Timothy Cummings was raised in New Mexico and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1993. Cummings renders exquisitely crafted narrative and portrait paintings that reflect on art historical and vernacular influences. Cummings’s work welcomes us into an imaginative world of intimate and sensitively rendered portraits that reflect on the unbounded space of creative self-fashioning, and his figures often employ style as both a mode of self-defense and fabulous self-expression.
Cummings’ work is included in the collections of the di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, California and 21c Museum Hotels in Louisville, Kentucky, as well as many private collections.
In November 2020, Catharine Clark Gallery presented Muse, Cummings’s solo exhibition of new and recent paintings in conjunction with the gallery’s 2020 BOXBLUR season of live performances, featuring a marquee concert with acclaimed singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright and a special opening performance by Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique. The intimate concert with Wainwright, whose close friendship with Cummings resulted in multiple collaborations and intersections between the artist’s painting and Wainwright’s music. In conjunction with Wainwright’s performance, Cummings created a life-size theatre set inspired by 19th century puppets and theaters—a nod to Cummings’s own history as a radical puppet maker and to the imagery and allusion in his and Wainwright’s work, both of which explore LGBTQ+ identity, adolescence, sexuality, coming of age, psychology, equity, and justice. Though Muse was conceived prior to Covid-19, the history of puppetry as an art form to animate and convey the needs of human society, particularly during difficult times, are as relevant a reference as ever.
Based in New Mexico, Cummings has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 1994.