In the economies of cultural production Art as Gift Exchange is a profound pleasure. The dedication of the mural – Rosita’s Garden Anti-Corruption Diwata – was one of those events. Anne Perez opened up her new family building -The Portal – to the Catbalogan cultural community as a venue to inspire a new kind of experimental art and music presentation and gathering. Catbalogan, with a population of about 100,000 is the provincial capital of Samar, the third largest island of the Philippines. It takes 3 hours to drive there on a rough road from the Tacloban airport. It is surrounded by hills which prevents unlimited expansion. Fishing boats from all over dock at its port so it has wonderful fresh seafood. Anne has a long family history there and her 93 year old Papa lives in town.
For the celebration local artists installed an exhibit in the upstairs space transformed into a gallery. As the works arrived I wondered how they were going to arrange all the artwork successfully! In the patio area in front of the mural Anne, Chris Brown aka CBmuse and Gianni Gnu waited for their sound check. Within a few hours lights lit up everything beautifully, the sound system was in, the table for the food beautifully coifed and ready, people arrived, there was an opening ritual, the MC from the Catbalogan Office of Culture introduced the Mayor Dexter Uy, the musicians improvised, a frenzy of pictures were taken in front of the mural, we got banig medals, the food was eaten, I donated the archival prints I brought for the show to raise funds for their art education program, the family friends living in back of The Portal because their house sunk due to over excavation joined in the fun, we stepped outside onto the street to see the light show bounce off all the buildings and tricycles emanating from the José Rizal statue in the nearby square. Catbalogan knows how to put on a light show that is for sure! Thanks to the City of Catbalogan for sponsoring this celebration for National Arts Month!
Electric opening of The Great Wall of Los Angeles/ Judy Baca exhibit at the Jeffrey Deitch Gallery Los Angeles on May 20, 2023 with so many of the people present and past who have a hand in making it. Lots of camaraderie all around! I’m on the current Artist Design Team and worked on colorations and designs . There are so many layers to making a project like this come to fruition. And so timely what with all the history deniers and book burners out there. Art for Art, Art to record, art to educate, art to make, art to share.
Judy Baca started this project decades ago ad created the SPARC: Social and Public Art Resource Center. The current project extends the wall for 1/2 mile!
There are 21 CAC Legacy Artist Fellows as well as Emerging and mid-career Fellows.
“The Individual Artist Fellowships support artists from a broad spectrum of artistic practices, backgrounds, geographies, and communities, whose work addresses themes such as race, diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility, consistent with the goals of the Council,” said Council Chair Lilia Gonzáles-Chávez of Fresno.
City of San Jose Fire Department Training Center and Office of Emergency Management
I completed design phase for a new public artwork through the San Jose Public Art Program for a new training facility that is currently under construction. These are two different but related centers that work to mitigate disasters providing operational and tactical response in collaboration with and in service to the community.
I have a new mantra now: Prevent/Prepare/Respond/Recover
RESILIENT CITY
This symbol of resilience begins in the scattered blocks that transform up into a uniquely organized pattern framed by rays that extend up behind the City of San Jose. The three figures in the landscape celebrate fire fighters and emergency managers working in service to the community. The community of San Jose is represented in the downtown business and civic district cityscape, local historic and cultural sites and neighborhood homes. The colors, metal material, composition and placement of the artwork works within the architectural lines of the buildings and colors at the site. Details of this design include the Cesar Chavez Meeting Hall, historic Greenawalt House/Vietnamese Museum and the Peralta Adobe, the oldest buiding in San Jose. The mathematically complex non repeating pattern is generated by computer technology developed in this area. These patterns are technologically useful. The rays echo the City of San Jose logo.
