Bay Area art spaces back on feet for fall, focusing on the traditionally underrepresented

The Bay Area art world is optimistically approaching the fall with big ambitions and big exhibitions, a sign that institutions have mostly regained their pre-2020 footing…Creativity Explored, a gallery and art center for developmentally disabled artists, partnered with the Museum of Craft and Design on this new fashion exhibition.

Speed Read with BIKE EXIF

November 2020

THE MOTO SCENE is sizzling this week, with Triumph launching its new Trident middleweight, news of a major custom exhibition in San Francisco, and Revival Cycles releasing a very sharp custom Husqvarna Svartpilen 401. And Germany’s Hookie Co have just shown how to tweak the Bonneville T100 without breaking the bank.

A New Exhibit Of Outrageous Custom Motorcycles Reveals The Problem With Big Manufacturers Like Harley-Davidson

October 2020

The FrankenBlast is one of more than a dozen custom motorcycles currently on view at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco, and also presented virtually, in a new exhibition dubbed MOTO MMXX.

A New Online Exhibit Shows How Architects And Designers Are Confronting COVID-19 – With Outmoded Ideas And Products Nobody Needs

June 2020

Back in the days when COVID-19 was still an epidemic centered in the Hubei province of China, a Chinese architect named Sun Dayong posted some computer-generated graphics on Instagram showing a man wearing a carbon composite shield nearly as big as a bathtub.

Got a Creative Mask Idea? You Could Win $500 in a Mask-Making Competition

May 2020

The initial rush to produce as many simple-but-effective face coverings as possible (most notably, to address personal protective equipment shortfalls for front-line workers and medical personnel) was necessary and generous. But as panic subsides into a baseline of healthy, responsible caution, there’s more room for creativity.

In Review “Linda Gass: and then this happened…”

April 2020

Artist and environmental activist Linda Gass is concerned about “climate change at the intersection of water.” Her solo exhibition, titled and then this happened… at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) addresses issues of failing infrastructure, human interventions, and disasters that impact the Bay Area’s varied terrain and fragile watersheds.

Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience

January 2020

Our Earth – in terms of climate – is on the brink of no return. This precarious situation is clear for all to see. Extreme events continue to batter every corner of the planet, even those that were hitherto considered safe, protected places.

Circular, Portable, Visionary, and Resilient: Survival Architecture

January 2020

Climate Change is an issue that can no longer be escaped in our everyday lives as well as in our disciplines. On view at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco is an exhibition that addresses the matter at both of these levels.

Best of 2019

January 2020

Wanxin Zhang @ Museum of Craft and Design. The artist’s life-sized figures fuse the ancient tradition of Asian ceramic sculpture (as seen in the terracotta soldiers excavated in 1974) with the subversive legacy of Northern California Funk. His art addresses age-old questions about whether enshrined ideals are sturdy enough to withstand present-day assaults.

San Francisco Art Shows Reveal a Future

January 2020

“…While Far Out gets us to contemplate interplanetary solutions to our earthbound problems, another San Francisco exhibition, Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience at the Museum of Craft and Design, asks us to rethink the foreseeable habitability of Earth (before we resort to living on Mars).

Climate Change Told With Needle & Thread

December 2019

It’s beautiful and horrifying at the same time. But Gass doesn’t mean it to be depressing. “I like to use a soft and comforting medium to engage people and to draw them in to this narrative that I’m telling them, that could be a little bit hard to take in. The point of my work is to give people hope. We do have a lot of power as humans over our choices.”

The Museum of Craft and Design Explores Design and Disaster

December 2019

Survival takes on a whole new meaning at the Museum of Craft and Design’s new exhibit, “Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience.” The show explores the intersection of art, architecture, science, and technology to understand how to design and adapt our built environment with natural disasters in mind.

“Interior/Exterior” Is the Design Exhibit Your Instagram Feed is Craving

December 2019

For Bay Area residents looking to do some gallery hopping this fall, a trip to “Interior/Exterior” at the Museum of Craft and Design may be in order. “Interior/Exterior” features various structures, sculptures, and objects that explore the intersection of the two boundaries.

