Curated by Joyce Grimm & Justine Topfer

Dates: August 29 – October 18, 2008

Location: SFAC Gallery Window Installation Site, 155 Grove Street

Hours: 24 hour viewing

The San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery, in partnership with New Langton Arts, is please to present Jesse Schlesinger and Jerome Waag’s site-specific sculptural installation, the seed: a proposal for a new branch of the san francisco public library, at our window installation site at 155 Grove Street.

Schlesinger and Waag are San Francisco-based artists who share a passion for both food and art. Their Grove Street collaboration will explore this intersection and extend the vernacular of food to social, political, economic and environmental issues. Their conceptual installation takes the form of a proposal for a new branch of the San Francisco Library dedicated to seed exchange, as well as the loaning of gardening tools and literature associated with farming, gardening and urban greening. From the street the viewer will see an archetypal model, which will embody the essence of the proposed seed library. In Schlesinger’s view the Grove Street installation “represents two potentials: a new branch of the San Francisco Public Library system devoted to a specific environmental effort, and the possibility that individual citizens will think about how art can incite social change.”

“This project is a seed to be planted in the cultural soil of the city to be nurtured, irrigated and grown to full maturity by the San Francisco community. We believe seeds accomplish in the soil what words accomplish in the mind and that seeds carry stories just as complex and varied as books.”                                                                                  - Jerome Waag

the seed: a proposal for a new branch of the san francisco public library will run concurrently and act as a platform for conversation with Slow Food Nation (http://slowfoodnation.org/). Slow Food Nation is “the largest celebration of food in America.” It will take place in the Civic Center (and various other locations throughout San Francisco over Labor Day weekend (August 29 – September 1, 2008). Showcasing an extraordinary range of events; taste halls, workshops, lectures, dinners and more Slow Food Nation highlights the connection between plate and planet.

Artists Bios

Jesse Schlesinger is a visual and social practice artist residing in San Francisco. He works with a hand made aesthetic, utilizing foraged urban materials and recycled objects from which he creates sculptural dwellings. Both private and public, these dwellings explore how we inhabit and contemplate space. Currently, Schlesinger’s practice reveals a conversation between culture and agriculture. His work is a direct synthesis of his personal history with carpentry, eight years of experience farming with Dirty Girl Produce, and a belief in the "back-to-the-land movement".

Jerome Wag is a performance artist living in San Francisco who also works as a chef at Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley CA. He is currently collaborating with New Langton’s Arts on OPEN restaurant. OPEN restaurant is an experimental restaurant run by a collaborative of restaurant professionals as a way to explore the issues associated with the production, distribution and consumption of food. Set in an art context, it invites the creative participation of people interested in food and its politics to a discussion about the way we feed ourselves and cultivate our communities.