In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Adriene Busch, fiber artist and weaver based in the Bay Area.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
In this week's Episode, Emily features Adriene Busch, a Bay Area fiber artist and weaver whose exhibition "Of Water" is currently on display at M Stark Gallery in Half Moon Bay. They chat at Adriene's home studio and discuss her artistic journey and creative process.
Adriene grew up in Arizona making art but studied business in college, considering art impractical as a career. She continued creating throughout her education, exploring photography, ceramics, and painting. About 10 years ago, she discovered fiber arts through embroidery, which led her to weaving—a medium that combines everything she loved: the composition skills from photography, the tactile nature of ceramics, and the color mixing from painting.
Her breakthrough came with "West Bay: A Love Letter," a large-scale aerial view of the Bay Area made with felted wool details like San Francisco skyscrapers. This piece was displayed at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Center for a year and caught the attention of gallerist Marianna Stark, who offered her the current exhibition.
About Artist Adriene Busch:
Adriene Busch is a contemporary weaver based in San Mateo, California. She has worked in various modes of fiber art since 2016, eventually committing fully to tapestry weaving. As a self-taught weaver, she finds great joy and satisfaction from artistic problem solving and in the continual development of her technical skills and artistic vision. She is intentional in her selection of materials, using color and texture to represent particular characteristics of her surroundings. As a tapestry weaver, she enjoys the many choices that working with fiber allows; in her pieces, color, texture, and composition interplay to create a balance between bold and neutral, flat and three-dimensional. Adriene’s work reflects her personal connection to the world around her, creating pieces that embody her daily experiences.
Visit Adriene's Website: WestBayFiber.com
Follow Adriene on Instagram: @WestBayFiber
For more on Adriene's exhibition "Of Water" at the M Stark Gallery - CLICK HERE
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2026-0203 - AIA - EP064 - Adriene Busch
Host Emily Wilson: [00:00:00] Art is Awesome can now be heard on KSFP 1 0 2.5 FM every Friday at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM Please follow the show and rate us wherever you get your podcast media. If you like what you hear from today's artist, you can find links and information about them in our show notes.
Artist Adriene Busch: I bought fiber from a farm in Idaho that the wool came with hay still in it smelling like farm, and I loved that.
I loved the texture and the organicness of it, and it felt like I was making art with someone else's art, like I could feel the process that it took to get to me.
Host Emily Wilson: That's Adrian Busch, the guest on this week's Art is Awesome.
I'm your host, Emily Wilson. I'm a writer in San Francisco, often covering the arts, and I've been meeting such great people [00:01:00] that I created this biweekly podcast to highlight their work.
Adriane Busch grew a painting and drawing in Arizona. She says she was too practical to study art in college, but she continued making art while she was studying business. About 10 years ago, she started doing fiber arts and she became a weaver. Adriane's large aerial view of the Bay Area. West Bay. A love letter was selected by a jury and it was on display at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative Center in downtown Redwood City for a year.
Marianna Stark saw the piece, which has details like San Francisco skyscrapers made of felted wool and offered Adrian a show at her Gallery M Stark in Half Moon Bay. The exhibition Of Water is on view through February 22nd. Like the title says, it's all about water and specifically the peninsula. Along with Love [00:02:00] Letter, the weavings have titles including Half Moon Bay, Rockaway Beach and Fog Break.
I met Adriane at her house, and we talked about weaving, having no rules, how much she loves being around water and fog, and that her work is not about finding beauty anywhere. It's about the specific beauty of the Bay Area. She showed me the room she uses as a studio. There are several looms she made in some of her weavings.
Artist Adriene Busch: I hang my pieces on just a variety of things. Everything from copper pipes, square, wooden, and dowels, and sometimes branches if it calls for it, just kind of depending on. What the piece feels like. Some of my more nature pieces, representational pieces, I like to hang on branches, 'cause it, it, it ties in nicely, I think.
But I use a variety of fibers. Everything from wool [00:03:00] to recycled clothes, cotton, silk chiffon.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane created most of the 19 pieces specifically for the Half Moon Bay Show, Of Water. Since she works full time for the county of San Mateo, it took her about a year.
Artist Adriene Busch: The theme of the show is Of Water, and it's really inspired by the Bay Area and the Peninsula.
