Drawing the Circle: Relational Practice from the Studio to the Community

Sharon Siskin will present lots of images and stories, providing an intimate window into her community-based collaborative visual art projects in San Francisco Bay Area AIDS services communities (1988 to present), services for unhoused women and children, incarcerated people living with AIDS at California Medical Facility; and collaborations with visual artists and a poet friends addressing issues of memory, loss, and grief; her Jewish cultural lineage and cross-cultural visual ecoart dialog with a Muslim artist friend; her current project, Service Works, in collaboration with Nancer LeMoins and longtime survivors of AIDS; and her collaborative teaching with activist artist friends and colleagues at SFAI, USF, and Laney College.

Bio

Sharon Siskin is an interdisciplinary, relational, community collaborative artist. She is the recipient of awards that include a Creative Work Fund and a Berkeley Civic Arts, both in 2019, Visual Arts Fellowship from the California Arts Council in 2003, the 2001 Potrero Nuevo Prize, Noetic Arts Community Grant, San Francisco Arts Commission Market Street Art in Transit Commission and 12 California Arts Council Artist in Residence Grants for community-based public art projects in the San Francisco Bay Area AIDS support service community and in the City of Berkeley homeless women and children services community. She was the Artist in Residence at Recology in 2004, and Artist in Residence at Playa, 2015. Her artwork has been featured in publications including Notes on the Need for Beauty: An Intimate Look at an Essential Quality, by J.Ruth Gendler; Women Artists in the American West, edited by Susan Ressler, Lure of the Local: Sense of Place in a Multicentered Society, by Lucy Lippard, Connecting Conversations: Interviews with 28 Bay Area Women Artists, edited by Moira Roth and Site to Sight, Mapping Bay Area Visual Culture, edited by Lydia Mathiews. Her work as a community-based art professor is featured in Outside the Frame: Teaching Art for Social Change, by Beverly Naidus.

She is Faculty Advisor in the MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts Program at Goddard College in Plainfield, VT, and an Adjunct Professor in the Art and Cultural Studies Program at Berkeley City College and in the Art Department at Laney College, where she teaches socially-engaged courses with curriculums she developed including The Artist as Citizen: Introduction to Community-based Arts Practices and Eco Art Matters: History, Theory, and Practice of Environmental and Social Justice Art. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, John F. Kennedy University, California State University East Bay, University of New Mexico, at several Bay Area Community Colleges, and for 5 years as Assistant Professor at University of San Francisco. From 1993 through 1995 she worked as an Art Instructor for the William James Association, at the California Medical Facility, in Vacaville, CA, where she worked primarily with incarcerated men and trans-women who were HIV positive, living with AIDS, or dying in the AIDS Hospice. She is the founder of Positive Art from 1988 to present, an art project in the Bay Area AIDS services community, and founding board member of WEAD (Women Eco Art Dialog) 1996 to present. She has lectured extensively in art colleges, universities, professional conferences, galleries, and museums throughout the United States.

Image caption-top and middle: Sharon Siskin & John Lavine, "Table of Contents", Gallery Route One, Pt. Reyes, recycled pine shelves, acrylic painted text, worm composting paraphernalia, earth, native seeds, water, electric light, gardening quotes. 35"x 35"x 26", (details of Sunlight and Seeds drawers), 2002

Image caption-bottom: Sharon Siskin, "Planting the Seeds of Hope", Falkirk Cultural Center, San Rafael, shirts, mirrors, vinyl text, school desk, table, clay pots, seeds, gardening tools, watering cans, safe sex kits, artist books, installation dimensions variable (detail of hope/seed planting area), 1994

Event Venue

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