NEON AS SOULCRAFT

Museum of Craft and Design, San Francisco CA
July – November 2024

She Bends: Neon as Soulcraft is an inquiry into the significance of manual trade skills and their impact on our relationship to the material world. Centering neon bending as an embodied, process-driven practice, the exhibition examined the diverse knowledge systems required to work with glass and light—spanning physics, chemistry, spatial reasoning, and care—and considered how access to these skills fosters deeper engagement with sustainability, social responsibility, and creative problem-solving.

The exhibition presented collaborative works developed through three teaching residencies held in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and Seattle/Tacoma. Through community outreach and nomination process, emerging student artists were identified and paired with teaching artists via a community-driven selection process. Residencies were designed to support both skill transmission and pedagogical development within a craft that is often difficult to access, responding to the scarcity of sustained learning environments for neon as both a technical trade and a conceptual medium.

Student artists were selected with support from the Student Artist Selection Committee, which included She Bends curators Kelsey Issel and Meryl Pataky, Ariel Zaccheo, Curatorial Director at the Museum of Craft and Design, Mari Robles, Executive Director of Headlands Center for the Arts, and Homan Rajai, Principal Designer at Studio Ahead.

To honor the learning process itself, She Bends created Quilt (2024), a site-specific hanging installation composed of scrap glass collected during the residencies. Each fragment served as an artifact of experimentation, failure, and discovery—making visible the often hidden labor embedded in learning to bend glass. Reassembled with noble gases and test leads, Quilt illuminated the collective devotion, care, and shared authorship that define neon’s evolving lineage, and marked the first work in a new collaborative body of installations by She Bends co-founders Kelsey Issel and Meryl Pataky.

As part of the exhibition, She Bends also produced the short documentary The Art of Neon, directed by Gaby Scottwith cinematography by Lawrence Rickford. Supported by the Museum of Craft and Design, the film documented the embodied process of neon bending and the pedagogical environments cultivated during the residencies. Media partners for the film included KQED and San Francisco Magazine.

Neon as Soulcraft featured teaching artists Dani Kaes (Seattle, WA), Leticia Maldonado (Los Angeles, CA), and Victoria Ahmadizadeh Melendez (Philadelphia, PA), paired respectively with student artists Melissa Jean Golberg, Mayra Zambrano, and Christen Baker. Together, their works traced neon’s capacity to hold memory, care, and collective authorship, while extending the medium beyond its commercial origins into the realm of studio craft and fine art.

The exhibition was curated by Kelsey Issel and Meryl Pataky and organized by the Museum of Craft and Design.
Generous support was provided by The Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation, Alyce and Steve Kaplan, Babette and Steven Pinsky, the Glass Alliance of Northern California, Anonymous, and Sharon Karmazin, with in-kind support from Gaby Scott, Michael Ambrose Design, Cadogan Tate, and She Bends.