators that work within and without the gallery-museum system without eschewing either, just not defining their practice or depending exclusively upon these traditional systems”

Heyward’s art and artist books are held in numerous significant museum and institutional collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Yale University, National Gallery of Australia, and Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Feature Published: March 3, 2023
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