ART SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT
"Get to the Bag" mylar art exhibition arrives April 5 to 23, 2024
“Get to the Bag”—a first-ever exhibition of cannabis mylar bag art will arrive at San Francisco’s stunning Mirus Gallery for an 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 your brand. RSVP now. Tickets will sell out. Check the Schedule.
Contact curator David Downs ([email protected]) to sponsor. Follow along with project’s production on social.
“Get to the Bag” sponsored by Compound Genetics 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 800 bags from all the leading brands—Runtz, Cookies, Sticker Farmer, Grove Bags, Super Dope, Champelli, Zushi, DEO Farms, and more—“Get to the Bag” opens 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 closes on April 23 and is open to the public daily.
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- Over 800 bags on display from more than 50 brands and artists. See the bags up close, as well as projected, and touch them in an interactive exhibit.
- ”Get to the Bag” sponsored by Compound Genetics 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.
- Exhibit open daily to the public, with multiple events and talks in the space over an 18-day run.
“Get to the Bag” sponsored by Compound Genetics 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.
The Venue
Mirus Gallery is a dynamic exhibition space established by curator and art dealer, Paul Hemming in 2012. The gallery features a program of contemporary artwork by emerging and mid-career artists in a rotating lineup of both solo and thematically organized group shows. Mirus gallery’s distinctive curation highlights work that emphasizes skill and process and aims to engage viewers on a sentient, emotional and evocative level. In 2017, Mirus opened its second location in the heart of Denver, Colorado alongside it’s sister business Temple Nightclub. In 2022, Mirus gallery launched their third location in the heart of the arts-district in Los Angeles, CA.
Exhibition Statement
“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.