In 2023, Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life explored the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem after the devastation of the pandemic and the closure of the San Francisco Art Institute. Recurring four years later, Fight and Flight 2 will investigate what it means for an artist to craft their life in the Bay Area in the shadow of AI and in a vacuum of nonprofit arts education. This survey exhibition will feature works that reveal a narrative of the struggle of living and working in an area prone to cyclical economic struggle, the lineage of arts educators in our region, and the loss of institutions, affordable housing, and studio space.

Each creative practitioner in this exhibition has shaped a unique pathway to sustain their practice — with a common thread of community at the heart of navigating and creating opportunity. Fight and Flight 2 invites you to consider ways we can continue supporting this vibrant community and craft new spaces for creative risk-taking, historically provided by non-profit arts education.