I was born in San Francisco in 1969, and began painting in oils as a small child alongside my aunt. After leaving home and high school at 16, I took art classes at San Francisco City College and elsewhere, attended life drawing sessions at Mission Cultural Center , Precita eyes, and wherever else they had them, and painted most days in my studio apartment in the Excelsior. I read a lot of books, went to art shows and rock shows, and made my living as a bartender. In 1999, I received the Merit Fellowship award from the San Francisco Art Institute, where I studied painting for a year under Pat Klein and briefly, Brett Reichman. Following that, circumstances took me away from painting for almost two decades. I began showing work in the spring of 2023.
During my time away from painting, I studied writing, specifically memoir. I have been published in a handful of journals, linked to below. My essay, "Good Morning, Heartache" is cited in an open-source creative writing textbook published by Northern Iowa University in 2023 to illustrate the use of synesthesia as a descriptive mechanism.
I live and work in San Francisco's Mission District.
Selected Group Exhibitions
2026 • sca open • juried by Nancy Lim, Danielle Fox and Chester Arnold @ Sausalito Center for the Arts, Sausalito, Ca
2026 • full-feel • 120710, Berkeley, Ca
2026 • nature • Rosebud Gallery, San Francisco
2025 • fall show at rosebud gallery • Rosebud Gallery, San Francisco
2025 • figure as story • juried by Kathleen Hanna, Llisa Demetrios, and Carole Barlas @ Petaluma Arts Center
2024 • an invitation to mercy, w/ Deirdre White and Rommel Rommo • Bane Gallery, San Francisco
2024 • re:present • curated by Val Carter, Third Street Gallery, Moscow, Idaho
2023 • upstairs downstairs • curated by Sylvie McClelland, San Francisco
2000 • the western show • curated by Alexis Georgeopolis, San Francisco
Selected Solo Exhibitions
Commissions
“Clane Holding a Drawing of Moose”, Commissioned by Clane Hayward
Writing
Hens & Chicks (published by Jelly Bucket, 2023, link to come)
Good Morning, Heartache, (published by North American Review, 2023)
Big Frenchy (published by Upstreet, Issue 18, 2022)
About the Herons (published in Proof That I Exist, 2021, link to come)
My Work and His Walk Through the Storm (published by ST Katherine Review, 2020)
Precious Words (published by Brevity Blog, 2020)
Statement
I work primarily in oil, in a contained palette of earth tones in a naturalistic style. I paint on a variety of surfaces, with a fondness for found wood that reflects my interest in the beauty inherent in the real.
This interest also drives my choice of subject matter, which ranges from dead birds, to toys and rocks and dried-up leaves, to people. I am fascinated with the interplay of identity and exposure; the basic human drive to be seen and made real by way of relationship with others, and how vulnerable that makes us, and how powerful that makes us. My paintings explore these dual acts of seeing and being seen through close examination of my subjects.
Press
-press release
An Invitation to Mercy @ Bane Gallery, November 2024
San Francisco is a port city, and has been a boom town many times over. But San Francisco functions best as a playground of art, music, poetry, and spectacle. Just ask the bay Area Figuratives, the Beats and the hippies, Survival Research Laboratories. These groups made San Francisco their art-fantasy playground. Everyone knew each other and they came out for each others' shows and art.
But any movement, if enduring, produces its own outsiders. In the San Francisco of the1990's, while muralists and graffiti artists were kicking off the Mission School, Alison Alstrom, Rommel Romo and Deirdre White were smoking distorted figurative realism behind the gym. Rommel painted the iconic, oversized, oppressive chihuahuas that judged our excesses or steered colossally poor decisions while we did what we did in our favorite bar. Deirdre painted raw meat and honed her quiet subversive genius in academia, reaching a kind of pinnacle in reverse rebellion. While a fixture on the fringes, making drinks and selling books to up and coming art stars, Alison practiced painting in her bathrobe, in a tiny in-law apartment out where the 280 cuts across the southern tip of the city, rendering everything below it "excelsior."
In 2024, Alison Alstrom has curated a group show with her new work in oils along with two other Mission District artists she's admired for decades. All three are visceral painters who appreciate a sensual and demanding medium that seems to have a life of its own. All three reveal everyday contradictions that alternately evoke despair or delight. Their work is dramatic and revelatory, asking you to look closely, and then look again, to find something surprising or familiar in a bird's ribcage, a freeway overpass, the gaze of a Mexican street dog.
