Amy Hauft

An unapologetic sculptor, Amy Hauft grew up on Southern California light. She earned a bachelor of arts in fine art from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a master of fine arts in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She lived most of her life in New York City, in addition to significant stints in Richmond, Virginia, and Austin, Texas. She resettled in St. Louis in 2019. 

Hauft creates architectural-scale installations, haptic situations in which the viewer’s experience is equally palpable as physical and cognitive experiences. She has exhibited her work in museums and galleries worldwide, including the Brooklyn Museum (New York), the New Museum (New York), the International Artists’ Museum (Poland), the American Academy in Rome (Italy), and MoMA PS1 (New York), among others. She recently completed a major solo exhibition for MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Hauft’s honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the St. Gaudens Foundation, and the Howard Foundation, as well as grants from New York’s Public Art Fund and the PEW Foundation Philadelphia Exhibitions Initiative. She has been awarded residencies to work internationally, including the Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellowship in Umbria, Italy, and the International Artists’ Residency Fellowship in Łódź, Poland.

For 14 years, Hauft taught at the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, moving from assistant to full professor. In 2004, she was appointed chair of the department of sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University, whose graduate sculpture program was ranked first in the nation by U.S. News & World Report for her entire tenure. In 2012, Hauft was named the Leslie Waggener Professor in Sculpture at the University of Texas at Austin, where she ran the MFA in studio art program. In 2019, she was appointed director of the College of Art and Graduate School of Art in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University, and established her studio in St. Louis.