Object Stories: San Francisco

Executive Director, American Craft Council

Andrea has served as executive director of the American Craft Council since 2022, guiding the 83-year-old organization through a period of significant growth and evolution, including expanded grants, a redesigned membership program, digital publishing, and new events. With more than 25 years of executive and board experience in arts and culture, youth development, civic engagement, and higher education, Andrea is also a licensed attorney and former Minnesota Supreme Court judicial clerk. She remains deeply engaged with the arts as a collector, with a particular interest in living artists from Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Artist, designer, former CEO of Artful Home and Guild Brands

Lisa is an artist, designer, and former business leader with a BFA from the California College of the Arts, and continues to practice art and design in the San Francisco Bay Area. She recently retired as CEO of Guild Brands and Artful Home, an e-commerce pioneer and one of the original online art galleries, where she represented more than 1,000 North American artists, designers, and craftspeople. Today, Lisa maintains a daily illustrated journal, paints, creates woven mixed-media works, serves as creative director for the Lisa Bayne clothing collection, and remains active with San Francisco’s Museum of Craft and Design, where she formerly served on the board.

Graphic designer, co-founder of SF Neon, co-producer of Neon Speaks

Randall is a San Francisco-based art director, photographer, and award-winning graphic designer whose passion for signage began as an apprentice sign painter in Flagstaff, Arizona. Along with her husband, Al Barna, she co-founded SF Neon, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving vintage neon and publishing books about historic signs. Randall is also the co-producer of Neon Speaks, an international neon symposium celebrating the history and future of neon, and dreams of designing neon signs for a living.

Studio artist, writer, Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation program officer

Rebekah is a San Francisco-based studio artist, independent writer, and arts administrator whose practice explores protection, vulnerability, and boundaries through steel sculpture and contemporary jewelry. With a background in blacksmithing, welding, and machining, she earned a BFA from Texas State University and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. In addition to her studio practice, Frank writes about materially focused artists, with a particular affinity for queer artists, and serves as a program officer at the Maxwell/Hanrahan Foundation.

Co-Chair of Heath Ceramics

Robin is Co-Chairman of Heath Ceramics, where he has spent more than two decades stewarding the company’s design, craft, and long-term business vision. In 2003, Robin and his partner Catherine Bailey purchased the ailing Saucelito pottery, founded in 1948, and built it into a sustainable, locally made business rooted in creativity, craftsmanship, and product integrity. A Stanford-trained product designer, Robin champions “Slow Business” — balancing profitability with positive community and environmental impact — and received a 2015 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award in recognition of these efforts.

Artist, writer, KQED senior editor of arts and culture

Sarah Hotchkiss is a San Francisco-based artist and writer and senior editor of arts and culture at KQED, the Bay Area’s NPR and PBS affiliate. Her essays and reviews have appeared in publications including Art in America, The Creative Independent, SFMOMA’s Open Space, and Squarecylinder, and her writing has received awards from the Dorothea & Leo Rabkin Foundation and the Society of Professional Journalists, Northern California. She is also an avid flea-market enthusiast, with a particular passion for discovering interesting and unusual objects.