For an artist who has made her name celebrating the everyday, the career of Kate Pocrass (MFA 2001) is anything but ordinary. Pocrass's well-considered salute to normalcy began at CCA, when she launched Mundane Journeys, a community art project based around a telephone hotline. Art fans calling the line would hear a series of instructions directing them to a specific address in the city where they might find intriguing graffiti, a charming storefront window, or an upholstered tree stump.

"The hotline started in 2001, the year I graduated from CCA. It was in reaction to a show one of my advisors, Ted Purves, did at Southern Exposure called Sites and Expeditions. I changed the telephone message every Monday, figuring at first that it would end when the gallery show ended. I ended up continuing it for eight years, from 2001 to 2009."

Mundane Journeys led directly to a residency at the Hammer Museum. Allison Agsten, who curates the Hammer's residencies, saw a Mundane Journeys poster created for the Orange County Museum of Art's 2006 California Biennial and gave Pocrass a call.

"During the residency, artists are encouraged to look at the Hammer in a different way. I put together an insert for its seasonal calendar that revealed hidden views of the museum, things rarely seen by visitors. I created sections on staff etiquette in the break room, interviews with security guards, and a surreptitiously recorded soundtrack of the various kinds of footwear worn by visitors. What shoes were most popular? Stylish sneakers!"

Although Pocrass makes a clear distinction between her personal artistic projects and her work as a freelance textile designer, she says that the subject matter of the former does inform her approach to her day job, particularly with respect to how she looks for patterns or colors. Her clients include Pottery Barn and Gymboree; she worked for the latter full-time for five years.

Underpinning Pocrass's search for what she calls "quirkitude" is a strong entrepreneurial spirit and quiet ambition. This is partly due to nature -- her instinctive gravitational attraction to challenges -- and partly due to nurture, in particular the example of her mom, who gave up a career as a nurse to launch a chocolate company. Today, the artist's ephemeral personal project that at first existed only as a 415 telephone number has evolved into permanent form: Thanks to two cultural equity grants from the San Francisco Arts Commission, Pocrass has been able to publish two collections of Mundane Journeys.

She has also collaborated with Chronicle Books on two illustrated editions. "Chronicle Books approached me and said: 'Can you do something like this that isn't regional, something that people would use anywhere they go?' The first book, entitled I Was Here, is a travel journal featuring my illustrations. The second, due for publication this winter, is a manual for exploring your own city called Side Walks. I see it as kind of like Mad Libs -- with prompts and fill-in-the-blank lists to help you create your own personal guidebook.

Her latest project is Average, a new magazine celebrating ordinary moments that we fail to properly contemplate while going about our daily lives. "I was looking for a new personal project, and I realized that magazines are full of things that are curated and purposeful. They are all focused on one thing in your life that defines who you are. I got so overwhelmed by how designed life is. It's really hard to get away from the images of all these curated lives. And so Average was born, a publication created to mark the moments that get missed.

"I applied for grants from the Fleishhacker Foundation and Alternative Exposure (Southern Exposure's re-granting program, with funding via the Andy Warhol Foundation) and received $28,000, which should fund two editions and contribute something toward the third. (I'm pretty frugal!) We're working on the 2012 issue now. I'm not printing a zillion copies. If people enjoy it and I don't have them sitting in my basement for years, it will be a success."