Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, Sculpture, Textiles, Time-based Media
Website: christinalasala.com
Christina La Sala is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in San Francisco. Born in Philadelphia, she moved to San Francisco in 1992 to study at the San Francisco Art Institute, where she earned her MFA in New Genres in 1994. She has lived and worked in the Bay Area ever since, developing a practice rooted in site-specific installation, sculpture, textiles, and time-based media. She is currently an Associate Professor and Chair of the Individualized Program at California College of the Arts, where she has taught since 2002.
Describing herself as “a scavenger, a collector, a researcher and a maker,” La Sala developed her artistic sensibility through a childhood spent in thrift shops, nature museums, and libraries. Her scholarly interests center on utopian movements; her Master’s thesis examined “the search for Utopia in the beehive,” analyzing late 19th and early 20th century communal experiments. This fascination with collective life and material culture carries through her work, informing both her teaching practice—which explores utopian experiments through folklore studies—and her studio output.
La Sala has exhibited widely in the Bay Area and internationally, with solo projects at Alter Space, the Roxie Theater, and Hancock Shaker Village, and residencies at the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito, ZKU Center for Art and Urbanistics in Berlin, and the Ayatana Art Science Residency in Ottawa. She has served as Board President of The LAB and SF Cinematheque and has been a sustained organizer within San Francisco’s arts community.
La Sala’s practice is rooted in the idea that time is tangible—“measured in stitches, steps, shadows, and breath.” She works across sculpture, embroidery, kinetic installation, and mixed media, using ephemeral materials such as water, wax, thread, and found objects to construct sensory investigations of duration and process. Her work is consistently site-specific, designed to integrate with the architectural history and material character of non-traditional venues, from theaters and gallery spaces to village museums and science centers.
Recurring concerns include the body, craft, and the boundary between scientific inquiry and domestic practice. Her Anatomical Embroidery series adapts illustrations from medical textbooks, translating neurological anatomy into embroidered textile works. Her 2015 project Measured Intention, partially funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, was presented at Hancock Shaker Village in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, drawing connections between Shaker craft traditions and contemporary art practice—hand-turning wooden screws, hand-spinning wool thread, and creating an accompanying film. Throughout her career La Sala has maintained a commitment to communal and collaborative modes of making, reflected in her long tenure as faculty member, board president, and organizer within San Francisco’s arts ecosystem.
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