Digital Catalog
FIGHT AND FLIGHT: CRAFTING A BAY AREA LIFE
April 15 – September 10, 2023
Co-Curators:
Jacqueline Francis
Ariel Zaccheo
Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life is generously supported in part by the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and Anonymous.
The Museum of Craft and Design’s exhibitions and programs are generously supported by the Anonymous, Windgate Foundation, and Grants for the Arts.
ACTION PLANS
By design, this exhibition presented shared conversations that were already underway—about San Francisco Bay Area artists’ work, cultural community building, and professional careers. As curators, Ariel Zaccheo and I knew the story outlines, and in many cases, the particulars because we know the participants. Our ties to them are institutional and informal: they are past or current colleagues, former classmates or students, or friends of friends. During our studio visits–some in person, others virtual–with artists, we learned more about their practices, from sourcing materials and stitching techniques to working with foundries and enlisting volunteer help in order to meet project deadlines. We heard about the mingling currents of their everyday lives, too. Studio sublets. Researching colleges with high school age children. Landing public art commissions. Filling the dishwasher at home. Day jobs. Applying for artist residencies and grants. A landlady with a soft spot for creatives who doesn’t raise the rent much. Favorite clubs and bars. The next exhibition. Counting the reasons to stay in the Bay Area and the reasons not to. The takeaway: we–artists and everyone else– act and make things happen in the porous ground of existence.
An exhibition is the culmination of planning efforts to display art work, yet Fight and Flight can’t be the last word on the Bay’s cultural landscape and traversing it. Wherever we do it, engaging art is like going for a walk— good for body and mind. Artists put things together for us to experience in the permitted ways, and our interpretations are the fodder for conversation while we are with the art object, right there and then (and maybe, later as well). But what else do we do “because” of art and “for” artists? Curating sets up a problem for the public to consider. Writing puts artworks into critical contexts and situates artists into historical narratives. Buying and collecting art are customs under scrutiny, but unlikely to be abandoned anytime soon because it is the way that markets support artists and establish value to their production. What are the other ways to contribute to and replenish culture that provides us with so much?
Ask artists. Although many state that they prefer to let their work speak for them, they have opinions that they readily share in written statements, social media, posts, and public lectures. This catalog provides our curatorial take on the import and impact of their creative labor and projects. We hope it piques reader curiosity and generates more questions that can be put to the artists. Reach out to them via their individual websites and through their gallerists. Join us at the Museum of Craft and Design for walk throughs of Fight and Flight with participating artists. Bring your appreciation and uncertainties, and everything in between. The artwork merits it; there is no exhibition without active audiences.
– Jacqueline Francis
Adia Millett, Quilted Ancestor (Sun), 2022
Alexander Hernandez, Light as a Feather and Seven Minutes in Heaven, 2022
Cheryl Derricotte, The Geography of an Artist, 2023
Jenifer K Wofford, Battlefield III (Choices), 2023
Libby Black, The Build Up, 2021
Michelle Yi Martin, Godwit, 2023
Related Tactics, The future now, 2023
Woody De Othello, tomorrow always never is, 2023
Adia Millett, Portal to Stillness in Motion, 2023.
