Amy Franceschini / Futurefarmers

Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer whose work facilitates encounter, exchange, and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the ​“certainties” of a given time or place where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between ​“humans” and ​“nature”. Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to ​“hunt” and ​“gather”. Using this as a starting point, she creates relational objects that invoke action and inquiry; not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

In 1995, Franceschini founded Futurefarmers as a collaborative platform to consider the social, political, and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education. Through this disassembly, they find new narratives and reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems.

Futurefarmers work is based in enmeshed acts of wandering and material processes. In the context of public art works, they cultivate public life in place, rather than inserting pre-determined forms and concepts into public space. They do so through a process-led approach,inviting materials and communities to arrive and intersect at a specific site or situation. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable forms and functions of their work

Franceschini is a 2009 Guggenheim Fellow, a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow and a 2017 recipient of the Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts. She is the author of A Variation on the Powers of Ten, For Want of a Nail, and, most recently, Silicon Forest in 2026. Franceschini received a BFA in Photography from San Francisco State University and an MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Stanford University, and in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy. 

With support from Design Core Detroit, Detroit UNESCO City of Design, and U‑M Student Life Sustainability. 

Series presenting partners: Detroit PBS, ALL ARTS, and PBS Books. Media partner: Michigan Public.