Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Drawing, Painting, Sculpture, Photography, Video, Social practice
Website: aliciaescott.com
Alicia Escott is a San Francisco-based interdisciplinary artist whose work moves between drawing, painting, photography, video, sculpture, and social practice, addressing species loss, ecological grief, and the human experience of the climate emergency. She earned a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2002) and an MFA from California College of the Arts (2009), and has lived and kept a studio in San Francisco’s Outer Sunset neighborhood for most of her career. She currently teaches as an adjunct professor at California College of the Arts.
Over nearly two decades, Escott’s work has been shown in more than 100 exhibitions at institutions, galleries, and alternative spaces, including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Berkeley Art Museum, Berkeley Art Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, the Hayward Gallery in London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, and has been covered by The Economist, The New Yorker, The San Francisco Chronicle, KQED, and the BBC. She has held residencies and fellowships at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, the Lucid Art Foundation (including the Gordon Onslow Ford Scholarship), Recology San Francisco’s Artist in Residence Program, I-Park, Dream Farm Commons, and Anthropocene Laboratories in Sweden. In 2026 she was selected by the San Francisco Arts Commission as Artist in Residence at the San Francisco Department of the Environment, an appointment placing her inside the department for twelve weeks to research and produce new public artwork on municipal climate action.
Escott is also known for her collaborative practice: she is a founding member of the artist collective 100 Days Action, and in 2014 co-founded The Bureau of Linguistical Reality with Heidi Quante, a participatory social-practice project that invites the public to help coin new vocabulary for experiences and emotions specific to the Anthropocene.
Escott describes her approach as interstitial, tailoring medium to subject rather than working in a single signature form — a project might surface as a hand-painted drawing, a functioning online shop, a sculptural installation woven from natural and synthetic detritus, or a public workshop soliciting new words. Running through this range is a sustained effort to “undo the construct of ‘nature’ as a thing separated from us,” using research-driven, often poetic strategies to make space for grief, heartbreak, and loss within the context of mass extinction and climate change. Her long-running series A Brief History of the Sunset centers on the Xerces Blue, the first North American butterfly species driven extinct by human activity, using it as a lens onto the vanished dune ecology of San Francisco’s Outer Sunset district and the gentrification, colonialism, and displacement that reshaped it. Her sculptural work frequently interweaves natural materials — driftwood, seed pods, ash — with the discarded technological residue of daily life, such as phone chargers, earbuds, and copper wire, collapsing the distance between “natural” and human-made decay.
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