bio

Hargrave has been painting and working in clay since college, where she studied color theory, ceramics, sculpture, drawing, painting, as well as creative writing.  She has shown her work in Seattle, Minneapolis, San Luis Obispo, Santa Fe, Brooklyn, NY, Manhattan, Truro, MA and Atlanta.   Her paintings are in several corporate collections including Seattle’s University House, Swedish Hospital and the University of Washington Medical Center, Barclays International in Texas, the Abri Hotel in San Francisco, the Woodmark Hotel in Kirkland, and Kaiser Permanente in Baltimore.  Over the past 19 years she has had 20 solo shows, been in 13 2-3 person shows, and participated in 79 group shows.  Her work was recently accepted into the Bainbridge Island Museum of Art’s Spotlight Group Exhibit scheduled for June 2023.

In 2014 she was a panelist for Inside Art at Seattle’s Town Hall and in the accompanying exhibit curated by Juan Alonso-Rodriquez.  Her collaborative work with RobRoy Chalmers was on the cover of New York’s Art Voices Magazine, and she was published in Jennifer Margell’s book Encaustic Art.  In 2015 she juried the Mercer Island Art Council’s Annual Art Show, and her work Capra Hircus 3 was selected into the Encaustic Art Institute’s permanent collection.  In 2016 she received a grant to complete a collaborative permanent art installation at Einstein Middle School featuring the work of over 120 students.  That same year she was given the William Radcliffe Studio Challenge Award during the Kirkland Art Center’s auction and awarded a project grant from International Encaustic Artists.  With her Shift Gallery colleagues, she was juried into the International Seattle Art Fair in 2017, 2018 & 2019. She participated in two Brooklyn, NY based residencies in 2019 with celebrated encaustic artist Michael David, one focused on the city’s art fairs, the other on critical thinking.  In February 2020 she moved to New York as the director of virtual online programming for M. David & Co. and was a resident for 2 months at Judy Pfaff’s art compound in Tivoli, NY.  That same year she was the juror for Lynn Hanson Gallery’s ICON exhibition.  She has done numerous commissions, and donated work to art auctions annually since 2005.  She has taught privately for over 20 years and has instructed workshops at both Pratt Fine Arts Center and Northwest Encaustic in Seattle, as well as Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill in Massachusetts, where in June she demonstrated at the International Encaustic Conference.  

She moved from Brooklyn back to Seattle in mid-September 2022 to focus on sculpture, although she still does encaustic paintings and works on paper.  Her 25-year studio practice is her very nucleus.

Click to see Video by Aaron Bourget