Location: San Francisco, CA
Medium: Sculpture, installation, public art
Website: jesseschlesinger.com
Jesse Schlesinger was born in 1979 in Kentucky, into a family of carpenters. He received his BFA in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2008 and has lived and worked in San Francisco since. A second-generation carpenter and former small-scale organic farmer, his practice carries both inheritances: a reverence for material and a philosophy of careful stewardship toward the land. He studied traditional Japanese timber framing alongside a Zen monk and master craftsperson, and has made two extended trips to Japan as a 2018 and 2020 recipient of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission (JUSFC) Fellowship through the NEA. He is a founding artist of the Minnesota Street Project in San Francisco and is represented by Anthony Meier in Mill Valley and Gallery FUMI in London.
In early 2025 he completed Pacific Transit, his first permanent public art installation for the City and County of San Francisco, commissioned through the San Francisco Arts Commission, installed at the intersection of Judah Street and La Playa Street in the Outer Sunset neighborhood. A second public commission for San Francisco is in progress.
Schlesinger works in sculpture, site-specific installation, drawing, photography, and design, using locally salvaged wood — primarily old-growth redwood and cedar native to the Bay Area — alongside stone, bronze, ceramic, glass, and concrete. Labor and craft are fundamental to his practice: he is a working maker with hands-on knowledge of every material he uses, and the marks of that knowledge — the cut of a chisel, the sag of a glaze, the grain of salvaged timber — are legible in the finished work. His sculptures are rooted in the landscapes of Northern California: the way the Pacific Ocean meets the gridded streets of San Francisco at Ocean Beach, where erosion and human geometry press against each other. Their organic, curving forms evoke geological processes — erosion, growth, accumulation — while their vivid ceramic glazes and painted metals introduce a deliberately artificial brightness. He has described ceramics as teaching non-attachment: the kiln introduces chance and unpredictability that challenges the control available in woodworking.
This entry was written by the Bay Area Artist Wiki project and is based on publicly available information.
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