Artist Bio:

Jillian Crochet is a Bay Area artist working in sculpture, video, and performance to confront grief and disability. Using elements found in nature mixed with medicalized objects, her work questions the medical model, desire for control, and the complex ethics of genetics and experimentation. Her work questions: What is natural/unnatural? What bodies are included/excluded — important? The unceasing work of self-advocacy led her to performance and interventional installation. This work reveals the inherent ableism of our built environment and social structures, while seeking to carve out a space for the disabled body to find pleasure and comfort — to liberate the disabled body from normalized marginalization and oppression.

In 2021 she was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She is in YBCA’s Bay Area Now Triennial and she was a 2020-21 Artist in Residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability program and Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally, at YBCA, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco, CA, SOMArts, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the Alabama Contemporary Art Center and has published work in Able Zine based in London, UK, Quiet Lightning, and Feral Fabric Journal. She has presented work at MAD Museum, Stanford, and BAMPFA. Her sculptures were commissioned as awards for the Morris Dees Justice Award by the Morris Dees Poverty Law Center. Her work has been presented internationally and will be in the forthcoming book Disability Arts. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2020.

Contact jilliancrochet@gmail.com for more details.