SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The Museum of Craft and Design opened Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life, on view since April 15–. A timely examination of the Bay Area arts ecosystem, this exhibition features 23 Bay Area artists who have stuck it out during the crises of our times: a pandemic, gentrification, high cost of living, limited access to resources, insurrection, and racist, xenophobic, and transphobic violence. Their responses are evident in their artworks. From them, we get a sense of what it takes to make it in the Bay Area now.
Curated by Jacqueline Francis and Ariel Zaccheo, Fight and Flight, which will end September 3, 2023, is about the struggle to live and work in the Bay Area where, despite the lack of affordable housing and studio space, the participating artists’ histories are nuanced expressions of the determination to remain. Over several months, Francis and Zaccheo visited artists in their studios and via Zoom, engaging in conversations about their Bay Area lives and careers and asking: “How, if at all, does your art practice relate to the Bay Area?” In dialogue with the artists, they discussed the relevance of “home” and “place” in their work. The artists spoke of conflicting and complex feelings: grief and frustration over erasure and invisibility; enjoyment of and inspiration from the Northern California landscape; and gratitude for friends, peer groups, and chosen families.
Francis comments, “For a long time, artists have ingeniously crafted a life in the Bay Area. For some of those who decide to move on, the careers and relationships started here are central to their sensibilities as makers.” Consciously uplifting communities that are historically underserved and underrepresented in museum collections and exhibitions, Fight and Flight primarily features African American, Latinx, LGBTQIA+, and AAPI artists.
Nasim Moghadam, Iranian-born art educator and multidisciplinary visual artist, moved to the Bay Area in 2010. Her work focuses on discrimination, hyphenated identity, and the constraints on women, their bodies, and their voices. Moghadam’s work creates narratives inspired by the efforts of women worldwide who are defending their basic, unalienable rights. When discussing her artwork and living in the Bay Area, Moghadam mentioned the struggle of studio space and affordability; but for her, the weight of community care is greater than the complications of living here. She has found a welcoming community and wouldn’t be able to express the themes and concepts within her work if it weren’t for having moved to the Bay Area.
Francis and Zaccheo identified local artists and collectives working across a multitude of craft mediums and processes. Intentionally, the selected artists’ work questions the totality of what “craft” can encompass: from the traditional (textiles, ceramics) to installations, graphite on paper, sound, and the written word. The exhibition’s subtitle, Crafting a Bay Area Life, denotes action: crafting refers not only to the creation of art but also designing a creative life, whether or not the artist identifies as a craftsperson.
The artist collective Related Tactic’s artwork, the future now, is a series of multilingual, site-responsive posters that “illuminate facets of Black life in the city.” Originally installed in 2020 in multiple sites within walking distance along the 3rd Street corridor of San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, the posters served as prompts to explore national politics and encourage community dialogue.
San Francisco-based artist Alexander Hernandez uses textiles and found objects in his mixed-media art practice. Having been born in Mexico and raised in Colorado, the Bay Area evokes a nomadic sense for Hernandez, but he is inspired by the grit of the city and community he has found. Craft is a safe space where his love of U.S. pop culture and Mexican culture coexist. His work explores intersectional identities rooted in immigrant experiences, gender expectations, HIV+ survival, and queer sensibilities.
Recent narratives have placed San Francisco and its surrounding urban areas “in the shadow” of larger art metropolises like Los Angeles or New York. The Bay Area finds itself in the penumbral margins of the art world conversation. So too is craft often marginalized or footnoted in the canon of art history. To survive and thrive in the margins is a radical act that occasionally requires the will to fight. Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life positions the Bay Area as a uniquely advantageous site for makers of craft.
A multilingual digital catalog, accessible on the exhibition website and via QR code at MCD will go live in early June of 2023. This catalog will act as an online repository for interviews, writings, and photographs of artists’ studio practices.
Participating Artists:
Adia Millett, Ala Ebtekar, Alexander Hernandez, Angela Hennessy, Cathy Lu, Cheryl Derricotte, Craig Calderwood, Erica Deeman, Jenifer K. Wofford, Lauren Toomer, Leila Weefur, Libby Black, Liz Harvey, Liz Hernández, Michelle Yi Martin, Nasim Moghadam, Ramekon O’Arwisters, Related Tactics, Charlene Tan, Margaret Tedesco, Richard-Jonathan Nelson, Woody de Othello, and yétúndé ọlágbajú
