“Lumpy Bed,” 2023. [Shot with people sitting on sculpture.]
Teaching Artist Cohort
2025
Jillian Crochet is a disabled interdisciplinary artist, writer, and activist based in the Bay Area working in sculpture, video, and performance to engage embodied perception and challenge inaccessibility. She experiments with seductive textures to create interactive objects people can touch, which increases accessibility and expands modes of relating to the environment.
As a wheelchair user, the pervasive inaccessibility of the built environment—from bathrooms to most parks and trails—is a constant source of grief and frustration. Therefore, responding to and negotiating the inaccessibility of the built environment is embedded in her work—manifesting in layers as a subtle longing in a performance video or, sometimes, more overtly addressing barriers to access through institutional intervention and persistent advocacy. Her work questions: What is natural/unnatural? What bodies are included/excluded—important?
She was a 2020–21 artist-in-residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability program and Graduate Fellow at Headlands Center for the Arts. In 2021 she was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the California Arts Council. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally at YBCA’s Bay Area Now Triennial in San Francisco, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, SOMArts, and the Alabama Contemporary Art Center. She has published work in RACAR, Feral Fabric, and the Journal of Arts and Communities. She earned her BFA from the University of Alabama in 2007 and an MFA in Fine Arts at California College of the Arts in 2020.
Selected works
“Accessible Bathroom,” 2021, emotional labor, tears, and negotiation, dimensions unknown. Photo credit: Courtesy of Headlands Center for the Arts. Photo by Andria Lo.
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