Kate Haug is a San Francisco based artist and writer. She makes conceptually based works in print, film, photography and installation. Using experimental and narrative forms, her projects often investigate history— its presentation and consumption—through a multiplicity of viewpoints. Haug sees history as ongoing, subjective and participatory, often inserting her work into contemporary cultural ephemera.
Haug’s 2016 installation News Today: A History of the Poor People’s Campaign in Real Time re-presented Martin Luther King’s last monumental social protest which resulted in a 3,000 person encampment, Resurrection City, on the Washington Mall, highlighting the systemic causes of poverty. Haug produced an extensive catalogue for the work, which includes all images and pieces from the installation. The exhibition, based on a year’s worth of photographic and historical research, was produced as part of a residency at Irving Street Projects in San Francisco. Christian Frock selected it as a SF/Arts Monthly gallery highlight, writing “before there was Occupy, there was Resurrection City. Not to be missed.”
Recently, Haug and Ivan Uranga completed a Summer of Love themed public art work for the San Francisco Arts Commission, which lead her to an obsession with Didion’s essay “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” a condition affectionately known as “Didion Syndrome.”
Haug received an Honors degree in Art History from U.C. Santa Cruz, studying primarily with British cultural theorist Kobena Mercer in her senior year. Following her B.A., Haug was selected for a curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Independent Study Program, where her research proposal Dirt and Domesticity: Constructions of the Feminine was produced as an exhibition at the Whitney Philip Morris branch. The exhibition catalogue, edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, includes her essay entitled “Myth and Matriarchy: An Analysis of the Mammy Stereotype”.
Attending U.C. San Diego, Haug earned her MFA in experimental film and critical theory. Femme Experimental, her graduate thesis on sexually explicit, experimental film featuring interviews with Barbara Hammer, Carolee Schneemann and Chick Strand, was published by John Hopkins University Press as its own issue of Wide Angle, a thematic film journal edited by Ruth Bradley at the University of Ohio, Athens.
Her award-winning films have been exhibited internationally at festivals including the Ann Arbor Film Festival, Black Maria Film Festival, Cinematexas, London International Film Festival, and Sao Paulo International Film Festival. Her work has also screened at museums and universities with the national touring programs of the Ann Arbor Film Festival’s National Touring Program, the Black Maria Film Festival’s Touring Collection, the MadCat Women’s Film and Video Film Festival’s Interior Worlds Program and Miranda July’s Big Miss Moviola I Saw Bones national tour. Haug’s films, The Booby Trap and Deep Creep, are now part of the Big Miss Moviola Joanie 4 Jackie archive housed at the Getty.
Pass, described as a heavy metal haiku of American culture, was included in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s New Directors/New Films screening at the New York Museum of Modern Art.
She has been awarded residencies at Arteleku, Film/Video Arts and Vermont Studio Center. Her art writing appears in SFAQ and other publications.