Climate change in the Bay Area is focus of two new exhibitions

December 2019

“Survival Architecture and the Art of Resilience” features ambitious work from artists and architects creating adaptations to a world that will be increasingly in need of emergency shelters in a climate-constrained world. The concurrent exhibition “Linda Gass: and then this happened …” draws attention to the natural water infrastructure in the greater Bay Area.

Celebrate 100 years of Bauhaus at these two new exhibits

October 2019

This year marks the 100-year anniversary of the first Bauhaus school opening in Weimar, Germany. Bauhaus—from 1919 to 1933—brought together arts, crafts, and industry with a focus on aesthetics and objects. Though it lasted only a few years, it forever changed design.

What Is The Ultimate Machined Object? A New Exhibit Of Ingenious Devices Shows How Innovation Works

July 2019

“It is a bit frightening to know that just before the fall of their great civilization the ancient Greeks had come so close to our age, not only in their thought, but also in their scientific technology,” wrote the science historian Derek J. de Solla Price in the June 1959 issue of Scientific American. The source of Price’s awe and anxiety was a peculiar 2,000-year-old device known as the Antikythera mechanism.

Photographic Creativity: 100 Years of Bauhaus

July 2019

In celebration of the 100-year anniversary of the Bauhaus movement in Germany, American Institute of Architects, San Francisco (AIASF) and the Museum of Craft and Design (MCD) present bauhaus.photo, a catalogue of life at the Bauhaus, portrait, architectural, and product photography.

Shotgun Review “Al Farrow: Divine Ammunition”

April 2019

Al Farrow’s exhibition, Divine Ammunition at the Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco, was a topical, heady series of twenty-four sculptures of cathedrals, synagogues, mosques, religious objects, and reliquaries.

Wanxin Zhang @ Museum of Craft and Design

April 2019

Each of Wanxin Zhang’s ceramic sculptures give the viewer something old and something new, reminding us of Jasper Johns’ famous injunction “take a thing, do something to it, do something else to it.”

Wanxin Zhang shares ‘Long Journey’ at Museum of Craft and Design

April 2019

“Zhang may be a descendant of such masters of monumental ceramic sculpture as Shaw, Viola Frey, Peter Voulkos and, above all, Robert Arneson, but he is a worthy heir. Like them, his skills are so extraordinary he can confidently violate every rule, turning that technical irreverence to humorous, polemical and artistic effect.

Sculptor Wanxin Zhang pushes clay’s boundaries

March 2019

Inspired by the late Robert Arneson and his friend Ai Weiwei, internationally celebrated and exhibited Bay Area sculptor Wanxin Zhang is a truly creative force.

Houses of the Holy: Al Farrow’s Sculptural Provocations

December 2018

As a symbol of power, the White House has been a site of protest from almost the time it was rebuilt in the early 19th century. Anyone who has witnessed or participated in the yelling and sign-waving that takes place at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. — especially in the Donald Trump era — will testify to the cacophony of sound and noise directed at the neoclassical building.

Al Farrow @ Museum of Craft and Design

December 2018

It’s not possible to walk into Al Farrow’s Divine Ammunition without feeling both awe and soul-deep dismay.  Farrow’s somber, menacing vision is ideally suited to the fear, horror, and moral dissolution that seems to permeate  contemporary life.

Dominic Di Mare @ Museum of Craft and Design

July 2018

Anchors in Time is an exquisite jewel box of a show: a single large room containing selections from five decades of Dominic Di Mare’s long and extraordinarily productive career. This presentation of 35 works in multiple mediums offers a rare opportunity to see how a visual language of personal references connects different stages of a long career.

THE VISIBLE INVISIBLE: A RUFFLED LOOK AT UNITED STATES HISTORY

July 2018

Known colloquially as “green-screen,” chroma key compositing is a “technical term in video and television for placing a person or an object against a uniform background, onto which any given situation can subsequently be (realistically) superimposed.”

Raw Design: Material Matter(s)

July 2018

Shiny bulbous columns and spheres are presented alongside jagged mineral-like structures and rocky reconstructions. It seems to be a futuristic stone-age, where the uncannily natural sit alongside the synthetic in an exploration of unapologetic materiality.

