Michael Swaine
2012 Fellow
Michael Swaine is an inventor and designer working in many media. His work is collaborative in nature and has been included in exhibitions at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Craft and Folk Art; and the Exploratorium, San Francisco.
He is currently building the Free Mending Library in the Tenderloin area of San Francisco. It is a library for fixing the holes in our lives—a place to borrow thread and sewing machines and talk about life. He has been sewing, hemming and mending for free in the Tenderloin on the 15th of every month since 2001 – the year of his Generosity Project for the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts.
Swaine teaches at California College of the Arts, Mills College and the San Francisco Art Institute.