UCSF’s Artisan Guild by the Bay will hold its Winter Handmade Market on Wednesday, Dec. 6 from 11am to 2pm in the Genentech Hall Atrium at Mission Bay.
The event features a variety of crafts including jewelry, ceramics, art prints, home décor, journals, knitted gifts and more. They were all created by a collective of UCSF staff, students, and faculty, past and present.
“The guild brings us together twice a year to hold our markets and sell our wares to our UCSF colleagues,” said Brandee Woleslagle Blank, academic program manager for the Sociology PhD program and the specialty administrative coordinator for the Nursing Health Policy and Public Health program.
Vendors at the event are strictly limited to selling hand-made or items designed by the artists. There is no reselling of vintage items unless they are significantly altered by the artist. “The fair is open to the public, but since our advertising is internal and depends on word-of-mouth, historically it’s only been the UCSF community in attendance,” she said.
Woleslagle Blank said guild members bring a variety of crafts to the market which are great gifts for the holidays. “We have several jewelry makers using a variety of media, traditional artists and photographers, posters, artisans who create home décor like decorative jars and sculptures, knit-ware, hand-made kimonos, jean jackets with original art decorations, hand-made journals, and with the holidays, people will be using their chosen craft to make holiday and tree decorations.”
Since she was a child, Woleslagle Blank has always been creative and involved in crafts. “I was always doing art or making sculptures from found objects,” she said. “I am not a traditional artist though. I never got the hang of painting, nor do I have the patience for drawing. My strength is mixed media, but I have crafting-ADHD: I tend to jump around, sticking with one thing for a few years then jumping to the next.”
Woleslagle Blank said she tends to make a good bit of non-traditional jewelry and home décor. “I work in polymer clay, with lots of beads and mineral inclusions and have dabbled with electroforming (a technique using chemistry and electricity to cover objects in metals). “These past few years I have been creating junk journals and will have a few at my table, but mostly it will be my jewelry and jars.”
The guild started at the Laurel Heights campus. The building was known for a very competitive Halloween decorating and costume contest and conversations surrounding artwork on the doors eventually provided impetus for the crafty folk to talk to each other which then led to conversations about doing a craft fair. “2009 was the first Laurel Heights craft fair where I participated,” she said. “We became an official registered campus organization in 2010 and we continued to hold the fair at Laurel Heights until the building was decommissioned in 2019.”
Woleslagle Blank moved to Mission Bay, but the pandemic closed in-person events for the next few years. “This will be our first market since December 2019 and it’s our first market at Mission Bay,” she said. We rebranded our name to fit our new location: the Artisan Guild by the Bay.”
There are currently 12 vendors for the December market but, if the new location is popular enough, Woleslagle Blank said the event could expand in the future. “I would love to get some new artisans involved to reinvigorate our guild!” she said. “There are opportunities for us to grow and do more art-and-craft based community events, but with limited membership, that is a challenge. Plus, new members would bring fresh ideas, something we love.”
For more information about the UCSF Artisan Guild, visit the organization’s website at https://artisanguild.ucsf.edu. Learn more about this, and the other 21 Staff Registered Campus Organizations at UCSF, by visiting this page.
