Art Show - San Francisco Weed Week

ONLINE ART GALLERY

Smash-hit "Get to the Bag" mylar art show goes digital

Jackie Simion models the rainbow wall. (David Downs)

Excerpt from the 700+ cannabis mylar art exhibition and retrospective. (Copyright Cannabis Journalist David Downs Presents)

“Get to the Bag”—the first-ever exhibition of cannabis mylar bag art hit big at San Francisco’s stunning Mirus Gallery during its 18-day long run to support 4/20 and SF Weed Week this year. Sponsored by Compound Genetics and Node Labs. With Sticker Farmer, Seven Leaves, Kanha, Permanent Holiday, Grove Bags, Snowtill, Terphogz, Deep East, Bloom vapes, Holy Smokes, and many more brands. Tickets to many nights sold out. Now the show goes online.

First off, visit the Gift Shop to purchase your piece of the show. Buy the limited-edition show zine, or a signed show poster.

“Get to the Bag” treats low art in a cheeky, high-brow manner—exalting packaging often discarded in the gutter. The exhibition and retrospective explores the thesis that there is no difference between commercial art and fine art.

Featuring more than 1,200 bags from all the leading brands—Runtz, Cookies, Sticker Farmer, Grove Bags, Super Dope, Champelli, Zushi, DEO Farms, and more—“Get to the Bag” opened Friday, April 5 at 4:20 p.m. at the high-end Mirus Gallery in SOMA district at 540 Howard St. on the 3rd Floor with a rooftop deck. The show closed on April 23.

"May's online gallery wall: Metallics" — an excerpt from Get to the Bag

Metallic Bags explained

OK, so one of the hottest genres in cannabis mylar art is ‘metallic’ bags. Vibrant inks gets printed on layers of reflective plastic and cut into unique shapes. The blingy glint of the bag adds attractiveness to the product. Metallics can appear in a specific color, or use layering to create a gradient and 3-D shapes. Contact Sticker Farmer to get started on your metallic mylar bag design.

More Details

The show featured 1,200 bags on display from more than 50 brands and artists over 10 genre walls in an interactive exhibit.
”Get to the Bag” includes the history and development of plastic marijuana packaging over time; from dime-bags to die-cut augmented reality bags. It showcases innovations in materials, the first fully compostable plastic cannabis packaging.
An interactive exhibition area allows visitors to bring their own bags and take one as well.
Gift shop sales of zines, merch, commemorative posters, and more, as well as free giveaways from sponsors. Bring cash or Venmo.

“Get to the Bag” is conceived and curated by award-winning cannabis journalist and best-selling author David Downs, as part of his SF Weed Week event series. Downs has covered tech for WIRED, music for Rolling Stone and The Onion, comedy for New York Times, and marijuana for Scientific American. He is the senior editor for the popular cannabis app Leafly (2018 to present), and the former Cannabis Editor of the San Francisco Chronicle (2016-2018). Downs is also a 2024 Emerald Cup judge for pre-rolls.

“Get to the Bag” sponsored by Compound Genetics’ debut comes from minds of designer Conor Buckley (Outside Lands), and North Bay artist Eric Lister, and San Francisco web developer/artist Keith Woody. Downs, Buckley, Lister, and Woody are UC Santa Barbara alumni—from the Departments of English Literature, and Art, as well as the College of Creative Studies.

Exhibition Statement

Go to the “Get to the Bag” exhibition brochure.

“Get to the Bag” is urban slang for ‘acquire the money [bag]’, as in ‘focus on the thing that makes you money.’

In the $60 billion US cannabis industry, plastic mylar bag packaging art is big business. A bag design itself can make or break a multi-million dollar product launch, says Ben Pechetti, owner of the Sticker Farmer bag-making empire in California.

Major agencies like Sticker Farmer take orders to design hundreds of thousands of bags per week. Bag artists are in demand and make a good living. Artists and brands compete to make the most eye-catching, innovative, colorful, and outrageous packaging.

Furthermore, cannabis’ experiences are highly suggestible—so a bag’s look primes the smoker for an expected flavor or effect.

As such, the cannabis mylar bag has become the most prominent blank canvas of cannabis culture, and functions as a mirror into the psyche of the culture.

How do artists and brands fill this canvas? Do genres emerge? What does this mirror show?

“Get to the Bag” provides answers those questions by assembling a first-ever exhibition and retrospective of cannabis mylar bag art.

The exhibition includes award-winning commercial best-sellers like Ridgeline Farms, a That Badu bag signed by Erykah Badu, and the work of the Seed Junky Genetics brand.

The exhibition explores innovations in die-cutting, reflective materials, metallic inks, digital design, and augmented reality; like the work of Champelli.

And we exalt the risque, juvenile, politically incorrect, and artistically thriving world of bag art unbound by regulation or censorship. A NSFW section includes hentai bags from Super Dope, and the notorious Coochie Runtz bag, and the banned CLSICS/Porous Walker collaboration for Valentine’s Day 2023, as well bags from illicit or “trap” market; like the “Sleepy Joe” [Biden] bag.