La Vie en Rose

Miriam Sweeney is a San Francisco–based artist whose work reimagines aerial views of cityscapes as textured, map-like abstractions. Her paintings explore the balance between order and chaos, structure and collapse, capturing the rhythm of urban life through layered shapes that suggest streets, landmarks, traffic, and the voices of the city. Each piece begins with a digital mapping process, where Sweeney plots city blocks using Apple Maps as a structural guide. She then builds the surface with repeated layers of soft-body acrylics, creating depth, color, and a subtle sculptural quality. The process is slow and meditative, allowing compositions to shift gradually, sometimes reflecting the density of an urban core, other times opening into looser, more organic forms. Her paintings transform maps into a poetic language of texture and rhythm, evoking both the excitement of exploring new places and the intimacy of finding meaning within them. Her work has been shown throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, including the Triton Museum of Art, the Pacific Heights Gallery, and the Harry Williams Creative Gallery, and is held in private collections around the world.