Josh Faught

Josh Faught is a San Francisco-based fiber artist (born 1979, St. Louis, Missouri) who creates sculptures and multimedia installations. His work incorporates techniques such as knitting, crochet, and weaving and addresses topics of craft and queer history. His fiber sculptures, influenced both by domestic crafts and by art styles such as abstract and color field painting, are often either hung on the wall or stretched over scaffolding such as garden trellises; they are three-dimensional but forward-oriented.

Faught graduated from Oberlin College in 2001. He earned an AAS in Textile and Surface Design from FIT in 2004 and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006.

In 2012, the work It Takes a Lifetime to Get Exactly Where You Are included a section that used weaving to replicate a segment of the AIDS Memorial Quilt. It Takes a Lifetime evokes the mixed history of the feminist craft revival of the 1970s and the concurrent AIDS crisis. It also assesses the legacy of the AIDS Memorial Quilt, which was criticized during its early years for sentimentality and a lack of political direction. It Takes a Lifetime recognizes the "grassroots networks for caregiving and other support that are not easily integrated into official histories and are often subject to dismissal as merely creative, ameliorative, or apolitical."

In 2013, Faught, commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, created an installation for the Neptune Society Columbarium in San Francisco. The major element, Untitled (2013) consisted of a large panel, both woven and crocheted, hung from the central archway of the Columbarium. The panel incorporated various objects that mimicked offerings left by the niches, such as plastic food, pins, and greeting cards. Untitled (2013) addresses issues of memorialization in a sympathetic and irreverent manner. Of the project, Faught said: “Really ordinary objects can resonate on a deeply personal level. They can archive someone in a really idiosyncratic and unusual way.”

• Christmas Creep, Lisa Cooley: New York
• I know I came into this room for a reason, Kendall Koppe Gallery: Glasgow, Scotland
• SECA Art Award: BE BOLD For WhatYou Stand For, BE CAREFUL For What You Fall For, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California. 2013.

• Patel, Alpesh Kantilal. "Artforum Picks". Artforum. Retrieved July 1, 2016. 
• Thompson, Susannah (December 2014). "Josh Faught: I know I Came into this Room for a Reason". Art Review. Retrieved July 1, 2016.