DAKOTA X

(American b. Boston, 1961) is an American Painter, Curator and Founder of Pinesmoke Residency based in Mountain Center, CA. X received a BFA and BS Masters of Arts in Teaching, Art Education from The Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University respectively.

X’s work is included in the permanent collection of The Provincetown Art Association and Museum (PAAM), Provincetown, MA. X is a recipient of the Orlowsky Freed Foundation Grant sponsored in part by PAAM (2011) and a finalist in the shortlist of seventy for the 2018 BP Portrait Award, National Portrait Gallery, London.

Work by Dakota X has been included in curatorial exhibitions at The Provincetown Art Association and Museum, Provincetown, MA; The Cape Cod Museum of Art, Dennis, MA; William Scott Gallery, Provincetown, MA; MM Fine Art, South Hampton, NY, Susquehanna Art Museum, Harrisburg, PA; William Rolland Gallery of Fine Art, California Lutheran University, Thousand Oaks, CA; Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; The Salton Sea History Museum, North Shore, CA; New Museum Los Gatos, Los Gatos, CA; Orange County Center of Contemporary Art, Santa Ana, CA; The Marks Art Center, College of the Desert, Palm Desert, CA; Melissa Morgan Fine Art, Palm Desert, CA; Peggy Phelps Gallery, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA; Sam Francis Gallery, Santa Monica, CA; Launch LA, Los Angeles, CA; Billis Williams Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, Annenberg Theatre, Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; among others.

X’s work has been featured in publications including Juxtapoz Magazine, art ltd., Angeleno Magazine, FABRIK Magazine, Palm Springs Life Magazine, Art and Cake, Palm Springs Life ARTS+CULTURE, La Quinta Arts Foundation, AEQAI Magazine, New American Paintings Magazine, The Provincetown Independent, Provincetown Magazine, The Provincetown Banner and Provincetown Arts Magazine among others.

Over the past two decades, X’s artistic work focused on the complexities of individual experience particularly in relation to home, isolation and memory. X’s stark landscape paintings often feature marginalized communities located on the fringes of American
society.

In 2017, X turned to portraiture to create Portraits of Autism a developing project. Portraits of Autism, explores the relationship and impact autistic adults and children have within their immediate family and community on a continuum. Each Portrait focuses in part on relationship, connection and methods of communication. This ongoing series follows the process a family goes through as their autistic child becomes an adult when access to Federally mandated funding is discontinued at the age of 21. The focus of each portrait is to provide an emotional experience and public connection to each subject as a unique individual who is not only defined by their “disability”.

Outside of the Binary - Opening the Narrative of Gender and The Memories You Keep - Surviving Generational Addiction and Mental Illness are current portrait projects.