Large-scale public art installation confronts Chevron refinery in Richmond, accompanied by major exhibition at Richmond Art Center
FENCELINES // PUBLIC ART INSTALLATION April 22 – June 3, 2023 @ Richmond Parkway between Vernon and Gertrude
FENCELINES // EXHIBITION April 5 – June 3, 2023 @ Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA 94804 Gallery Hours: Wednesday-Saturday, 10am-4pm
FENCELINES // COMMUNITY EVENTS Earth Day Installation @ Richmond Parkway: Saturday, April 22, 10am-4pm (Community Remarks at 3pm) Spring Family Day @ Richmond Art Center: Saturday, April 29, 12pm-3pm Artist Talk @ Richmond Art Center: Saturday June 3, 12pm-1:30pm Artist Talk @ Richmond Art Center: Saturday June 3, 12pm-1:30pm Closing Reception @ Richmond Art Center: Saturday June 3, 2pm-4pm
Richmond, CA: The Fencelines Project centers circumstances of environmental injustice through a public artinstallation along the Richmond Parkway, where an existing fenceline separates Richmond residential neighborhoods from the Chevron petroleum refinery. For generations, this refinery has polluted the community’s air, water, land and people.
The art installation encompasses painted slats, milled from locally reclaimed trees, placed on the fence itself and adorned with ribbons animating the direction of the wind. Over the past year at community workshops in Richmond hundreds of individuals and families have recorded their stories and messages on these slats, documenting the impact of the petroleum industry on many lives and together forming a collective monument to resilience.
“We are here, we want to be seen, and we are lending our hand to make all of these initiatives work to end pollution of our communities.”
–Princess Robinson, Community Organizer and Fencelines Co-Creator
A Fencelines public art installation event will happen on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22. Community members are invited to meet at Richmond Parkway between Vernon and Gertrude Avenues to install the painted slats. This event will take place between 10am and 4pm, with a program of remarks from community organizers, artists and poetry happening at 3pm.
A large-scale exhibition and free community events at Richmond Art Center accompany the Fencelines public art project, offering opportunities for community participation and designed to amplify the work of local environmental justice organizations.
The Fencelines exhibition in the main gallery at Richmond Art Center features an immersive collective portrait of project participants and a sculptural fence installation featuring community-painted slats. The gallery space hosts workshop tables where visitors can participate by making their own piece of the project and include their portrait in the digital archive of the project. The exhibition also features picket signs from local actions for climate justice, and video and audio projects that highlight Richmond stories of confronting the harms of the refinery presence here. A special conversation with the project’s co-creators and closing reception will be held on Saturday, June 3. The talk will occur between 12pm and 1:30pm, and the reception will run from 2pm to 4pm.
On Saturday, April 29, 12pm-3pm, Spring Family Day is happening at Richmond Art Center. Kids of all ages and their grown ups are invited to spend an afternoon making art and celebrating the community-voices that demand Richmond residents’ right to clean air. This family event will feature art-making activities – including an opportunity to paint a fence slat to be added to the Fencelines installation – community action groups, spoken word, and music. Special guests will be the Richmond Our Power Coalition.
The exhibition and events at Richmond Art Center are free, open to all, and no rsvp is necessary. Richmond Art Center is located at 2540 Barrett Avenue in Richmond.
Fencelines is funded in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency.
About the Project Team: Fencelines is co-created by local artists and organizers –
Graham L.P., Princess Robinson, and Gita Khandagle – and members of the Richmond Community working in partnership with the Richmond Our Power Coalition to envision a just and regenerative future.
About Richmond Art Center: For over 80 years, Richmond Art Center has served the residents of Richmond and surrounding communities through studio arts education programs, exhibitions, off-site classes, and special initiatives for community-wide impact. Richmond Art Center’s mission is to be a catalyst in Richmond for learning and living through art. Richmondartcenter.org
For more information contact: Amy Spencer, amy@richmondartcenter.org
Top image: Excerpt from Fencelines: Richmond Collective Portrait, courtesy of Graham Laird Prentice & Gita Khandagle
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA
What does ENOUGH mean to you?
