Artist Bio

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Patricia Fong (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist who creates ephemeral site-specific installations and performs embodied poetry. She works primarily with found materials, including clothing collected from city streets, as well as her hair, mud, and trees. By weaving discarded materials into boundary places, public parks, trees, alleyways, their body and other bodies, Patricia performs mourning rituals for those who die before their time, especially species made extinct by climate change and capitalism, young people killed in their neighborhood, their three grandmothers and all their ancestors, roadkilled animals, and every being killed by those two great American weapons: the car and the gun. She draws from the grief practices of her community — including roadside memorials, candlelight vigils, memorial t-shirts, protests, funeral liturgies, and rap songs — and from other-than-human creatures including magpies and turkey vultures. Patricia's work invites viewers into our precarious interdependence with other vulnerable creatures through mourning rituals and storytelling.

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Patricia lives in San Francisco's Excelsior District, where she was born and raised. The Excelsior is a multicultural community of immigrant and working class families. Patricia's work is rooted in their beloved neighborhood's particular tangle of resilience, precarity, life, and loss. Patricia recently graduated from Seattle Pacific University with a triple major in Studio Art, English (Creative Writing), and Honors Liberal Arts. She is a recipient of the President's Citation for the class of 2023, the Dora E. Jensen Art Scholarship, the C. Dorr Demaray English Scholarship, the Erin Kimminau Award, Wesley E. Lingren Commendation, the Distinguished Scholar Award, the Dean's List, and President's List. Patricia currently teaches art and English at Rise University Preparatory, a high school in  Bayview Hunters-Point.