Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1976, Rojas currently works in San Francisco and is an integral member of the Mission School. She works between many artistic disciplines, including painting, drawing, sculpture, video, and music, and plays guitar and banjo under the stage name Peggy Honeywell. The driving force behind her creative impulse is the act of reduction, which Rojas uses to simplify concepts into universal themes in order to communicate with her viewers and listeners. Inspired by folk art, Rojas’ aesthetic has moved from the figurative into the abstract in her more recent work. She derives motifs from Native American textiles, Quaker Art, and Byzantine mosaics, but one universal thread unites all of her works: the impulse to tell a story. Her work addresses gender roles and female sexuality, the relationship between humans and nature, and the universality of forms found in our environment. Tending toward geometric abstraction, Rojas’ pieces reflect our own collective search for harmony and balance. Clare Rojas married fellow Mission School artist Barry McGee in 2005. In terms of public commissions, she is known for her series of panels Blue Deer (2006-07) installed at the SFO International Terminal, as well as her 2014 mural at 982 Market Street on the side of the Warfield Theater. Recent projects include a site-specific commission for the Art in Embassies Program in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico (2018), and two-person exhibition with Barry McGee at the Watari Museum, in Tokyo, Japan (2017). Her work has been reviewed in the Huffington Post, ARTFORUM, Art in America, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, and Art Review.