Humming With Life Mural Restoration on La Cocina Municipal Marketplace
Years after the San Francisco Civic Center Post Office closed and the original mural had been painted over in orange and black stripes and tagged mercilessly, hummingbirds once again fly through the restored mural and circle lightly at the center of this garden, vibrant, fragile yet strong, pollinating this city corner with creative energy. Plant motifs are drawn from the visual traditions of San Francisco’s rich mix of cultures turning into trumpets and other musical symbols representing the music and art in the Tenderloin neighborhood. The mural now wraps La Cocina Municipal Market Place, an incubator program and the nation’s first women-led food hall. Portraits of La Cocina’s chefs, low-income and immigrant women entrepreneurs, greet the public as they enter the building.
Mural Team: Luis Parra Dzul, Cesar Moreno, Elaine Chu, Pablo Ruiz Arroyo, Matthew Floriani, Taylor Coburn and Stefhani Godinez
Funded by: SF Department of Public Works and SF Community Challenge Grant
This year the AC Transit TEMPO Line is in full operation. The public artwork at each station is the artistic centerpiece of this new transportation infrastructure.
Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow is a 9 mile, 1.5 million public art work created with Lead Artist Johanna Poethig, Mildred Howard, Peter Richards, Joyce Hsu which employs a ribbon of words and neighborhood iconography to enhance the new AC Transit Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) Line that connects downtown Oakland, International Boulevard, to San Leandro. Workshops with Oakland’s “Youth Uprising”, San Leandro residents and the broader community, informed, inspired and guided the artists design process. Local poet and writer Elmaz Abinader contributed to the text as it was developed resulting in a 9mile long poem. Light responsive honeycomb-hex panels, designed for the Enhanced Stations, punctuates the lively visual environment as they respond to people and vehicles moving by. Each Station is a landmark riffing on the unique cultural and social environment of the surrounding neighborhood. Cultural Corridor/Urban Flow considers transportation in the context of all the human constructed systems which enable us to live and prosper on this planet. Moving people and goods freely from one place to another, along with education, communication, commerce, clean water, energy, waste management are just a few of the ways we have devised to provide for fulfilling lives. A sign of a healthy society is when all of these systems flow together in harmony. This is an unfolding work of art that offers a continuous experience of discovery along the TEMPO BRT route.
Here are Links to the article about the project by Maria Porges in Sculpture Magazine and the book:
I’ve been writing fabulist fictions that chronicle the rise of Terrestrial Terminal Earth Stations and their new symbiotic life forms, rising out of the wreckage of climate crisis and cargo cult capitalism, skillfully orchestrated by Terraqueous, Troposphere and Extraterrestrial in collaboration with Time, all major players in the theater of the Cosmos.
These zines are available at my new shop along with other artworks and prints:
October 17, 2020. This is an excerpt from Wall Stories, my upcoming book that tells the stories of my murals and public art projects. Artifact Earthquake is the story of painting the mural on SOMarts and the day that I was on site when the 1989 Earthquake hit. Today we are in another disaster, the COVID 19 pandemic and an excruciating wait for the results of the upcoming election to remove the disaster of a president and his regime from power. May it be so.
We live in a time where science is fake and social algorithms entrap us. For the past century, botanists have studied the nature of phyllotaxis and the algorithmic beauty of plant growth patterns. The science that uncovers these systems that create life is the inspiration for this series of paintings and prints. Phyllotaxis is the spatial and temporal arrangement of leaves or petals around a stem or plant axis. Parastichy is the invisible, hypothetical spiral line connecting a series of leaves on a stem that create an effect on the human eye. The surreal gardens that I paint overlay organically drawn and mathematically generated computer models of plant algorithms mixing realism and abstraction. The story of love and war imagines a world populated by futurist plant people tangling with misshapen primordia in the toxic sludge of human de-evolution using phyllotaxis and parastichy masks as subversive algorithmic shields.
