Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life is a timely examination of the Bay Area arts ecosystem. The exhibition features 23 local artists who, despite the many crises of our times, continue to call the Bay Area a creative home. Their works reveal a narrative of the struggle of living and working in an untenable city–from the joy of finding chosen communities and families, to the loss of affordable housing and studio space.

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.

Co-curator Jackie 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.