About Art Works for Change
Since 2008, AWFC has created, curated and produced 13 cross-disciplinary traveling exhibitions and projects that address critical social and environmental issues, and have reached a global audience of over 2 million people. These projects, hosted in 17 countries on five continents, have showcased the stories and visions of renowned artists from around the world. Learn more at www.artworksforchange.org
Multimedia artist Linda Gass creates stitched paintings and works in glass questioning water and land use issues in California. Informed and inspired by her extensive research on the impact of changing waterways, sea-level rise, fire, and drought in California and the American West, Gass’s work uses beauty to shed light on these challenging issues.
Evoking both topographical maps and comforting textiles, Gass’s work brings to light the incongruence between the safety of individual homes, and the devastating effect environmental manipulation has on the natural ecological processes of our collective home, California. Divided into four themed topics, the artwork in this exhibition reflect how sea-level rise, man-made waterways, rain/snowpack loss, and wildfire changes over time. Gass includes work that is hyperlocal in context, including three new sea-level rise artworks focused on the Dogpatch neighborhood where MCD is located. This series shows three aerial street views of Dogpatch: as it looks today, how it would change after the impact of three feet of sea-level rise and the devastation after six feet of sea-level rise. Another localized piece, Severely Burned (2014) represents the impact of the 2013 Rim Fire on the Tuolumne River Watershed, which provides drinking water for the City of San Francisco and many other Bay Area cities.
Gass comments, “Our current water infrastructure was designed during an era when our climate was more stable and the average annual rainfall was higher than it is now. Human development has permanently altered and destroyed much of our natural water infrastructures such as wetlands and watersheds. My textile, glass, and mixed-media artworks address these concerns – how our infrastructure and development policies are failing under climate chaos – and invite the viewer to ponder the question ‘what can we do better?'”
About Linda Gass
Bay Area artist and environmental activist Linda Gass is best known for her labor-intensive stitched paintings about land use and water issues in California and the American West. She graduated from Stanford University with a BS in Mathematics and MS in Computer Science and has been creating art for more than 20 years after a decade-long career in software. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US and in Europe and Russia, at venues including the Oakland Museum, the Bellevue Arts Museum and the US Embassy in Moscow. Gass’s work has been written about in The San Francisco Chronicle, National Geographic’s All Over the Map: A Cartographic Odyssey, 500 Art Quilts, The Map as Art: Contemporary Artists Explore Cartography, Why We Quilt: Contemporary Makers Speak Out about the Power of Art, Activism, Community and Creativity, and American Craft as well as other publications.
Solo exhibition of artworks about climate change in conjunction with the traveling exhibition Survival Architecture at the
Museum of Craft and Design, 2569 Third Street, San Francisco, CA.
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