Tom Loeser Forges Whimsical Furniture From Gardening Tools

February 2018

“Tom Loeser comes from a family of unicyclists—an unconventionality apparent in his work, which turns traditional furniture on its head. As seen in “Tom Loeser: Please Please Please,” at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design through May 20

5 Fun Things To Do For $31 Or Less In San Francisco This Weekend

January 2018

“Compared to the likes of the SFMOMA and the de Young, the Museum of Craft and Design in the Dogpatch is an undersung local spot for art enthusiasts.

Furniture and Objects Design: Please, Please, Please by Tom Loeser

January 2018

El artísta Tom Loeser estará presentando en el Museo de Artesanía y Diseño su exposición inaugural de 2018, Tom Loeser: Please Please Please, en asociación con el Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, y una instalación complementaria específica del sitio realizada por el colectivo artístico galardonado en SFMOMA SECA 2017: t.w.five.

Where to explore the best of tech and science in San Francisco

January 2018

Under radar even for many locals, the Museum of Craft and Design is a small museum with a big science-y and architectural bent. To be fair, the 13-year-old institution only moved to the Dogpatch neighborhood in 2013.

San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design Announces First Exhibition of 2018

January 2018

The first exhibition of the new year at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco will be “Tom Loeser: Please Please Please,” honoring the work of the Wisconsin-based artist.

Architects Experiment With The Future Of Construction By Building Their Biggest Visions In Miniature

August 2017

“A life-size environment for exploring architectural ideas in public, the pavilion is the architectural equivalent of the concept car. Yet unlike concept cars, which often generate headlines, pavilions seldom get much attention outside of specialized contexts like the Venice Architecture Biennale. A new exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design makes a strong case for the pavilion’s importance, and may even help to bring more attention to the pavilion-building practice.”

A Day in San Francisco’s Dogpatch: What to Do, See & Eat

July 2017

“A new exhibit opens this month at the Museum of Craft and Design, making it the perfect third stop on our morning-slash-afternoon in Dogpatch. See the new exhibit — highlighting digital and handmade architectural pavilions — then hit up the gift shop.”

‘Pavilions’ Offers a Primer on Structures Built for Pure Pleasure

July 2017

“The pavilion is an architectural outlier. Traditionally a freestanding, temporary structure, it can provide utility or shelter, but more often than not its true purpose is pure spectacle. Imagine the architectural equivalent of statement jewelry. But Architectural Pavilions: Experiments and Artifacts, now on view at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, pinpoints an ulterior, altogether invisible functionality for these unconventional structures: architects’ testing grounds…”

In Review: San Francisco California

June 2017

“In San Francisco, the heart of high tech, it is all about coding. Appropriately, Felt Decoded | Wool: Nature’s Technology deciphers the many facets of this fascinating fiber. The exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Design explores every aspect, from the science of wool and age-old traditions to contemporary artistic and architectural uses.”

The Material You Should be Buying Right Now: Felt

March 2017

The new “Felt DeCoded:Wool: Nature’s Technology” exhibition at the Museum of Craft & Design pays tribute to wool as a raw fiber and its many uses for making art, household items, and clothes (The Woolmark Company is an exhibition sponsor).

Silicon Valley -Technology, Art, Green and Sustainability

March 217

Heather Durham of SVTAGS and artist Janice Arnold discuss Arnold’s art, process and her MCD exhibition Felt Decoded | Wool: Nature’s Technology, supported by The Woolmark Company.

Home Design Guide to Dogpatch’s flourishing design shops

March 2017

“Situated on dockside flats in the shadow of Potrero Hill, the Dogpatch neighborhood has maintained a strong, almost defiant character amid San Francisco’s rapidly shifting cultural landscape — which is not to say that it isn’t evolving. Recent years have seen a boom in small, creative businesses that wedge themselves among the industrial warehouses and vintage cottages that survived the 1906 earthquake…”

Chris Eckert’s ‘Mixed Messages’ Transforms News into Morse Code

February 10, 2017

“Many artists can identify with Chris Eckert, whose long hours in the studio making work and listening to public radio left him feeling overwhelmed and frustrated. “The topics are complex and nuanced without simple answers,” Eckert says. “I don’t pretend to have solutions for any of these issues, but I feel their weight.”

