Art

36: Amy Franceschini on victory gardens in San Francisco, a Seed Journey to the Middle East, and the importance of not finding a common language

Amy Franceschini is an artist and educator who creates formats for exchange and production that question and challenge the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between humans and nature, and her projects reveal the ways that local politics are affected by globalization. In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers and in 2004, she co-founded Free Soil, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. In 2008, Amy worked with the City of San Francisco to transform the plaza in front of City Hall into a modern victory garden, and to build gardens in people’s back yards. She is currently sailing from Oslo to Istanbul as part of Seed Journey, bringing seeds found in Norway and other points in the northern hemisphere to their center of origin in the Middle East and connecting with seed savers, farmers, bakers, activists and others along the way.  Amy grew up on a farm in the Central Valley of California. In this episode, Amy talks with Chelsea about her victory gardens project in San Francisco, a Seed Journey to the Middle East, and the importance of not finding a common language.

Photo: RS 10 Christiania by Martin Høy

 

29: Lexa Walsh on meals that bring people together across difference, creating temporary utopias, and collecting recipes for food end everything

Lexa Walsh is a longtime artist and cultural worker based in the Bay Area. She has also lived, worked, exhibited and toured internationally. She founded the experimental music, performance and film venue the Heinz Afterworld Lounge, worked for many years as a curator and administrator at CESTA, an international art center in Czech republic, whose team created radical curatorial projects to foster cross-cultural understanding. She co-founded and conceived of the all women, all toy instrument ensemble Toychestra. She founded and organizes Oakland Stock, the Oakland branch of the Sunday Soup network micro-granting dinner series that supports artists’ projects, and launched the Librarification tumblr, which hosts artist resources.  Her silo-busting project Meal Ticket brings people who don't normally eat with each other together for a meal.  In this episode, Lexa talks to Chelsea about meals that bring people together across difference, creating temporary utopias, and collecting recipes for food end everything.

6: Victoria Wagner on the symbiosis of art and baking, and meeting neighbors through food

Victoria Wagner is a visual artist, educator, and baker based in Sonoma County, California. Her work is comprised of organic, multilayered paintings, sculptures and drawings that vacillate between objective and non-objective notions. The main thread of her work is found in tonal vibration, electricity and naive human understanding of the simplicity of the natural world. Recently her work has been shown at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Southern Exposure, theLab, Headlands Center for the Arts, Sonoma County Museum, and the DiRosa Art and Nature Preserve. She teaches at the California College of the Arts. This past summer, she ran an experimental biscuit business out of her hatchback called Hello Nomad Roadside Biscuits. In this episode, Chelsea and Victoria talk about the overlap and symbiosis of baking and painting, the selling biscuits in the least likely corners of Sonoma County, and getting to know your neighbors through food.

4: Farnaz Fatemi on eating in Iran, growing tomatoes, and the role poetics in a movement

Farnaz Fatemi is a poet, a writer and a teacher of the craft of writing at UC Santa Cruz, and a gardener and lover of tomatoes. Her poetry has been published in the Ekphrasis, Red Wheelbarrow, and several other poetry journals, and in the anthologies Let Me Tell You Where I’ve Been, and recently, Love and Pomegranates: Artists and Wayfarers on Iran, both compilation of works by the Iranian writers outside of Iran. Her poetry has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize. A favorite recent work of hers is in the Tupelo Quartlerly, a very personal and lyric essay about visits to Iran called The Color of the Bricks. Devon and Chelsea speak with Farnaz about tomatoes; the interplay between gardening, cooking, and writing; travel; and the necessity of poetics and creativity in a movement.

2: Amanda Eicher on art and food, OPENrestraurant, and places where we can re-imagine food systems

In this episode, Chelsea meets up with Amanda Eicher at Southern Exposure in San Francisco to talk about food and eating in the context of art and activism; about the OPENrestaurant project, and her long-term community-based art project in rural El Salvador.

Amanda’s projects investigate the roles artists play in development processes; the ways groups engage in creative thinking; and intersections between traditional community-based art practices and contemporary approaches to social engagement in art, relational aesthetics, and dialogic practices. Her work often touches food, especially in the OPENrestaurant project, which experiments with the daily activities of food and restaurant workers in art spaces.

Her work has been shown and/or supported by SFMOMA, Berkeley Art Museum, UC Berkeley's Arts Research Center and the UC Futures Working Group, the Botkyrka Konsthall in Tumba, Sweden and their residence in Fittja, the Fittja Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale, in projects at CCA's Wattis Center for Contemporary Art, and in an upcoming residency at the Di Rosa Preserve and Stag's Leap Winery in 2015.