Born in 1972 in Portland, Oregon, James Gobel received his BFA at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (1996) and his MFA at the University of California, Santa Barbara (1999). He has had solo exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum (2000); Kravets/Wehby Gallery, New York (1999, 2001, 2002, 2005); Marx & Zavattero, San Francisco (2008 & 2010) and Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles (2008 & 2012). Gobel’s work was included in the traveling museum exhibition curated by Dave Hickey, entitled Las Vegas Diaspora: The Emergence of Contemporary Art from the Neon Homeland, Las Vegas Art Museum (2007), Surface Value, Des Moines Art Center (2011), the Kemper Museum (2012) and Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art (2014), and most recently a solo exhibition at Second Floor Projects in San Francisco (2016). His work has been written about in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, Art in America, and Beautiful Decay, as well as numerous catalogs.