Pamela Pitt found her way to the art world a bit circuitously, via work in the oil industry. A native Texan, she worked for oil companies until she was 38, and then left the business to travel the world, ultimately landing in San Francisco. There, she sold off all the oil stock she’d acquired to pay for her education at the San Francisco Art Institute, from which she graduated almost three decades ago.

Today, Pitt’s brightly colored mixed-media collages examine a variety of social themes, from the roles of women in society, to immigration and borders between nations, to the ways in which humans treat the Earth. This last theme is influenced not only by her work in the oil industry, but also by her background in law and her interest in geology. In particular, she is fascinated with tectonic plates and the movement of the Earth, and found herself overwhelmed during a trip to Iceland, where she saw the spot where the North American and Eurasian plates are separating

“You can’t see movement, but you know it’s moving,” she says of the experience. “That just struck me as so wonderful to be able to see that part of the history of the Earth. That got me started doing collages about the Earth.”