Location: San Francisco Bay Area, CA
Medium: Social practice, Public art, Books and prints, Illustration
Website: katepocrass.com
Kate Pocrass is an artist, illustrator and surface designer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She received her BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Since 2001 she has combined a conceptual art practice rooted in everyday urban experience with commercial illustration and textile and surface design work for clients in the apparel and publishing industries.
Pocrass is best known for Mundane Journeys, a public art project she began in 2001 as a telephone hotline for an exhibition in which no work could physically occupy the gallery. Each week she recorded a new message sending callers to an overlooked destination somewhere in San Francisco — a sidewalk marking, an unusual tree, a particular shop or specialty food — paired with an instruction for what to do once they arrived. The San Francisco hotline ran until 2009, and the project expanded into self-published guidebooks, letterpress calling cards, posters, maps, and bus, audio and walking tours. She received two Cultural Equity grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission toward self-publishing Mundane Journeys and Mundane Journeys Field Guide to Color.
Her work was included in Bay Area Now 4 at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2005 and in the 2006 California Biennial at the Orange County Museum of Art, where she produced a new Orange County map and a second hotline. She was a 2011 artist in residence at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and a recipient of a Fleishhacker Foundation Eureka Fellowship (2008–2010). Alongside her self-published work she is the founding editor of the magazine Average and of Mundane Times, a limited-edition newspaper of “stories of connection in a lonely year” distributed free in Berkeley during the pandemic with its own accompanying hotline, and she is the author and illustrator of several guided journals and gift books published by Chronicle Books.
Pocrass works in what she and her funders have described as social sculpture: ephemeral, participatory projects staged in the public sphere rather than in galleries. Hotlines, newspapers, magazines, field guides, posters, maps and guided tours are her primary formats, and the encounter they produce — a stranger standing on a corner looking carefully at something unremarkable — is the work itself. Her stated interest is in the anonymity of daily experience and in “common moments that unwittingly happened upon us each day,” with the time spent en route treated as more memorable than any destination.
The visual register is deliberately modest and handmade: letterpress cards, hand-drawn maps and illustrations, newsprint, flat saturated color, and a deadpan editorial voice that treats the trivial with the seriousness usually reserved for monuments. Color recurs as an organizing device, most directly in the Mundane Field Guide to Color, which indexes San Francisco locations by hue, and in One Day One, which renders memories of pivotal days as overlapping fields of color. Across projects her practice asks viewers to slow down and look with intention rather than move efficiently from point A to point B.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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