Richmond Art Center
Richmond Art Center

Wee Poets Features WCCUSD Youth and Richmond Art Center

Wee Poets Features WCCUSD Youth and Richmond Art Center

For over thirty years Wee Poets on Channel 28 has supported literacy development through interviews with thousands of Bay Area children. This month three WCCUSD students and Roberto Martinez, RAC’s exhibitions director, were invited onto the show to talk about the WCCUSD Student Art Show.

Top Image: Wee Poet’s host Sally Baker speaks with RAC’s Roberto Martinez

The Richmond Standard: Richmond mayor’s office also an art gallery

Link: https://richmondstandard.com/community/2023/06/23/richmond-mayors-office-also-an-art-gallery/

The Richmond Standard

Richmond mayor’s office also an art gallery

June 23, 2023

After a four years, works from locally-based NIAD Art Center are being exhibited on rotation at the office located at Richmond Civic Center, according to Mayor Eduardo Martinez.

The mayor’s office also partnered with the Richmond Art Center to display art from the West Contra Costa Unified School District (WCCUSD) Student Art Show.

“Both shows are in the mayor’s office and you are invited to come and look at the artwork,” Martinez said at this past Tuesday’s Council meeting.

Artnet News: Chevron Took Down an Artwork, Which Called Out the Oil Giant for Polluting a California City, From a Fence Surrounding Its Refinery

Weblink: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/chevron-removes-public-artwork-pollution-2317611

Artnet News

Chevron Took Down an Artwork, Which Called Out the Oil Giant for Polluting a California City, From a Fence Surrounding Its Refinery

The project adorned a fence separating an oil refinery from residential neighborhoods.

Brian Boucher | June 8, 2023

Oil giant Chevron has acknowledged that it removed an art installation from a fence surrounding its refinery in Richmond, California, near San Francisco.

The piece, installed on Earth Day (April 22), consisted of brightly painted slats placed on the fence around the oil refinery. Neighborhood residents were invited to inscribe messages and stories on the slats as a way of documenting the local petroleum industry’s health and environmental impacts, and form “a collective monument to resistance.” The slats were painted with messages such as “clean energy now.”

“Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction,” Chevron spokesman Ross Allen told Artnet News in an email.

Organizers of the art project argue that the portions of the fence they used are owned by the city and that they received permission from Richmond’s Public Arts and Culture Commission, the City of Richmond’s Love Your Block program and Public Works Department, and Contra Costa County’s North Richmond Municipal Advisory Committee to install the work. The removal, they said, was “an attempt to silence our voices and erase our stories.”

The work was the subject of an exhibition at Richmond Art Center that ran from April 5 to June 3. 

Chevron claims that the fence is the company’s private property. “Perhaps someone is mistaken about ownership of our fence and our property line, but we are quite clear about ownership of the area,” spokesman Ross Allen told Artnet News. “[N]o city permit allows construction on private property without landowner permission.”

Earth Justice, a nonprofit environmental law organization, wrote on its website that Chevron’s refinery has been “wreaking havoc on the local community for decades and was the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the state.” The residents of the surrounding neighborhood, the organization points out, are primarily people of color. 

“The population in closest proximity to the refinery has disproportionately high rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer,” the Guardian reported in 2019. The city’s children have rates of asthma twice the national average, the paper reported in a story on a 2018 lawsuit the city filed against Chevron, alleging public nuisance and negligence.

“We think it’s pretty weird that they disappeared the project without any kind of communication with us,” one of the installation’s organizers, Graham Laird Prentice, told the San Francisco Chronicle, noting that there had been extensive publicity surrounding the project. The removal “seems to have transpired during the night. It’s pretty shady stuff.”

