Ilana Crispi is a San Francisco based artist with an interdisciplinary practice. She mixes traditional ceramic arts with local histories and geologies, food, dirt, and junk materials. Her site-specific installations invite engagement and investigate ideas of perception and the ways in which we experience our environments.

SEE(d) visited Crispi’s Half Moon Bay studio on Saturday, May 11, 2019, 3:00 - 5:00pm where we learned about Crispi’s intriguing process of making art from the land and her process of excavating dirt from underneath her home in San Francisco’s Mission District.

Crispi has been the resident artist at the Rochester Folk Art Guild, Montalvo Arts Center, the de Young Museum, and Jiwar and Can Serrat in Spain. Her work has been shown at museums, galleries, and alternative sites nationally and internationally in Spain, Mexico and China. Crispi earned her BA from Brown University and holds an MFA from Mills College. She is an Assistant Professor of Art at San Francisco State University and has her studio in Half Moon Bay, CA.