Ilana Crispi

Instagram: @ilanacrispi

Website: http://www.ilanacrispi.com

Bio: Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based artist, mother, and teacher, with an interdisciplinary practice incorporating ceramic arts with local histories and geologies. She has mined urban soil for gold, shared it with neighbors, sculpted it into ceramics, and built ephemeral monuments in the landscape. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of power, access, and perception and the ways in which we experience our environments. Crispi has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum and Can Serrat. She has shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites in the USA, Mexico, Spain, Portugal and China. She has curated shows in San Francisco, Oakland, San Mateo and Barcelona. Crispi is Associate Professor of Art at San Francisco State University.

Statement: I explore the stories of place and how the physical world around us, the land, holds stories and reflects both change and permanence. Geologic change inches along. Changes in our society, in the demographics of our neighborhoods is much more rapid. I have done projects using the local soils of different neighborhoods to explore histories and question value and ownership and to produce shared experiences – sometimes embracing the absurd by inviting neighbors to mine for gold from the soil under my apartment using a sluice box set up in the street. My background with ceramics started as a child, sculpting from mud, and this is something I’m returning to now with my child. I am creating collaborations with my son. Prioritizing play and experimentation and exploration has allowed for new possibilities.