I can’t grow dahlias. I have tried several times but they never poke themselves up through the dirt. The Harvey Milk Mural wall was discovered by my dear friend Rick Terry. It was not far from the dirty beige apartment building we lived in on the panhandle, in the Haight Ashbury. This site was an obvious location for a mural to honor the first gay and tragically shot San Francisco Supervisor. The Harvey Milk Rec Center in Duboce Park overlooked a grassy knoll where dog owners scooped up after their hounds with Harvey’s famous pooper scooper. The Rec center had a photo studio, a tribute to Harvey’s camera store. When I met my friend Rick he introduced himself as a “Castro Clone”. He was a Tsimoso, a gossip, a fallen angel with red bird nesting on his head for his 30th birthday party. I had reluctantly let him use my fancy cut glass pitcher to make his tequila sunrise mix. When I heard the crash a few minutes later I knew my grandmother was right about giving me nice wedding gifts and my reckless lifestyle. Rick wailed his apology but I still miss that pretty present.
We were young and sinfully silly but I was serious as I started down the road of creating the Harvey Milk Memorial. The wall that rose up over the park was a perfect square with a long view. I called up Harvey’s “widow” Scott Smith and went to meet with him, go through old pictures and hear the stories. Harvey loved to play the clown dressed up in full regalia. He was an instant classic with his flower lei as he rode in the convertible, Jackie Kennedy style for the victory parade. He adored his big black dog “the Kid”. He was exuberant, full of life, humor and promise. Should this mural be a tragedy or a victory, a reminder of what was lost or what was won?
Rick loved dahlias so at the center of the mural design I planted a glorious fuchsia bloom. Like a Hindu goddess floating on petals, Harvey rode on the shoulders of his clown self, flowers around his neck and the Kid in attendance. I had gotten the permission for the wall, gone door to door to show my design and raised a few thousand dollars to cover the scaffolding and paint. The design had passed through the flaming hoop of the San Francisco Arts Commission review. When the time came to get final approval from the San Francisco Rec and Park Department a snake came out of the grass of Duboce Park. Across from the wall out of the corner of his eye, if he angled himself just so at his window, Deputy Mayor Rotea Gilford could see that bare wall. He wanted it to stay that way, naked, concrete, meaningless. No matter that most everyone was excited about the idea. He was a friend of Mayor Dianne Feinstein who had taken over after the fateful shooting of Moscone and Milk. He spoke to the Mayor and the fight was on. The Castro neighborhood rallied, petitions were signed and articles published. “Her back against the Wall” was the headline. The bad news was the mural project was at risk, the good news was people cared about it.
When the five Rec and Park Board members met at McLaren Lodge, at the entrance of Golden Gate Park, the carved mahogany door shut out the crowd and radio newscasters waiting for the decision. By one vote they said yes to the mural but shifted it to the side wall overlooking the basketball court so Rotea would not have to look at it.
By the time the mural was done Rick had full blown AIDS. It was the late 1980’s. For the unveiling, Gilbert Baker, designer of the rainbow Gay Pride flag and member of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence made a huge purple curtain with a polka dot trim to drape the mural. It billowed up and around that day revealing parts of the painting in a sweet tease. We had a dog fashion show and Sista Boom marched in full percussion. Up and coming politician Tommy Ammiano and other luminaries from the community were judges for the canine styles. Ernie from tech services at SOMArts built a special ramp at my request so Rick could be wheeled up on stage. It was a blazing hot afternoon and the dogs were toasting their paws on the planks as they showed off their stuff. Blue Gene Tyranny’s composition of sound and historic speeches drifted out over the green hill. Rick had refused to attend the opening.
He was angry and despondent those days. But in the end, after it was over, the purple drape dropped for the final reveal, in the excitement of the attention, a burning stage and fake flowers in my hair, I had not thought to look out over the crowd to see if there was a wheelchair and my Rick waiting for his turn for some glory. He was there in the very back and I hadn’t noticed. I was despondent. He died not long after that. There was a little wall to the side of the mural that I took as my consolation prize for the new site. Next to that Dahlia explosion I painted the famous photographer Imogene Cunningham, a little girl playing a violin, a drama queen and Rick holding a candle in vigil. A sad woman stood in the shadows behind him.
EPILOGUE:
The mural became a poster and found its way around the world. I discovered it on a restroom wall of a pot club in Amsterdam. It’s gone now, lost to a building remodel. The options the City gave me to save it were not viable so now there is a plaque in its place.
NAKED DAHLIA
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