The Pull of Wool

February 2017

“GO AHEAD, YOU CAN TOUCH THAT—IT’S NATURALLY DURABLE, SO YOU CAN’T REALLY HURT IT,” says artist Janice Arnold. Standing at one end of a 40-foot table in her downtown Olympia, Washington, studio, the founder of JA Felt is running her nimble fingers along the undulating edges of a large handmade felt textile patterned with swirling foliage…

Artist’s portrait of elephant killed by poachers brings attention to the cost of the ivory trade

February 2017

The San Diego, California-based artist Wendy Maruyama is bringing attention to the plight of elephants and other animals slaughtered for their tusks with her recent work, the wildLIFE Project, now traveling across the United States. Maruyama was inspired to create the wildLIFE Project after meeting with wildlife advocates—and elephants—on a trip to Kenya.

Weaving a Legacy

February 2017

Arnold will again be the subject of an exhibition when FELT DeCoded | Wool: Nature’s Technology opens at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco this February – a visual exploration of art and science that offers an intimate perspective of wool as nature’s own technology.

JaVale McGee Surprises Five #GladToGive Heroes With A Shopping Spree

January 2017

Over the Thanksgiving holiday from November 22-29, the Warriors and Glad teamed up to recognize five exemplary Bay Area individuals who have embodied kindness and service to others through their community organizations.

‘Felt Decoded’ Exhibition Set for San Francisco Museum

December 2016

The Woolmark Co. is sponsoring an upcoming exhibition at the Museum of Craft and Design in San Francisco called ‘Felt DeCoded | Wool: Nature’s Technology.’ Set to open to the public on Feb. 11, Felt Decoded is a tactile and visual exploration of art and science with a step-by-step material study that shows an intimate perspective of wool as nature’s technology, demonstrating why wool is intrinsic to the practice of making handmade felt.

Dogpatch, San Francisco: A Hub for the Creative

December 2016

“…The arts also bloom in Dogpatch. The Minnesota Street Project, a three-building complex between 23rd and 24th Streets that includes 35,000 square feet of gallery space and 22,000 square feet of subsidized studio space, opened in spring as a refuge for artists who have been priced out of gentrifying neighborhoods like the Tenderloin.”

Glad to Give Honoree: JoAnn Edwards by Golden State Warriors

November 2016

The Warriors are teaming up with Glad to recognize a hero in the community on each day of Glad to Give Week. JoAnn Edwards: “I’m #GladToGive by gathering our communities to provide MCD MakeArt hands-on, experiential workshops where kids can discover their own creativity.”

Anja Ulfeldt Makes Art From the Unappealing Sounds of Aging Plumbing

September 2016

“You think, “All that rust and gunk: What an eyesore!” if you think of them at all. And the background noise of running water — from the toilet flush to the bathtub draining — is usually a mild annoyance and not a pleasure to hear. Of Sound l Mind and Objects, Ulfeldt’s new exhibition at San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, is out to prove otherwise…”

Scenes From The Bayview Opera House’s Grand Re-Opening

September 2016

“In the parking lot, tents and structures created a festival atmosphere, with carnival games and art activities supported by the Museum of Craft and Design, the Opera House’s own Dare 2 Dream art program, and more.”

A New Focus on Design in San Francisco

July 2016

“Following the trend south, the Museum of Craft and Design has moved to Dogpatch, San Francisco’s newest and most southerly arts neighborhood, already home to numerous galleries and studio buildings. The first permanent location for the twelve-year-old nonprofit is intended to diversify a program currently focused on thoughtful monographic exhibitions devoted to artists using craft material and found objects.”

How to Make an Anarchist Quilt

May 2016

“…But Venom’s quilts aren’t exactly Ladies’ Home Journal material: They’re all about crime, gambling, metal, and drugs. “My art is a collision of fine art crafting and the fringes of society,” he says. “I’m riding that razor’s edge.”