Angela Hennessy, Bearings, 2021
Craig Calderwood, Emotional Support, Hornet’s Nest, 2022
Lauren Toomer, Ground, Land, Road, 2022
Liz Harvey, Yellow Shift, Blue Shift, and Red Shift, 2022
Nasim Moghadam, Fabric, 2021
Richard Jonathan Nelson, Hearing hooves the five winds lead to distraction, 2023
Ala Ebtekar, Luminous Ground, 2017-present
Cathy Lu, Nüwa’s Hands, 2022
Erica Deeman, Being, 2023
Leila Weefur and Margaret Tedesco, Palms in the Fog, 2023
Michelle Yi Martin, Petaled Cosmos, 2023
Ramekon O’Arwisters, Mending #37, Cheesecake #14, and Cheesecake #11, 2019
yétúndé ọlágbajú, i love the ghost in your eye, 2023
Charlene Tan, Research and Remembering: Reptile Ube, 2023
There are an infinite number of stories in the San Francisco Bay Area, a region of three major cities, nine counties, and seven million residents. Whether natives or transplants, we all have reasons for living here. We cherish long roots in the region, or we have forged ties since arriving here, creating chosen families and settling into cultural communities. We enjoy individual freedom, see opportunity, and make careers here. Though droughts, wildfires, and other climate change disruptions have put us on notice, we appreciate the beauty of Northern California and bask in its Mediterranean-like weather. We take in these pleasures, and simultaneously, face our particular Bay Area dystopia of astronomical living costs, income inequality, and gender, political, and racist violence. Bay Area artists are among those who struggle to navigate the landscape in crisis.
Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life offers a view into our arts ecosystem. Produced by contemporary artists who have called the region home, the works are evidence of what has been done under challenging circumstances. Unsurprisingly, the exhibited projects are diverse and nuanced in regards to styles explored, formats elected, and tones struck. There is no shared lexicon nor visual language that manifestly communicates either fight or flight. In the absence of overt symbols of combat and departure, what is presented are the discoveries of our curatorial research: Bay Area art is what Bay Area artists make.
For a long time, artists have resourcefully 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. Who is a Bay Area artist? It is the artist who has been nurtured here. Many of this exhibition’s participants studied art at Bay Area schools, including California College of the Arts, Mills College, the San Francisco Art Institute, Stanford University, and the University of California Berkeley. Some have taken on teaching and administration jobs at their alma maters and at other outposts of the Bay Area cultural industry–museums, galleries, libraries, and archives. Few have one gig; artists labor so that they can make work and live here—a radical act of insistence that it’s worth the struggle to stay.
The Bay Area “stays with” the artists who have come of age or made their careers here. In Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit writes that, “places are leaky containers. They always refer beyond themselves…” In fact, some of the artists in this exhibition have recently taken leave of the Bay Area. Yet they maintain their connection to the region, taking its ideals with them to the next place.
Exhibitions are advocacy, and Fight and Flight is no exception. We take a stand for craft, a category frequently marginalized or footnoted in art history. To survive and thrive in the margins is a radical act that occasionally requires the will to fight. By the simple act of replacing “or” with “and,” Fight and Flight suggests a broader spectrum of response. There are many more artists whose stories we know, whose work we wish we had the space to present in this exhibition. We hold space for them here–artists, craftspeople, and makers that have crafted their lives here, and have written their parts of the Bay Area’s history.
Jacqueline Francis
Jacqueline Francis is an art historian, curator, and educator. She is the author of Making Race: Modernism and “Racial Art” in America (2012) and co-editor of Romare Bearden: American Modernist (2011). She is a co-founder of the Association for Critical Race Art History. Her curatorial projects include “side by side|in the world” (2019, San Francisco Art Commission) and “Where Is Here” (2016, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco). She is the Chair of the Graduate Program in Visual & Critical Studies at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Ariel Zaccheo
Ariel Zaccheo has been proud to call San Francisco home since 2011. She has worked with MCD since 2013, assisting with 40+ exhibitions. She has been MCD’s curator since 2020. Zaccheo is also co-curator of the Artists’ Television Access (ATA) Window Gallery since 2013, and now serves on the ATA Board of Directors. Her research focuses on contemporary craft applied to queer and feminist studies. Recent curatorial projects include Mode Brut (2021, Museum of Craft and Design) and Interior/Exterior (2019, Museum of Craft and Design). Zaccheo served as juror for Craft Nouveau (2022, Blue Line Arts), and Bridging the Gap: Contemporary Craft Practices (2019, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts). Her writing has appeared in Surface Design Journal, Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles, Art Practical, Fiber Art Network, and American Craft Magazine.