Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Environment, Health, Imagination


The collaboration continues. Joaquin Newman and I received a second commission from the Alameda County Arts Commission. We will decorate the Ashland Youth Center, working with youth and families from the Ashland neighborhood. Watch for this inspirational facility!

We put the final touches on the Berkeley Watershed and Community Mural sponsored by Friends of King Park. Thanks to Jeanine Strickland and Lessly Fields for their dedication to the neighborhood and Kala Art Institute for helping with the education piece!

Last March we installed the Right to Good Health mural at the Mission Neighborhood Health Center in San Francisco and the 100 Families Highland Hospital Community Mural Project, both mentioned in an earlier post. In addition, we produced characatures for Teatro ZinZanni’s spring production, Too Hot/Caliente to Handle! The San Francisco dinner theater, wanted the feel of movie posters from the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema. Who better for the job than Joaquin? We combined headshots, costume sketches, and photos to flesh-out the zany characters in the show directed by “Slick Ric” Salinas of Culture Clash! What an honor! We also painted another diaspora map for the Museum of the African Diaspora in the Education Center. It’s a popular tool that helps visitors better understand the slave trade history that underlies our national history and relevant to understanding contemporary human trafficking.

Our exhibition Community Spirits, January 30-February 26, 2011, at the Alameda Free Library, was written up in the Alameda Journal. The display included documentation of recent mural projects, Joaquin’s paintings and my photographs. I contributed a photo in the Alameda on Camera exhibition, April 1-May 28, 2011 at the Frank Bette Center for the Arts. My assignment on Alameda island was “Area 10,” bounded by the San Leandro Bay at Towata Park, High Street, Encinal Avenue, and Fernside Boulevard. I was attracted to the bird life particularly at the Towata Park beach. I took nature shots and found a pigeon racer among the houses nearby.

Finally, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union sculpture mural in San Francisco, appeared in a New York Times article about the challenge of maintaining the San Francisco public art collection. This significant project was done by me, Miranda Bergman, Timothy Drescher, Nicole Emmanuel, Lari Kilolani, James Morgan, Raymond Patlán, James Prigoff, O’Brian Thiele, and Horace Washington in 1986. Sponsored by the ILWU, it is part of the San Francisco Arts Commission collection.

Health, the environment, and imagination continue to surface as important concerns among the people we work with and the communities we are creating for. They’re just plain important! Stay Creative! Stay Engaged!