Fight and Flight

Presented by Museum of Craft and Design

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The Museum of Craft and Design presents an interdisciplinary exploration of today’s Bay Area arts ecosystem through the lens of MCD’s current exhibition, Fight and Flight: Crafting a Bay Area Life.

Co-curators Jacqueline Francis and Ariel Zaccheo join exhibition featured artists in conversation about 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.

This timely discussion focuses on consciously uplifting communities that are historically underserved and underrepresented in museum collections and exhibition, sharing the perspectives of the educators, artists and arts institutions for whom the Bay Area is their creative home.

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.

Ala Ebtekar

Ala Ebtekar is a visual artist who works in the mediums of painting, drawing, collage, alternative photography, text, ceramic, and installation. His work has been widely exhibited internationally and are in public and private collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art, Devi Art Foundation in India, Orange County Museum of Art, de Young Fine Arts Museum, San Francisco International Airport, and Berkeley Art Museum among others. He is the founder and director of Art, Social Space and Public Discourse, a global initiative on art that investigates the multiple contexts that shift and define changing ideas of public space. This ongoing critical framework of conversations, newly issued art projects, and exploration of various cultural productions and intellectual traditions looks at recent transformations of civic life. He has been a lecturer at Stanford University since 2009 in the Department of Art & Art History, Institute for Diversity in the Arts, ITALIC, Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, the Hamid & Christina Program in Iranian Studies, and Stanford Global Studies.