Anna Sergeeva

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. It took place in March 2023.

GM: What was your path to becoming an artist?

AS: On some level, perhaps, I was always an artist. I was living in San Francisco, working a tech job. It was a great company and team, but it didn’t feel perfectly aligned At the time, I did The Compliment Project, which got a lot of traction and became an inflection point for me. It was covered in The New York Times and other publications, and led to a book project with Chronicle Books that was published a year later. [These projects] led to more opportunities to focus on my practice, and the path continued

GM: Many of your projects embrace the concept of art in the public sphere – do you believe that society is receptive to public art, or are they still drawn to the institution?

AS: When I did a fellowship at YBCA, the question for my cohort was, “Where is the public imagination?” And so, we talked a lot about the concept of “Who is the public?” When you’re talking about the public, who are you actually talking about? What community are you engaging with? When you’re taking work out of the institution and asking these questions, there’s a lot of opportunity for magic to occur. That to me is really exciting – magic that can come into being when a sacred intention meets incredible attention to detail.

GM: Projects such as The Compliment Project (2016), If I Were The President (2018), and YOU MATTER (2020), exemplified art as protest and how artists can use activations to engage with the public. What did these projects mean to you and what was the reaction to them?

AS: I did The Compliment Project right after the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. The rhetoric occurring in public space was filled with rage. I felt like I needed to do something that put a different message out there, a more tender message that was communal in spirit. There is an element of anonymity [to the project] – none of the posters have my name, Instagram handle, website, etc. on them. The project just caught on. It is not about protest or resistance, but rather about tenderness. You never really know how far the ripple can go, like a small stone that you throw If I Were The President was a continuation of that same idea, where the narrative of politics after the election was just so difficult to follow. It felt dehumanized. When I did If I Were The President, I traveled around the country, asking youth between 5 and 18 years old what they would change if they were the President of the United States. I went from San Francisco to Colorado, New Orleans, Tennessee, Ohio, and New York City. “What do we owe one another as human beings?” was really what I was asking YOU MATTER was done in partnership with the San Francisco Public Library, and drew from their community-generated Shades of San Francisco photography archive. The YOU MATTER activation launched right when COVID [lockdowns] began. It was supposed to be this puzzle and activity that you would do in the library, but then all the libraries closed, so the imagery was used to raise awareness for the [2020 U.S.] Census.