Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Painting, Ceramics, Drawing, Photography, Printmaking
Website: bebepress.com
Anson Cyr is a San Francisco-based multidisciplinary artist whose practice spans painting, ceramics, drawing, photography, and artist publishing. He has been active in the Bay Area arts community since at least 2012, with early work appearing as street murals across San Francisco neighborhoods including the Mission District. In 2016, he founded B.B. Press (originally Burnt Bra Press), a small publishing imprint dedicated to limited-edition zines and artist books, inspired in part by his father’s background as a Xerox technician and a deep appreciation for toner-based printing processes. He has served as a studio assistant at Hospitality House Community Art Program in San Francisco and previously assisted artists Michael Jang and James Marshall (Dalek).
Cyr has exhibited solo work in San Francisco and internationally, including exhibitions at MRKT Gallery (2022), Adobe Books Backroom (2024), and Four Barrel (2024) in San Francisco, and at Ladrón Galería in Mexico City (2021). In 2026, he presented a two-person exhibition, Hell Is Other Horses, with ceramicist Amanda Wong at Public Land Gallery in Sacramento. He has also curated multiple exhibitions across the Bay Area, including shows at Goodmother Gallery in Oakland and Fleetwood in San Francisco, and co-curated international exhibitions in Mexico City.
Cyr’s studio practice is characterized by urgency and directness. He has described his work as “quick in its marks, quick in its method, quick in its legibility,” driven by a DIY sensibility rooted in improvisatory, last-minute problem-solving. His work moves between painting, ceramics, sculpture, and photography, with surfaces built up through spray paint, oil pastel, plaster, Xerox transfer, and sgraffito. The resulting compositions carry a layered, archaeological quality—gestural and dense, with imagery that rewards sustained looking.
Recurring motifs include animals, monsters, birds, skulls, masks, and melting or fragmented forms. These figures carry a humanist charge: animals bound in twine or yarn speak to interdependence and consequence; monsters embody the self-centered id; birds and oversized heads suggest an individual navigating societal constraints while seeking authentic freedom. Cyr’s thematic concerns center on the difficulties of translation, the weight of empty nostalgia, and the disorienting experience of loss—particularly the violence of not knowing what has truly been taken. His B.B. Press imprint extends this practice into print, producing collaborative zines with artists and galleries in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Mexico City under the studio motto “XEROX IS GOD.”
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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