About

Black & White Projects (BWP) promotes creativity, community, and experimentation in the arts to spark ongoing, and often difficult, conversations. Interested in content-driven work, BWP stewards, exhibits, and produces work by interdisciplinary artists pushing formal and contextual boundaries.

Our mission is to facilitate the creation of art and culture, honor people and process, hold space for communities’ needs, function as a laboratory for projects and professional models, spark collaboration, and foster mutual aid and knowledge sharing.

With the ethos of “productive discomfort,” BWP is more than a gallery, it’s a communal space, multigenerational community, and support system for artists and culture workers. We prioritize knowledge exchange and center works and experiences of creatives who are intersectional and interstitial. We provide project and career consulting, help with artist proposals, and offer the space when creators want to build something that out-scales their own studio. Because we focus on artists rather than objects, our efforts go beyond exhibiting work. We are a home base.

BWP was founded in 2013 (originally named ASC Projects) by artist/curator Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen. From 2013 to 2020, the exhibition program presented five to seven solo and group exhibitions, two live residencies, and regular public programs annually. Through covid, BWP focussed on artist care, advocacy work, and creating creative meeting points for youth and artists to gather outside safely. In 2023, BWP began the process of adapting to a post-pandemic arts culture by supporting artists through public events, off-site exhibitions, and professional development, and by securing fiscal sponsorship through Independent Arts & Media to better sustain our collective work. Reopened to the public in 2024, BWP presents on- and off-site exhibitions, continues to support our community’s personal and professional needs, and has launched new programs such as the Curatorial Apprenticeship, Affinity Circles, and BWP Editions.

Black & White Projects is located in the Pacific Felt Factory Arts Complex at 2830 20th Street, Studio 105, in San Francisco’s Mission District. Please email asc@asimplecollective.com for more information or to schedule a visit.

We respectfully acknowledge that we are on the traditional land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who have stewarded this land throughout the generations. (Learn how you can acknowledge ancestral lands at usdac.us/nativeland.)

Black & White Projects is a fiscally-sponsored project of Independent Arts & Media.

A Simple Collective is a fiscally-sponsored project of Fractured Atlas. You can donate to ASC here.

Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen, Founder/Director

Rhiannon Evans MacFadyen is a curator, consultant, and project-based artist from San Francisco. With a long background in the performing and visual arts, Rhiannon is deeply influenced by her own—and her communities’—intersectional identities. She is driven by her pursuit of “productive discomfort”: her curatorial focus is on projects that push boundaries of scale, scope, medium, venue, and dialogue; and her cross-discipline personal work engages symbols, identity, communication, and the unseen.

In 2013 she founded A Simple Collective: an organization dedicated to fostering creative independence for professionals, and professional independence for creatives, and Black & White Projects: an experimental project space in San Francisco’s Mission District. Deeply involved with community-building through the arts, she is on the Curatorial Committee for Root Division, launched the RE[FRAME] Arts Industry Conference at the Museum of the African Diaspora in 2015, is Director of Emerging Arts Professionals and founding member of Pacific Felt Factory arts complex and Invisibility Collective, and is an emeritus member of 3.9 Art Collective. Rhiannon is also adjunct professor at University of San Francisco and the SFAC 2024–25 Curator in Residence at the India Basin Waterfront Park in Bayview, San Francisco.