1 Claudia Altman-Siegel

is the owner and director of Altman Siegel, a new contemporary art gallery in San Francisco, that represents a select group of emerging and established artists. The exhibitions focus on rigorous content in a range of mediums, and the program seeks to contribute to the international cultural discourse. Altman-Siegel has formerly worked as an independent curator, writer, and private dealer, and she was the senior director of Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York. Altman-Siegel has organized numerous museum and gallery exhibitions including Trevor Paglen's SECA Award show, Larry Clark’s retrospective at the International Center for Photography, Christopher Wool’s survey at the Musee d’art Moderne et Contemporain de Strasbourg, Rachel Whiteread’s shows of new work at the Guggenheim and the Kunsthaus Bregenz, Janet Cardiff’s survey at PS 1 and numerous other exhibitions in Europe, Asia and South America.

2 Jim Fairchild

is a guitarist, singer-songwriter, and explorer. He is the current leader of All Smiles, a band that exists as a roving collective of musicians, with members of Modest Mouse, Menomena, Sleater-Kinney, Quasi, and many others.

He was the guitarist in Grandaddy, a band that was best known for their dreaming synth-pop folk songs depicting the disintegration of California's Central Valley. Fairchild has spent the last fifteen years touring the world, playing on and producing records for his various projects. He is currently the guitarist of the acclaimed rock band Modest Mouse.

His home is a blur of San Francisco, Portland, OR, and Los Angeles.

3 Amy Franceschini

is an artist, designer and educator whose work interrogates the social, cultural and environmental systems that surround her. Often working in collaboration, her projects involve the development of new formats for exchange and participatory modes of production. Because of Amy's deep interest in science and ecology, a recurring subject of her work is the perceived conflict between humans and nature.

In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an artists collective and design studio. In 2004, Amy co-founded Free Soil, an international

collective of artists, activists, researchers, and gardeners who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Her solo and collaborative work has been included in exhibitions internationally including ZKM, Whitney Museum, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She is the recipient of the Artadia, Cultural Innovation, Eureka Fellowship, Creative Capital and SFMOMA SECA Awards.

4 Renny Pritikin

is a contemporary art curator and poet who served as the Co-Director, then Director of New Langton Arts in San Francisco from 1979 to 1992. He was the Visual Arts Director, then Chief Curator, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts from 1992 to 2004 and Director of the Nelson Gallery, UC Davis since August 2004. He is also currently a senior adjunct professor of the Curatorial Practice program at the California College of the Arts, SF a position he's held since 2003.

Renny has lectured in museums across Japan on a fellowship from the USIA. He received the Koret Israel Prize to travel throughout Israel and received a Fulbright

New Zealand fellowship to lecture in New Zealand on museum practice. In 2002 he curated the exhibition that represented the US at the Cuenca Biennal (Ecuador).

During his tenure at YBCA he became known for his work with popular and material culture: he brought the first Star Wars show to an American museum in 1995, organized retrospectives of legendary figures like the Southern California auto customizer Ed Big Daddy Roth, the tattoo artist and painter Don Ed Hardy, the Blade Runner set designer Syd Mead, and most recently the magician, historian and collector Ricky Jay.

5 Jerome Waag

is an artist and chef at Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley CA.His work borrows from performance and installation art to create frames for social interaction. He is part of the collaborative OPENrestaurant, an experimental restaurant relying on art practices to explore the issues associated with the production, distribution and consumption of food with performances at SFMOMA, The Yerba Buena

Center for the Arts and New Langton Arts.. His personal work include Meet My Mom at the The Marin Headlands Center for the Arts, Marin CA; The Flavor of Democracy at 667 Shotwell and The Lab in San Francisco, CA and The Borrowed Kazan, The Global Art Lab in Osh, Kyrgyzstan.

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PICKPOCKET ALMANACK is curated by Joseph del Pesco and commissioned by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art

Design and typsetting by Scott Ponik
Web development by Chadwick Wood

Thanks to: Dominic Willsdon, Brian Conley, Anne Walsh, Renny Pritikin, and Helena Keeffe.