Amy Hauft

An unapologetic sculptor, Amy Hauft grew up in Southern California. 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 adult life in New York City, followed by an eight-year stint in Richmond, Virginia, and then seven years in Austin, Texas. She resettled in St. Louis in 2019.

Hauft creates architectural-scale installations; she builds haptic situations in which the viewer’s experience is equally palpable as physical and cognitive events. She has presented 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 is working on a major project for MASS MoCA (North Adams, Massachusetts). Hauft’s many honors include fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the St. Gaudens Foundation, and the Howard Foundation, as well as grants from the Public Art Fund in New York 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, where she moved from assistant to full professor. In 2004, she was appointed chair of the Department of Sculpture + 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 in the University of Texas at Austin’s Department of Art & Art History, 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 has now established her studio in St. Louis.