A lot of my inspiration comes from the, the Bay Trail. I'm very lucky to live close to the Bay Trail walking distance, and so I kind of take that walk a lot and I am able to see kind of the differences, the small differences in, in the scenery from low tide to high tide at sunset during the afternoon.
And it, the marshland there looks different. And being able to see it so frequently gives me an opportunity to, to observe the small differences and changes and how water impacts everything around us.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane left Arizona when her wife got into school in the Bay Area. She loves living on [00:04:00] the peninsula.
Artist Adriene Busch: I grew up in Arizona where there's, there's no water around me and I'm a Pisces through and through. So being in the bay is, is basically the dream for me. This collection is created just to show like the, the evidence of water and the impact of water. I'm inspired by just the colors of, of rusted fire hydrants and the things that happen because we live in an environment where there's a lot of water.
Host Emily Wilson: When the weather in Arizona was nice, Adrian played outside. When it was over a hundred degrees, she was inside doing art and crafts.
Artist Adriene Busch: I was very lucky that I had kind of a dedicated space in our house to do art. We had designated something that we called the art Center, and many years later I found out that it was actually a wet bar in the, like a very random wet bar in the corner of our living room that my parents said, you know, this is your art center, but I was like, oh, of course. There's, you know, a sink in the middle of the living room for me to [00:05:00] rinse out my paint brushes. This is perfect, but I had no idea what its intention was. Not to be an art center for a 10-year-old, but I loved it and I spent many, many hours just making things and trying things.
Host Emily Wilson: Eventually, Adriane took some classes in photography. She liked learning about perspective and composition.
Artist Adriene Busch: I was into photography for quite a few years. My uncle gave me his old film camera, and so I loved doing the, and being in the dark room. And then I also did, uh, ceramics and I, I did that for a couple years, a few classes, and I liked the tactile part of it, loved using like my hands as the tools.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane didn't consider studying art in college or grad school. She studied business.
Artist Adriene Busch: It felt like being an artist was not something that was in the realm of possibility. And I was a very practical kid, but I still would paint and collage all throughout the time I still was doing photography just as a a creative outlet. And then eventually I found my way to the fiber [00:06:00] arts through embroidery. The embroidery process was very meditative, but I got tired of sitting for hours and hours and hours when the end result was like, you know, the size of my palm, if that. Um, it was a very, it's a very tedious medium, but that, you know, introduced me to fiber arts.
Host Emily Wilson: Adrian's says weaving combines what she's learned in other art forms.
Artist Adriene Busch: Learning photography and, and composition helps me figure out composition for a weaving. And it was, which is even more magnified because I'm also dealing with the texture. So it's, it's figuring out the balance and the weight of, of the piece and the picture.
And also with the 3D nature, 'cause the, the texture adds kind of a different dimension. And then it also combines the tactile nature of, of ceramics that I loved. 'cause I'm using my hands and the materials. Together and with painting, my favorite part was always mixing colors. And so it combined that I was able to, you know, use the color theory that I learned through that to, to apply that to my weaving.
Um, so it really [00:07:00] was just all the things that I loved in, in one medium.
Host Emily Wilson: The gallerist of M Stark at Half Moon Bay saw Adrian's piece love letter at a show in Redwood City.
Artist Adriene Busch: Marianne found my work through a large piece that I did for Trans Zuckerberg Initiative that I called Love Letter, and it's an aerial overview of the Bay I had just seen a photo of an overview of the bay and I couldn't believe the differences in the shades of blue of the water particularly. It was, you know, an actual photo of of the bay. And so that's actually how it was. Even though when you are looking at it from across the bay, it all looks like it's just like kinda one color, but it's really has a variety of blues.
I just immediately thought it would be so cool to weave. But I didn't wanna do it unless I could do it on a larger scale, so I needed something that I could make it for. And so I had applied and they accepted my idea, so I hadn't even created it yet. It was really a cool opportunity to be able [00:08:00]to, to make it for that show.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane taught herself to weave by watching videos.
