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Studio for Urban Projects
3579 17th Street
San Francisco, CA 94110
phone: 415.436-9294
web site: studioforurbanprojects.org
e-mail: info@studioforurbanprojects.org
Alison Sant
Alison Sant is an artist, with a background in digital media, architecture, and urban art practice. Her work explores the city as both a site for investigation and intervention and focuses on the intersection of technology, architecture, and ecology. She has exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Berkeley Art Museum, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, VIPER Basel, ISEA and the Conflux Festival. Sant has taught classes that blend urban art practice, ecology, and new media at the California College of Art, San Francisco Art Institute and Mills College. Sant has been awarded artist residencies at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, and the McColl Center for Visual Art. She is the recipient of grants from the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Creative Work Fund. She has been invited to speak at a variety of symposia including ISEA2006, IDEA2006, the Mobile Digital Commons Network Symposium and VIPERBasel|2004. Her essays have been published in the Leonardo Electronic Almanac, Intelligent Agent and the Transcultural Mapping Reader. She received her BFA from New York University in the Departments of Photography and Interactive Telecommunications and received her Masters in Design at the College of Environmental Design, University of California Berkeley. Sant is a curator and board member of Southern Exposure and a member of the Art Program Oversight committee for the San Jose Airport.
Marina McDougall (www.forkingpaths.org) is an artist and curator with an interest in the culture of nature and interdisciplinary approaches to art. McDougall has organized exhibitions and public programs for the Exploratorium, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, MIT Media Lab, theCCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, and the California Academy of Sciences. McDougall is the founder of the Garden of Forking Paths. Its first project Machine in the Garden: A Pastoral, an outdoor classroom that doubles as a sculptural landscape, opened at the Oxbow School in Napa, California in 2009. McDougall teaches a course in the Curatorial Practice Program of the California College of Arts with Matthew Coolidge, the Director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation. McDougall is currently Project Director of the Marvelous Museum: Treasures, Curiosities, and Orphans of the Oakland Museum of California: A Project of Mark Dion. She is the co-editor of Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painleve (MITPress/Brico Press, 2000). McDougall received her BA from UC Berkeley; and her MA in Communications in Documentary Film from Stanford University.
Richard Johnson (richardjohnsondesign.com) received his Master of Architecture Degree from the University of California Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Fine Arts for the San Francisco Art Institute. For the past twenty years he has worked on wide variety of design-build projects focusing primarily in the public realm. His research-based practice bridges the fields of art and architecture. Johnson’s projects engage the themes of mobility, technology, ecology, and urbanism to investigate how they permeate and shape our daily environment. Johnson’s projects are defined by program, often proposing unique ways of defining and interacting with public space. His strengths are based on his ability to research, design and build works that are contextual in nature through the understanding of a site’s specific social, cultural, and political history. His recent projects include office and exhibition spaces for Southern Exposure and Post Tool, residential projects in San Francisco and Inverness CA, and exhibition design work for The Exploratorium. Johnson is an Adjunct Faculty Member at California College of the arts.
Kirstin Bach brings years of administrative and project management experience to the Studio. She served as an exhibition coordinator the 2002 Whitney Biennial and coordinated several other large scale exhibitions for the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Prior to her experience at the Whitney, Bach was the Assistant Director for Administration at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts at the California College of the Arts. Bach received her BFA in Art History from the University of California, Santa Cruz in 1993.
Strange Weather (www.strangeweatherproject.net)
Strange Weather is an interactive visualization that graphs the usage patterns of terms characteristic of the dialog around climate change. Drawing from both historical sources and contemporary usage on the Internet, Strange Weather aims to provoke us to think about how weather must change in our everyday consciousness from an objective measure of natural phenomena to something that complexly/darkly also mirrors ourselves. Strange Weather was created and installed in March 2008 for Eyebeam Art and Technology Center’s “Feedback” exhibition and received Eyebeam’s Eco-Vis Challenge Award. Strange Weather grows out of a previous project entitled In Popular Terms: The Evolving Language of Ecology conceived for the Berkeley Art Museum’s on-line exhibition RIP.MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA curated by Richard Rinehart.
An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park (www.anunnaturalhistory.net)
The nature of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park is deceptive. The land that it occupies today was originally thought to be an undesirable drift of sand dunes on the outskirts of the city known as the “outside lands.” Today the picturesque scenery of Golden Gate park presents a convincing English style landscape and the park, a treasured recreational ground for the citizenry of San Francisco. An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park is an audio tour that strolls through Golden Gate Park exploring the ways in which the park represents changing ideas of nature in the city. The piece considers the important role that this evolving landscape plays in the social and ecological life of San Francisco. Created by The Studio for Urban Projects in collaboration with Kurt Keppeler and Gabrielle Teschner. An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park was presented as part of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Bay Area Now 2008 Ground Scores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal curated by Valerie Imus. Two walking tours have also been presented by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2008 and SPUR (San Francisco Planning + Urban Research Association) in 2009.
