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Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life

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Inside museum exhibition photo of multiple artworks
Text reading: Fight and Flight Crafting a Bay Area Life on a red cloud like background

Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life

April 15 – September 10, 2023

Guest Curator: Jacqueline Francis
Co-curator: Ariel Zaccheo

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.

 

NEA and Wattis Logo

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.

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

Jenifer K Wofford

WALL TEXT TRANSLATIONS

Click to listen to an audio description of works in Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life. Read the script of the audio description.

View the press release for Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life here.

RELATED EVENTS

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Member Preview Night for "Fight and Flight"

April 14, 2023 @ 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM

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Speaker Series: Art Market – Fight and Flight

April 23, 2023 @ 12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

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Designing Change Artist Panel

June 14, 2023 @ 6:00 PM - 8:00 PM

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Member Event: In the Studio with Charlene Tan

September 9, 2023 @ 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

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