Join artist Michael Swaine as he details the 15 years he spent offering ‘free mending’ in the heart San Francisco’s Tenderloin district.

He says, there are “ten things I learned about mending, that at first glance have nothing to do with mending and, with later pondering, have everything to do with mending.”

Michael Swaine was originally trained as a ceramicist, but he works in a variety of materials, methods, and media and has had a long-time focus on collaborative work – in particular with Futurefarmers. He has participated in exhibitions at teh Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico; The Guggenheim, New York among others. His Free Mending Library received notice on CBS Nightly News in May 2015, winning him a Jefferson Award for Public Service in San Francisco two months later. Swaine holds a BFA from Alfred University and an MA from the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Swaine began teaching at the University of Washington in 2015.

This event is held in conjunction with The Future of Fixing, on view at Benchspace Gallery & Workshop September 2, 2016 – January 7, 2017.

The Future of Fixing was originally created by From-Now-On and adapted and curated by Marilyn Zapf of The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. This project was supported by the North Carolina Arts Council, a division of the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.

Matter in Action: Mending on the Streets || Artist Talk with Michael Swaine, Dec. 1, 2016 6:30 p.m. at The Center for Craft, Creativity & Design