Inga Bard is a Ukrainian-American artist and non-profit founder based in San Francisco. Her studio practice explores the intersections of misinformation, attention/ surveillance capitalism and public narratives, while employing beauty as a means of insisting on hope and optimism. Rooted in lived experience, Bard’s work has been shaped by Ukraine’s ongoing information war since 2014, offering a critical lens on the weaponization of narratives in digital spaces.
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She is the co-founder of several non-profit initiatives—the SHACK15 Art Prize (current), Paint the Void (2020), Safety Net Fund (2020), Art for Civil Discourse (2019), and Private Practice Art Residency (2022)—all dedicated to fostering community resilience and supporting local artists. Through these projects, Bard and her collaborators have directed over a million dollars into the hands of Bay Area artists. Her latest endeavor, Art Bae, serves as the definitive contemporary art calendar for the Bay Area and magazine for art criticism, which she runs alongside LA-based writer and art critic Andrew Berardini and award winning photographer Lucas Foglia. She is particularly proud of recently helping to launch the SHACK15 Art Prize, the largest artist prize in the Bay Area, alongside friend and collaborator Elle Black as well as the SHACK15 leadership and community.
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Bard’s artistic practice, including projects like Panoptic Forest, explores the tensions between nature, technology, and capital, examining how systems of control and commodification shape our perception of reality. As both an artist and a mother, she weaves personal and political narratives into her work, interrogating the ethical and emotional consequences of an increasingly algorithmic world. Through painting, murals, digital media, and mixed-reality experiments, Bard challenges audiences to confront the unseen forces that manipulate attention and public narratives.
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Her work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Soho Fluorescent Festival, the HK Art Fair with Mendes Wood Gallery, the Museo Villa Bardini in Florence, and more. She has also created public art projects, including murals for Flint, Michigan; Dunedin, Florida; and Oakland, California.
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Bard is passionate about exploring her evolving role of being an artist that is also an activist, exploring how art can expose, disrupt, and reclaim narratives in a world shaped by power, technology, and misinformation.