Amy 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 group of artists, activists, researchers, farmers, and architects who work 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, visualize, and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, and 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 received her BFA from San Francisco State University in Photography and her MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in visual arts graduate programs at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco, Stanford University, and is currently on the faculty in the Eco-Social masters program at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy. Amy is a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow, and has received grants from the Cultural Innovation Fund, Creative Work Fund, and the Graham Foundation.

Her work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, New York; MAXXI, Rome; Sharjah Biennial; Taipei Biennial; Henie Onstad Art Center near Oslo; the New York Hall of Sciences; and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.

futurefarmers.com

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