Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Installation, Photography, Video, Performance, Textiles
Website: marcypetit.com
Marcy Petit is a French interdisciplinary artist born in 1990 in northwest France. She studied fine art at the Université de Rennes, earning both a BA and MA in Visual Arts, and later completed a joint MA in Management of Contemporary Art through the University of Leeds and Université Paris 8. After several years living and working in England, she relocated to San Francisco, where she is now based as an artist, educator, and librarian, working extensively with children and teens and teaching at the Alliance Française of San Francisco.
Petit’s career has developed through an international string of residencies rather than a fixed studio practice, allowing new tools and locations to reshape her work each time. She undertook the AADK residency in Blanca, Spain in 2019, the Zaratan residency in Lisbon, Portugal in 2021, and a residency at the Icelandic Textile Center in Blönduós, Iceland in 2022. In 2025 she was awarded the Sara Vance Waddell Feminist Residency at Wave Pool Art Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she produced the exhibition Under the Owl’s Eye, drawing press coverage from Cincinnati CityBeat and the Cincinnati Enquirer.
Her work has also been the subject of academic study, cited in a research paper on menstrual art as activism at the Université de Lorraine in Metz, France.
Rather than committing to a single medium, Petit lets each project determine its own form, moving fluidly between performance, video, photography, textiles, ceramics, and sound. Her practice critically engages social, political, and cultural issues, with sustained attention to gender, feminism, class identity, and environmental concern. Recent work is driven by an ecofeminist perspective, invoking folklore, myth, and the figure of the witch as feminist and political tools that blend art, magic, and activism.
This sensibility runs through bodies of work that reclaim the female body and ancestral, nature-based knowledge: a solitary reworking of Yves Klein’s Anthropometry performances that replaces his male-gaze staging with self-directed feminine empowerment; a cyanotype-and-ceramic-tile installation that reinterprets Portuguese azulejo tradition as a meditation on memory and fragility; and an eco-feminist installation exploring the loss and reclaiming of women’s ancestral ties to nature and French-Celtic heritage.
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