BIO

Marion Coleman, Textiles & Mixed Media

Memory, family stories, cultural change and a world filled with color serve as inspiration for San Francisco Bay Area artist/counselor, Marion Coleman. 

For over thirty years Coleman worked in youth and family services and now she combines this experience with her art to create work that explores memory, social change and community.

Coleman’s work has been exhibited in the United States and internationally. She has numerous private commissions and has completed public art commissions for Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center, Castro Valley Library and Richmond, CA Civic Center.  She will begin a new commission for a pocket park in the Bayview Hunters Point community of San Francisco that will be completed in 2012.  She was also a semi-finalist for the Bayview Library renovation.

She has received artist residencies at the deYoung Museum, Parchester Community Center through Richmond Arts Center, Edna Brewer Middle School through the California Arts Council, Manzanita Elementary through ALICE-Arts and Literacy in Children’s Education and Alameda County Juvenile Justice through Community Works/Alameda County Arts Commission.  In September she will participate in a residency at the University of Costa Rica, Limon as part of the Iberoamerican Textile Network exhibit.

 Her work has been presented in several publications including recently published 500 Art Quilts, Journey of Hope,   Quilts Inspired by President Obama ,American Craft, Quilting Arts Magazine, Alter Couture, Creative Quilting, a book on journal quilting and Textural Rhythms: Quilts in the Jazz Tradition, a book and touring quilt exhibition that opened in 2007. She is also featured in Crafted Lives by Patricia Turner that was published January 2009.

Coleman received a 2009 Alameda County Arts Leadership Award. She also received a 2007 Creative Work Fund Grant to collaborate with two other quilt artists and the Bay Area Black United Fund for a project on African American health disparities. 

She has served on the board of the African American Quilt Guild of Oakland, the African Advisory Council of the Oakland Museum and the board of the Textile Arts Council of the deYoung Museum.