Garden for the Environment Redesign (work-in-progress)
Many of we urban dwellers have heard about the virtues of ecologically-minded technologies, but seldom see them made manifest and up close in our immediate environments. The Studio for Urban Projects is collaborating with The Garden for the Environment (GFE), San Francisco’s premiere demonstration garden, to remake its half-acre site to include a new greenhouse and demonstrations of solar power, rain catchment, a green roof and more. The project was awarded a Community Challenge Grant from the City of San Francisco and is slated for completion in summer 2010.
Studio for Urban Projects Storefront
In the spirit of Gordon Matta Clark’s Food, The Studio for Urban Projects opened a storefront in the Mission District of San Francisco in 2008 as a means of advancing civic engagement and furthering public dialogue. Studio member Richard Johnson designed the storefront to function both as a private work space to a public venue. Here public workshops, talks, film screenings and meals inform our research process by fostering civic dialog. We see the storefront programming as as a vital extension of our artistic practice.
Public Orchard (work-in-progress)
Public Orchard is an installation that visualizes the possibility of incorporating public orchards into our urban landscapes. The project considers how we can make the planning of our cities more participatory, transparent, and reflective of the public need for affordable and healthful food. It probes models, current, imagined or historical that help us to understand future directions for our cities. Created for the ZER01 2010 festival theme “Build Your Own World,” the installation will be made up of heritage fruit trees, a horticultural reference and seed library, a community kitchen, and hands on workshop space. There we will host workshops, tours, screenings, and talks. Collectively, these events will explore models of urban edible landscapes, codes that encourage public foraging, and methods for harvesting and preserving food.
City of Seattle: Cheshiahud Loop Trail New Media Artwork (work-in-progress)
The Studio for Urban Projects has been commissioned to create an audio tour exploring the Cheshiahud Loop Trail surrounding Lake Union in the heart of Seattle.
Exhibitions and Awards
2007
MIX.BURN.BAM.PFA, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California
Eco-visualization award winner, Strange Weather
Eco-Vis Challenge, Eyebeam, New York
Open Skies, COCA Center for Outdoor Contemporary Art, San Francisco, California
2008
Feedback, Eyebeam, New York
Bay Area Now 5, Ground Scores: Guided Tours of San Francisco Past and Personal,
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, California
Panels/Lectures
2007
Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley, California
2008
Eyebeam, New York, NY
Public Programs at the Storefront
2008
An Unnatural History of Golden Gate Park, walking tour with scholars Galen Cranz, Terence Young and Richard Walker.
Manahatta Project, lecture by urban ecologist Eric Sanderson.
2009
Cinematic Landscapes, screening and talk with film scholar Scott MacDonald.
China Town: An Experimental Animated Video, film screening with filmmaker Lucy Raven.
The Urban Homestead, lecture and demonstration with author Eric Knutzen.
Feral Trade, lecture by artist Kate Rich.
Sam Green: Utopia in Four Movements, film screening with filmmaker Sam Green.
California’s Living New Deal Project, lecture by geographer and writer Gray Brechin.
Found SF & Nowtopia, lecture by activist and historian Chris Carlsson.
City Bountiful: a dinner focused on urban agriculture with a lecture by landscape architect and author Laura Lawson
The Infrastructural City, panel discussion with architectural historian Kazys Varnelis and architect David Fletcher. Moderated by California College of Art’s Architecture Chair Ila Berman.
Planting the City: Supplanting the Pavement, panel discussion with Jane Martin of Plant*SF, Gillian Gillett of Greening Guerrero, John Bela of Rebar, and Andres Power, the Project Manager of SF Pavement to Parks Program. Moderated by New York Times writer Allison Arieff.
Planting the City: Edible City Screening film screening with Directors Andrew Hasse and Adam Goldstein.
Planting the City: Urban Farming, panel discussion with Amy Franceschini, instigator of the new San Francisco Victory Gardens Project; Novella Carpenter, author of Farm City; and Paula Jones, Director of Food Systems San Francisco Department of Public Health. Moderated by New York Times writer Allison Arieff.
Teaching
2009
Food, California College of the Arts undergraduate seminar course with Suzanne Cockrell
The Self Sufficient Kitchen, cooking workshop series with chef Nicole LoBue
A Curious Summer, five weeks of children’s summer camp with Bryan Welsh, Marina McDougall and special guests
Press
September 18, 2009
Allison Arieff, Self-Preservation, Growers and Nomads
July 30, 2009
A Curious Summer, Crosscurrents, KALW News,
June 7, 2009
Tara Duggan, Cultivating their Fascination with Fermentation, San Francisco Chronicle
March 13, 2008
Interview Neighborhood Public Radio for the Whitney Biennial
December 31, 2008
John Alderman, “Repackaging Nature: An Interview with Philip Ross”, Rhizome.org
October 31, 2007
Rachel Swan, “You Can Kiss this Art: Exhibit’s open-source ideology encourages mashups and remixes,” East Bay Express