Lexa Walsh is an artist, cultural worker and experience maker based in Oakland, CA. She employs social engagement, radical hospitality, performance, sculpture, installation, text and institutional critique in her projects, objects, and exhibitions. Her works become places for conversation, storytelling, collecting and classifying, and address subjects such as labor, power, and value.  

Walsh is a graduate of Portland State University’s Art & Social Practice MFA program and was Social Practice Artist in Residence in Portland Art Museum’s Education department. She was a recipient of Southern Exposure’s Alternative Exposure Award, the CEC Artslink Award, the Gunk Grant, the de Young Artist Fellowship, and Kala’s Print Public Residency Award. Walsh has participated in projects, exhibitions, and performances locally at the de Young, di Rosa, Exploratorium, Kala, Oakland Museum of California, NIAD, SFMOMA, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.  She has shown nationally at Apexart, Atlantic Center for the Arts, Portland Art Museum, Smack Mellon, Walker Art Center, Williams College Museum of Art, and has participated in several international artist residencies, tours, and projects in Europe and Taiwan.

Her upbringing as the youngest child of fifteen informs her work, as does practicing collectivity while coming of age in the Bay Area post-punk cultural scene of the 1990’s.  She founded the experimental music and performance venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. Walsh co-founded and conceived of the all-women, all-toy instrument ensemble Toychestra. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network micro-granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects, and the Bay Area Contemporary Arts Archive. She has been Culinary Artist in Residence at Atlantic Center for the Arts since 2014.

Website: www.lexawalsh.com