Here are two ways to engage with this idea:
Stitch n’ Bitch: Stitch on a multilingual ENOUGH Protest Banner while reflecting on the many meanings and translations of ENOUGH.
Materials will be provided. No sewing experience necessary.
ENOUGH Considered Portrait Session: Become part of the ENOUGH Considered portrait project by artists Lisa Levine and Anne Wolf. The photo sessions offer an opportunity to write and reflect on the multiple meanings of ENOUGH. After reflecting, each participant is invited to choose an ENOUGH stamp and apply it directly to their body as a means of healing an old wound or violation, as a message of boundaries/protection, or a means of sanctifying one’s own sense of abundance.
Each participant will receive a copy and the digital portraits will be added to the exhibition.
This event is free, open to all, and no rsvp is necessary.
Art for Breakfast is a free workshop and dine-in experience providing culturally responsive creative arts instruction in underserved communities while building a love for art.
Richmond Art Center is proud to be a resource for hosting community meetings and events. Richmond Art Center is not the organizer of this event. For more information contact richcitykids@richcitykids.org
Sometimes art speaks louder than petitions and public meetings.
The creators and partners in “FENCELINES: A Collective Monument to Resilience” believe their project can. The Richmond community-based art project is designed to amplify the voices of those who, for generations, have lived with the effects of pollution from the giant Chevron refinery in “fenceline” neighborhoods.
Co-creator Princess Robinson, who grew up in and works in a North Richmond fenceline community, met artist and architectural designer Graham L.P. during a beautification project at Wildcat Canyon. They became friends, and began brainstorming on an art project to generate awareness of the multiple health problems affecting the generations who have lived next door to the refinery.
“This gave me a way to express myself that was not through politics,” said Robinson.
In turn, Graham L.P. contacted friend and fellow artist Gita Khandagle, with whom he’d collaborated on a number of projects centered in Richmond. “He reached out two years ago, looking for a way for the fence [itself to become a way] for people in the community to share their voices and their stories,” Khandagle said.
Quickly, other community organizations began to come on board: Robinson’s employer Urban Tilth, Rich City Rides, Communities for a Better Environment (CBE), Asian Pacific Environmental Network (APEN) and Richmond Our Power Coalition, among others. Richmond LAND was also a major partner, tying the project to its organizational mission as a member-based organization led by women of color “dedicated to creating pathways for everyday people to organize, acquire, and co-steward land and properties as community assets to build staying power, now and for the future.”
“We didn’t think the project would get this big,” Robinson said. But it did.
The co-creators decided to use wooden slats, on which community members could write messages and/or paint images. “We were working on drawings that ‘crossed out’ the refinery,” said Khandagle, resulting in the “X” shape used for the slats.
“X is a shape of resistance,” said L.P. “Princess and her family made the first prototype, and we took the first portrait of them. That became the format.” He explained that the partners then created an info packet so that people could read about the project and its goals.
Beginning in summer 2022, the creators worked with Green Waste Recycle Yard & Millworks in North Richmond to produce the fence slats from local reclaimed urban timber. The slats were given to people during public workshops, and participants then used paint pens to create their messages and designs. “The colors are primarily reds, yellows, blues, black and white…this is a reference to many activist movements,” said Khandagle.
During the workshops, many of which were sponsored by the community partners, the materials were set out alongside the prompts: “What message do you have for the polluting industry here in Richmond?” and “What vision do you have for your community in the future?”
A quote by Robinson used in the packet reads: “We are here, we want to be seen, and we are lending our hand to make all of these initiatives work to end pollution of our communities.”
Katt Ramos, managing director of the Richmond Our Power Coalition (ROPC), noted that there was great enthusiasm for the project when it was brought to ROPC a year ago. By that point, the project had already received a first round of funding from the City of Richmond’s “Love Your Block” program, “and we saw it as a fun and creative way to advocate,” she said. More grants supporting the project eventually followed, including a Southern Exposure: 2021 Alternative Exposure Grant and a California Arts Council Impact Grant.
ROPC members hosted workshops, and “people came to the tables eager to participate,” said Robinson.
