About

Adrienne Skye Roberts works in the crossroads of art, education and political organizing. As a curator and writer, she focuses broadly on issues of identity, history, and place, including the role artists play in gentrification, the relationship between public art and urban politics, race and the myth of the American frontier.

As an educator she will forever be developing and implementing an anti-racist, feminist, queer art curricula that challenges the false divide between cultural work and politics. She believes that art classrooms are fertile for grounds developing self-awareness, collectivity and anti-oppression politics.

Adrienne’s background as an organizer is in housing rights, reproductive justice and feminist, youth organizing. She is currently a member of the California Coalition for Women Prisoners (CCWP), a grassroots prison abolition organization that provides support, and advocacy for women and transgender people in California state prisons. Through CCWP, Adrienne co-facilitates Fired Up! a self-empowerment group at San Francisco county jail.

Adrienne is the granddaughter of a Jewish Communist arrested, incarcerated and tried for conspiracy to overthrow the government. Adrienne’s most recent project Swimming Lessons and the Red Scare explores this political inheritance by telling the story of her grandfather’s role in the Communist party in Philadelphia during the 1950s. Swimming Lessons and the Red Scare, along with her work with CCWP, led Adrienne to her current work  and collaboration with artist, Mabel Negrete in researching the country’s first jail on Walnut Street in Philadelphia and the history of architectural forms of social control.

Adrienne’s past curatorial projects include the radical queer film and photography exhibition, “Suggestions of a Life Being Lived” at SFCamerawork (2010), “Home is something I carry with me,” an exhibition and film screening addressing the housing crisis and funded by Southern Exposure (2009), “For Lovers and Fighters” at The Spare Room Project (2009) and “Sweet and Matchless” (2009) and “Between Memory and Invention” (2008) at PLAySPACE Gallery.

Her writing is published on SF MOMA’s Open Space, Art Practical and Make/Shift: Feminisms in Motion. She was an artist-in-residence at the Philadelphia Art Hotel (2011) and Elsewhere Collaborative in Greensboro, North Carolina (2009). She is a Lecturer in the sculpture department at UC Santa Cruz. She has a MA in Visual and Critical Studies from California College of the Arts and a BA in Feminist Studies and Studio Art from the UC Santa Cruz. She is from the Bay Area and currently lives in San Francisco.

Contact her at adrienneskye@gmail.com