ARTnews: ‘They’re Trying to Erase Us’: Chevron Takes Down Public Art Piece

Weblink: https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/chevron-takes-down-public-art-piece-fencelines-richmond-1234670880/

ARTnews

‘They’re Trying to Erase Us’: Chevron Takes Down Public Art Piece

Michael Cabanatuan 

BY SHANTI ESCALANTE-DE MATTEI | June 8, 2023 4:36pm

In the middle of the night on May 15, a public art project in Richmond, California, disappeared without a trace. The project, titled Fencelines – A Collective Monument to Resilience, was a collection of slats onto which community members wrote their hopes and wishes for the future of the city and its environment. The slats were installed on a fence that cordons off the Chevron refinery, which sits along the waterfront of the San Francisco Bay.

On Wednesday, Chevron admitted that it took down the public art piece in a statement made to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“The installation on company property was removed, in keeping with our security, safety and facilities policies,” a Chevron representative wrote to ARTnews. “Our fences and other company facilities are functional equipment and we cannot allow tampering or unauthorized construction.”

The artists and organizers behind the project, meanwhile, argue that Fencelines was mostly on a city-owned portion of the fence, which runs alongside a running trail and is separated from Chevron property by a six-lane thoroughfare. Fencelines, which was brought to life by community organizer Princess Robinson and artist Graham LP, had been in the making over the past year and a half, during which they and Gita Khandagle, an artist and designer, reached out to Chevron and city officials to ascertain who owned the fence so they could get approval for the project.

According to the organizers, Chevron never responded but the city did, approving the project. Graham LP and other people involved claim that the majority of the project was installed on the city-owned portion of the fence but bled into a part of the fence that Chevron owns.

“But we don’t want this to just become about the fence and who owns it. This conversation is about who owns the air, who has permission or the right to [impact it],” LP told ARTnews. “Though we’ll definitely push the property aspect of this when it comes down to it, they massively overreached.”

Fencelines was designed to call attention to the environmental and health impact that the refinery has on the Richmond community, where asthma rates are double the state average, according to an ongoing study at University of California, San Francisco. Slats painted with wishes for clean air and water from the community were attached to the fence and topped with ribbons that were activated by the wind, showing that the residents of Richmond live perpetually downwind from the refinery. The piece was installed April 22, on Earth Day.

As of publication, the company has not confirmed whether the piece has been destroyed or is in storage somewhere. Up until Wednesday evening, the artists and organizers associated with Fencelines thought the piece had been stolen as Chevron never reached out to them following the deinstallation or warned them of their impending action. But there were suspicions.

“As soon as it happened I was like, ‘That was Chevron, they’re trying to erase us,’” Katt Ramos, the managing director of Richmond Our Power Coalition, told ARTnews. The coalition brings together local organizations fighting for housing and a just transition away from the oil based industries that surround the area.

“[I thought] that was Chevron because we were three or four days away from Anti-Chevron Day and four or five days away from their stakeholder meeting, they don’t want any bad press.”

The Coalition and Anti-Chevron Day began as a response to the 2012 Chevron Richmond Refinery Fire, the resulting chemical release incident, and the general health issues that residents of Richmond tie to their proximity to the refinery, which has been operating in the city for 120 years. Ramos pointed out that earlier this year unionized steelworkers at the Chevron refinery struck for safer working conditions, which led, the union alleged, to at least five workers being let go.

“But there’s some signs on the fence and now they’re worried about safety?” said Ramos.

Robinson, LP, and Khandagle partnered with numerous organizations and with the Richmond Arts Center to make the installation as well as an accompanying exhibition at RAC that was made possible with a grant from the California Arts Council.

“We invited people to come and make some of these wooden slats, to paint messages of hope, messages of vision for a future where we have clean air, a healthy environment,” Roberto Martinez, a curator at RAC, told ARTnews. “We wanted to bring in people for dialogue about the lived experience of of the Richmond community, which has a very rich and complex history with environmental justice.”

Though there were a few references to Chevron in the signs, for the most part Martinez recalled that messages were generally calls for clean air and water, for love, and for resilience, and that the project was not particularly confrontational. Over 200 wooden slats were painted for the project, which was slated to be de-installed on June 3.

