The Museum of Craft and Design Presents Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life
Bay Area art is what Bay Area artists make. The San Francisco exhibition features 23 local artists who call this untenable place a creative home.
Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life, a newly opened exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, is a timely examination of the Bay Area arts ecosystem. It showcases 23 local 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 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.
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. Recent narratives have placed San Francisco and its surrounding urban areas “in the shadow” of larger art metropolises. 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 is on view at the Museum of Craft and Design through September 10.
Participating Artists
Libby Black, Craig Calderwood, Erica Deeman, Cheryl Derricotte, Ala Ebtekar, Liz Harvey, Angela Hennessy, Alexander Hernandez, Liz Hernández, Cathy Lu, Michelle Yi Martin, Adia Millett, Nasim Moghadam, Richard-Jonathan Nelson, Ramekon O’Arwisters, yétúndé ọlágbajú, Woody De Othello, Related Tactics, Charlene Tan, Margaret Tedesco and Leila Weefur, Lauren Toomer, and Jenifer K Wofford.
For more information, visit sfmcd.org.
Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life is generously supported in part by Anonymous, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation.
