about lisa

Lisa Solomon was born in Tucson Arizona, but has lived most of her life in California. She currently resides in Oakland with her husband, kiddo, a 3 legged pit bull, a small scruffy dachshund/terrier mutt, a 3 legged cat, a fluffy gray kitty, a bearded dragon and many, many spools of thread [Gutterman is her favorite brand]. She received her BA in Art Practice from UC Berkeley in 1995 and her MFA from Mills College in 2003. Her work is shown internationally and is in numerous public and private collections.

Profoundly interested in the idea of hybridization [sparked from her Hapa heritage – she is ½ Japanese and ½ Caucasian], Solomon’s mixed media works revolve thematically around discovering her heritage, the notion of domesticity, craft, feminism, and the pursuit of art as science/research. She is frankly obsessed with color/color theory and is drawn to found objects, tending to alter them conceptually so that their meanings and original uses or intents are re-purposed. She often fuses “wrong” things together – recontextualizing their original purposes, and incorporating materials that inherently question and skirt the line between ART and CRAFT.

Ms. Solomon’s work was featured in a monograph entitled Hand/Made published by MIEL press in 2013. In August 2019 her book A Field Guide to Color - a watercolor workbook all about color and color theory was published by Roost Books. It quickly became the #1 watercolor book on Amazon and was followed up by A Color Meditation Deck. In 2021 her pandemic writing project    Crayola: A Visual History of the World's Most Famous Crayon was released by Black Dog and Leventhal. In 2012 she authored a book on embroidery published by Quarry press entitled Knot Thread Stitch. Her illustrations were used for a book entitled Draw 500 Everyday Things   [Fall 2016] which was a pocket follow up to her book 20 Ways to Draw a Chair and 44 other Magnificent Every Day Objects released in the Fall of 2015. Please see her CV for an extensive list of where her drawings, mixed media works and installations have been featured.

Lisa has also been an educator for 20+ years teaching extensively in college classrooms, online with CreativeBug, and all over the world in all kinds of workshops. Please see the teaching page for more info or click on the say hello button below to inquire about having her teach or lecture.