Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini was born in 1970 in
Patterson, California.  She received her
BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University, San Francisco,
California and her MFA from Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. She has
taught at in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the
Arts in San Francisco and at Stanford University.

Franceschini is an artist and designer who
creates work that facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry
by calling into question the “certainties” of a given time or place
where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived
conflict between “humans” and “nature”. Her projects reveal
the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by
challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to “hunt” and
“gather”. Using this as a starting point, she provides new tools for
an audience to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry; not only to imagine,
but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live. 

In 1995, Franceschini founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of
artists, activists, researchers, farmers and architects who work together to
propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of
space. Founded in 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support art
projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests.
Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and
understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation,
education. Through this disassembly they find new narratives and
reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated
these systems. They have created temporary schools, books, bus tours, and
large-scale exhibitions internationally.

Franceschini ‘s solo and collaborative work have been exhibited internationally
at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, New York; the Museum of Modern
Art, New York, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; ZKM,
Karlsruhe, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; Hall
of Sciences, New York, New York; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis,
Minnesota. Franceschini is a 2009 Guggenheim fellow and has received grants
from the Cultural Innovation Fund, Creative Work Fund and the Graham
Foundation.