“I was constantly surprised and moved by what people contributed…how many folks spoke about what they were doing for self-care,” said L.P. “Messages were expressions of love, some including initials of all the family members, including deceased ones.”
Workshop sponsors also sent people to workshops at yet another partner in “FENCELINES”: the Richmond Art Center (RAC). “Graham, Gita and Princess proposed an exhibition here,” said RAC exhibitions director Roberto Martinez. “It was timely and appropriate. We want to use the power of art to engage conversations in the community.”
“FENCELINES” had now developed two components: the temporary installation that would go up on Earth Day, Saturday, April 22, at the Richmond Parkway Bay Trail between Gertrude and Vernon Avenues, in partnership with Richmond LAND, and an in-gallery exhibit opening at the RAC on April 5 and running through June 3.
“The temporary installation will bring color and life into a neighborhood shadowed by Chevron,” said Martinez. It will be publicly accessible from the community and visible to passers-by along the parkway. The installation will be in place for two weeks. Many of the project partners will also participate in the Earth Day ceremony and festivities.
The Earth Day installation of the slats will take place from 10am-4pm on the city-owned fence. At this time, ribbons will be attached to the tops of the slats, demonstrating to viewers the direction of the wind as it blows into the fenceline community from the refinery.
The RAC exhibit will contain some of the more than 1,000 slats that have been created, along with the photo portraits taken with them. Visitors will also have the opportunity to create their own slats. “These words and messages are the heart of this work, documenting the impact of the petroleum industry on many lives, and together forming a collective monument to resilience,” state RAC materials.
The center is also printing a life-sized mural of the portraits, said Martinez. Yet another gallery element will be a five-episode podcast based on a “listening project on environmental injustice” conducted by the Richmond Progressive Alliance.
A special “Spring Family Day” on Saturday, April 29 offers a chance for younger community members to participate. Called “Clean Air in the Wind,” kids and parents will be able to make slats together. One of Khandagle’s strongest impressions of the whole project has been “a lot of inspiration and powerful voices from the younger generation,” she said.
“All of this is so our kids can have a future that isn’t burdened with asthma and other respiratory illnesses,” said Ramos.
Will Chevron react to the installation and exhibit? Several of those interviewed expressed the hope they would spark dialogue with the refinery. “We all need to be at the table together, planning for the future,” said Robinson.
But Ramos said, noting that Chevron has proposals before the City of Richmond and Costa County County to expand the refinery facilities, “Chevron has made inflammatory statements about some of our members on their corporate media [in the past].”
In its March 15 posting about the exhibit, Chevron’s in-house media outlet, The Richmond Standard, made no mention of the project’s connection to the refinery, stating only that it is “a ‘community-based participatory art project’ centered on environmental injustice in Richmond.”
The “FENCELINES” co-creators and partners are looking to the future and focusing on the project’s potential impact.
“We hope it will spark curiosity in this issue, and encourage people wanting to learn more. We are all within this…it’s a Bay Area issue,” said Khandagle.
“Art has a beautiful way of conveying that we are not at opposite ends. We can express our hopes and dreams without pitting people against each other,” said Ramos.
“First of all, we hope it will bring visibility to the environmental racism of this circumstance, and the ways people can participate in changing it. And I hope they will think it is beautiful,” said L.P.
In fact, the “FENCELINES” projects are launching just at a time when a new UN report issues strong warnings about what will happen if the world’s countries refuse to take immediate action on climate change.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres, speaking to the press on March 20 about the Synthesis Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, included, among many other recommendations:
• Ceasing all licensing or funding of new oil and gas—consistent with the findings of the International Energy Agency.
• Stopping any expansion of existing oil and gas reserves.
• Shifting subsidies from fossil fuels to a just energy transition.
“This [project] is a milestone in this time as we speak about more formal attempts at transitioning away from the refinery,” said Ramos.
Top image: CLIMATE OF CHANGE ‘The Temporary Installation Will Bring Color And Life Into A Neighborhood Shadowed By Chevron,’ Said Martinez. (Photo Courtesy Of Graham L.P., Gita Khandagle)
