Soft Slants, Mixed Gestures

This studio will focus on developing new forms of housing in sites shaped by extreme plans and sections within San Francisco. We will investigate the conflicts and confluences between the city’s topography and grid, as well as the significant disruptions in its cultures and countercultures that have shaped the city today.

Here, “the slant” serves as both a literal and metaphorical concept, symbolizing a dialogue between the uniqueness of San Francisco’s urbanism and the particular intersectional practices and subject positions that extend beyond the dominant aesthetic, social, and political frameworks typically considered normal. In the context of San Francisco, the slant is twofold: the city’s distinctive topography is ever-present, and the way it has been adapted for habitation represents a softening that facilitates both movement and occupation in inventive and unique ways. Additionally, San Francisco has nurtured various countercultures and produced legendary figures who operate from the margins, redefining and reshaping the center through their activism.

As a point of departure, we will first highlight and engage with the expansive body of work by Bay Area artist Rosa Lee Tompkins, an African American artist whose improvisational quilts are both abstract and figurative, domestic and cultural, each imbued with spiritual and personal resonance. This form of tapestry has historically occupied a space between the folklore of American domestic life and its elevation to high art, as exemplified by Robert Rauschenberg’s “Bed” and the resilient collective efforts of Black women from Gee’s Bend.

The quilt serves as an intersectional art form that connects queer culture–especially following the AIDS epidemic–as a form of memorial, and African American culture as a ritual and shared knowledge between generations, influenced by Black migrants from the American South. In both cases, quilts carry collective and personal narratives, constructing a framework for creative and political expression. Tompkins’ quilts are often large, visually immersive compositions, with their patchwork units presenting nested narratives and symbols that engage with the larger whole. They serve as a visual representation of America as a melting pot and highlight the continuity of differences within it. Quilting as a spatial act accommodates multiple identities and embeds them in a single plane, where they can be observed in relation to one another. The assemblage of social and spatial identities in the tapestry is at once autonomous and reliant on one another for their perception and inhabitation.

Her quilts reflect Édouard Glissant’s ideas on difference and relation within modernity, showcasing how composite cultures create new, constantly evolving, and unpredictable configurations. Each work encompasses masterful color choices, sharp social commentary, and brilliant compositions of bold colors, patterns, nested figures, seams, edges, and overlaps. Her quilts can be seen as representations of new urban or architectural imaginaries that have yet to be fully explored.

Our effort to formalize these concepts will take shape through the medium of ceramics, which will serve as an analog to the patchwork nature of quilts–a material that is mass-produced yet carries the feeling of being bespoke. This approach loosely defines architectural enclosure and emphasizes the unitization and seriality of collective housing.

By integrating the visual narratives of Rosa Lee Tompkins’ quilts with our exploration, we aim to investigate alternative housing forms in San Francisco that reflect its rich cultural tapestry and diverse identities.