Artist Adriene Busch: I think that it just, for whatever reason, makes sense in my head. I can watch someone do something with weaving and it kind of just makes sense to me, and so I'm able to to figure it out. It's also a very intuitive art. I also teach weaving classes, and I often tell my students that once you figure out kind of the physics of weaving, like the tension and the relationship between warp and weft and how those things interplay. Then there are no rules. Like there's no pattern. There's no rules, which is great because I'm not a recipe follower and I'm not an instruction follower. So it's very intuitive. Once you kind of figure out the mechanics of the loom and how it works, really.
Then you can do anything you want
Host Emily Wilson: to start weaving. Adrian just dived in.
Artist Adriene Busch: I felt very confident that I was going to love this. I could just tell. And so I built the loom and [00:09:00] I bought materials that a beginner weaver had no business buying. Most beginners would start out. Buying cheap yarn from Michael's or something, but I bought fiber from a farm in Idaho that came, you know.
The wool came with hay still in it smelling like farm, and I loved that. I loved the texture and the organicness of it, and it felt like I was making art with someone else's art. Like the, the materials themselves were already like were there and I could feel the process that it took to to get to me.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane works full-time for the county of San Mateo and human resources. She also teaches weaving classes in Petaluma and Mill Valley, so she doesn't have a ton of time to do her own weaving.
Artist Adriene Busch: I mostly work in the evenings and on weekends. It's definitely harder in the winter when it gets dark, but I have a rule that I make no decisions.
In the evening, I can work on a piece, but if I'm looking at it and [00:10:00] I'm thinking, oh, this is terrible, I, I won't make any decisions until I can see it in the light and, and no color decisions at night. So I exclusively make my decisions during the daylight and then I can execute it at night.
Host Emily Wilson: Adriane is not trying to show in her work that you can find beauty anywhere. It's specifically about this area.
Artist Adriene Busch: I feel like the Bay Area is so like overtly beautiful that you don't need to find it places. It's just everywhere. I mean, sometimes overwhelming how, how beautiful it is and so it's, it's, yeah, a lot of my weaving practice is just sheer gratitude for living in this place.
Host Emily Wilson: At the end of the show, I ask three things to get to know the guest a little better. The questions are, when did you know you were an artist? What's some work that had an impact on you, and what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?[00:11:00]
Artist Adriene Busch: I think I knew I was an artist when I made a piece that I felt represented my artistic vision. Like I, I had worked on mastering the techniques and learning the trade, the craft, but once I was able to make a piece that felt. Kind of authentically my artistic voice and I was able to translate what I wanted onto a tapestry.
That's when I felt like I made a piece of art
work that has had an impact on me is these ink drawings by MarSha Yi Robinson. She goes by Strange Dirt. A lot of her work is kinda botanical like stylized botanical scenes. They range from really intricate and elaborate to much more sparse and restrained with really interesting compositions. And I saw her work [00:12:00] at Sky Gallery in New York a couple years ago, and I was so excited to be able to see it in person because her use of color is really interesting and it, it's kind of sparse, but it, the colors are so saturated that it really draws you in and, and packs a punch. And I think that I, I relate to her reverence of nature that she uses in her work,
The most creatively inspiring place in the Bay. I mean, there are so many, but for me it's. Specifically the Bay Trail and the San Mateo section of it, because it's the one I'm most familiar with. And also I can see the San Francisco City skyline. I can see the bay, the marshland I find very beautiful, very inspiring, and seeing the fog roll over the hills is really impactful in my work.
I always say that it's good that I found weaving because as a creative expression of my gratitude of, of the bay. Otherwise, I think [00:13:00] I'd be stopping people in the street to make them stop what they're doing to watch the fog roll in because it is just, it is that incredible.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you so much to the guest, weaver Adriane Bush. Of Water is at M Stark Gallery in Half Moon Bay through February 22nd, and thank you for listening. Please follow the show and join us next time when we talk with sculptor. Kristine Mays, her exhibition State of the Union is currently at modernism on Ella Street in San Francisco through March 7th.
Art Is Awesome is a biweekly podcast coming out every other Tuesday. It's created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotto of [00:14:00] Gotto Productions. It's carried on KSFP, LP 1 0 2 0.5 FM San Francisco on Fridays at 9:00 AM and 7:00 PM. Our theme music is provided by Kevin McLeod with Incompetent Music.
Be sure and follow us on Instagram at Art is Awesome podcast or visit our website till next [00:15:00]time.