Amber jean young biography

For Amber Jean Young, the loss of her mother to ovarian cancer on January 1, 2019, caused a grief so acute that it completely altered an essential part of her identity: her art.

An interdisciplinary artist who holds a Master of Fine Art from San Francisco Art Institute, Amber had been primarily working with textiles and quilting before the death of her mother, singer-songwriter Pegi Young. But when Pegi died, the world splintered apart for Amber, which dramatically affected her artistic process. “There was a real sea change in the artwork because of my mom’s passing. It didn’t really make sense to continue the trajectory I had been on anymore.” 

As Amber struggled to pull herself out of the “grief hole,” as she described it, she turned to painting. “At a different phase in my life when something difficult had been happening, I just made patterns and it kind of soothed me through it,” Amber said. So, she revisited the tec