Stephen Westfall (b. 1953) received his MFA in 1978 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. His first solo show was at Tracey Garet in New York’s East Village in 1984. Exhibitions followed during the 1980s and 90s at Daniel Newburg Gallery, New York; Galerie Paal, Munich, Germany; Galerie Wilma Lock, St. Gallen, Switzerland; Andre Emmerich Gallery, New York; and Galerie Zurcher, Paris, France. Westfall has been represented by Lennon, Weinberg since 1997 and has had seven exhibitions at their locations in Soho and Chelsea in New York. He had his first show with David Richard Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico in 2015 and has recently collaborated with Polly Apfelbaum on exhibitions presented at Clement & Schneider in Bonn, Germany in 2014 and at The Suburban in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in 2015, where he showed rugs recently woven under his direction in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Westfall’s work has been included in several important thematic exhibitions of abstract paintings, including Conceptual Abstraction at the Hunter College Art Gallery in 2012. Survey exhibitions of his work were presented at Colgate University in 2000 and Western Carolina University in 1999.
He installed his first monumental wall paintings at Solvent Space in Richmond, Virginia in 2007, followed by others at the American Academy in Rome in 2010, and a permanent work installed at the Mason Gross Performing Arts Center at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey in 2014. An exhibition at Art OMI in 2014 featured two very large wall paintings. He was commissioned by the Museum of Art, Architecture and Design at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2015 to create a permanent outdoor wall painting and a second large work for the museum’s Nachman Gallery. A wall painting installation in the AT&T Lobby at the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas remains on view through July 2016.
Works by the artist are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, the Louisiana Museum in Humlebaek, Denmark, the Munson Williams Proctor Museum in Utica, New York, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the UBS Art Collection.
Westfall has received grants and awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Nancy Graves Foundation, and the Guggenheim Foundation. He received a Rome Prize Fellowship and spent a year at the American Academy in Rome during 2009 and 2010. He is a professor at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and in the graduate program at Bard University. He is a Contributing Editor at Art in America.