Amy Franceschini

Amy Franceschini is a social artist and designer who facilitates encounters and encourages exchanges and tactile inquiry through temporary and permanent public art. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between nature and culture and the contradictions inherent in this divide. Her projects challenge systems of exchange and the tools we use to hunt and gather. They allow an audience to not only imagine but also participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Amy received her BFA from San Francisco State University in photography and her MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Stanford University. Amy is the recipient of the Artadia, Cultural Innovation, Eureka Fellowship, Creative Capital, Guggenheim Fellowship and SFMOMA SECA Awards.

In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international collective of artists, activists, researchers, farmers, scientists and architects working together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Futurefarmers uses various media to deconstruct systems of food, public transportation and education to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. They have created temporary schools, books, bus tours and large-scale exhibitions internationally. In September 2015, Amy and Futurefarmers were announced as finalists for the prestigious Artes Mundi 7.

Futurefarmers’ Flatbread Society

Futurefarmers’ Flatbread Society is a permanent public art project created on a waterfront development in Oslo, Norway. Formed in 2012, Flatbread Society has resulted in the formation of an urban gardening community called Herligheten, a Declaration of Land Use and a permanent grain field and bakehouse. The group’s dynamic activation of the site through public programs, a bakehouse and a cultivated grain field has attracted the imagination of farmers, bakers, oven builders, artists, activists, soil scientists and city officials. Flatbread Society has grown beyond Oslo into a network of projects and people that use grain as a starting point to examine food production, knowledge sharing, cultural development and socio-political formation.

Seed Journey

An outgrowth of Flatbread Society, Seed Journey is a seafaring voyage that moves people, ideas and seeds through time and space. This voyage of crew and cargo will transport varieties of unpatented ancient grains, recently discovered in Oslo, back to the Fertile Crescent, where agriculture originated. Various stops on the route will allow the travelers to meet leading actors of the food commons movement – anthropologists, artists, chefs, farmers, microbial ecologists and writers – to collect and exchange seeds and to rotate crew members. Actors from various stops can join a segment of the journey as it relates to their work, allowing for cross-pollination between movements and cultural exchange among the actors. At its final destination, Seed Journey will dismantle a boat and reassemble the parts into a permanent seed library and an open-air-theater titled Seed Theater.

	Flatbread Society is part of the Slow Space public art program, a curatorial vision conceived by Claire Doherty and commissioned and produced by Bjørvika Utvikling in collaboration with the artists.

		media sponsor

The Amy Franceschini residency is sponsored by the UW-Madison Arts Institute and is hosted by the Art Department, with Assistant Professor Meg Mitchell as lead faculty. Her residency is co-sponsored by the Departments of Design Studies, Horticulture and Community and Environmental Sociology. Flatbread Society and Seed Journey partners include Slow Space/Bjørvika Utvikling, Henie-Onstad Art Centre and Museum Aan de Stroom (MAS).

The UW-Madison Arts Institute has hosted world-class artists in residence since 1995 and formally launched the Interdisciplinary Arts Residency Program (IARP) in 1999. The IARP is made possible by funding from the university’s Office of the Provost.

Joe Riley* is an artist, a printer and a Master of Yachts 200-on Offshore Limited Mate. His work locates tangible, material experience at the intersection of history and storytelling and along the fringes of public space. Riley has biked atop abandoned railroads in the United States, paraded a mobile radio network in Ukraine and helped organize the longest student-led occupation in United States history while studying at Cooper Union. He has been faculty at Bruce High Quality Foundation University, a resident at Izolyatsia and a collaborator with Futurefarmers. Riley teaches boatbuilding in Brooklyn, NY public schools and letterpress printing and metalworking at Cooper Union.

Multimedia artist Stijn Schiffeleers* uses film, video and interactive installations to reveal the subtleties of life. His work embodies a sense of play and sensitivity that remind us to take a closer look at what surrounds us. He has been seen most recently soaring above the streets of San Francisco in a canoe mounted to the top of the Futurefarmers Volvo.

Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. He is known as the analog designer of Futurefarmers and has collaborated with the studio since 1997. Swaine’s ongoing project Free Mending Library is a library for fixing the holes in our lives – a place to borrow thread and sewing machines and talk about life. This project began as part of Reap What You Sew Generosity Project, which involved Swaine pushing an old-fashioned ice cream style cart on wheels with a treadle-operated sewing machine on it through the streets of San Francisco. He received his BFA from Alfred University in ceramics and his MA in design from UC Berkeley. Currently, Swaine is teaching at the University of Washington in Seattle.

• Flatbread Society was on a Norwegian national television program! Click here to watch.
• “UW-Madison helps artist prepare for voyage,” courtesy of Wisconsin State Journal
• Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers, the Spring 2016 Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence, Presents Final Event: Seeds of Time (PDF)
• No typical day in artist in residence’s classroom, courtesy of UW-Madison News
• Art of the farm: Amy Franceschini brings together artists, farmers and academics, courtesy of Isthmus
• Read an article from the UW-Madison Art Department, “UW-Madison hosting Franceschini as Spring Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence.“
• UW-Madison to host Social Practice, Multimedia and Environmental Artist – Amy Franceschini of Futurefarmers – as the Spring 2016 Arts Institute Interdisciplinary Artist in Residence (PDF), January 14, 2016
• Watch an interview with Claire Doherty and Amy, courtesy of Public Art (Now).
• Click here to learn more about Futurefarmers, or click here if you’re interested in their project, Flatbread Society.
• Listen in as KQED talks with Amy about working collaboratively and making work that encourages dialogue and exchange.