Princess Robinson, who works with Urban Tilth, never saw the project as antagonistic. “I’m a cooperative education and facilitator, I really believe in the cooperative model, to work amongst each other and for everyone to be at the table,” Robinson told ARTnews. Since finding out Chevron took down the piece, Robinson has been trying to see the positive side to this unfortunate situation, but it hasn’t been easy.

“Being a human, at first I was mad, I felt discouraged. I felt disrespected. I felt like well, dang, I don’t matter, all that work that I did doesn’t matter, bringing my community out doesn’t matter,” said Robinson. “But my intentions are now a reality, right, I wanted to have a conversation.”

Now Chevron is reaching out to the organizers as they try to backtrack from what has become a much larger story than could have been anticipated. The next steps are to find out if the work was destroyed and how to respond to the events with another art piece.

Luckily, for Chevron, Robinson is magnanimous.

“Me personally, there’s no bad blood,” said Robinson. “I want Chevron to know, let’s cooperate together and be more compassionate, more respectful, because there’s a better way that we could have done this.”

San Francisco Chronicle: Chevron admits it took down public art project that criticized the oil giant

Weblink: https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/chevron-admits-took-public-art-project-18140972.php

San Francisco Chronicle

Chevron admits it took down public art project that criticized the oil giant

Michael Cabanatuan | June 7, 2023

The mystery of who removed the colorful wooden slats of a Richmond public art project criticizing Chevron has been solved.

 It was Chevron, a spokesman for the oil company admitted on Wednesday.

Fencelines, a public art display consisting of colorful wooden slats inserted into the openings of a chain link fence between North Richmond neighborhoods and Chevron’s refinery, was a community project, conceived, created and installed over three years as an environmental justice message.

The slats, painted bright shades of red, blue, yellow and white contained messages including:  “My home is not your profit,” “We deserve clean air,” “No more oil — for our children’s future.” Others blamed Chevron for polluting the air and called for the refinery to shut down.

The slats were installed on a 1,000-foot stretch of fence along Richmond Parkway on Earth Day, April 22. A person who lives near the installation noticed the Fencelines stakes missing on May 16.

Project sponsors told The Chronicle on Monday they had no suspects in what they labeled the theft of their art project. 

But Chevron officials, after a Chronicle story on Tuesday, sent a statement acknowledging the company removed the project because, it claimed, the fence was on the corporation’s property. 

“We have a tradition of supporting free expression,” Chevron spokesman Ross Allen said in a statement. “We were not contacted about this activity on our land or fence.

Project organizers insist that Richmond city officials said the fence was on their property and issued permission for its use.

“As standard practice, our crews remove foreign objects on fences due to safety and security concerns,” Allen said. “We place the highest priority on the health and safety of our workforce, and maintaining a safe and secure operating environment helps us protect our assets, our community and the environment.”

Graham Laird Prentice, lead artist on the project, and Roberto Martinez, exhibitions director at the Richmond Art Center, which assisted with the project and displayed a related exhibit in its museum, said they were surprised Chevron was to blame.

“We had an inclination it might be Chevron but we didn’t have the evidence,” Martinez said.

But they knew that the community comments calling for a Chevron-free future might rub the corporation the wrong way, he said.

Prentice agreed.

“We think it’s pretty weird that they disappeared the project without any kind of communication with us,” he said, noting that it was well publicized and promoted. “Also, (the removal) seems to have transpired during the night. It’s pretty shady stuff.”

Prentice said the coalition behind the public art project is working with the city and planning an official response to Chevron.  An art-oriented response is also a possibility, especially if the creators can get back the slats that were removed.

“We’re going to make sure everybody knows Chevron is taking responsibility for this act of erasure,” he said.


Written By Michael Cabanatuan

Michael Cabanatuan is a general assignment and breaking news reporter who’s covered everything from wildfires and sports fans to protests and COVID masking requirements. He’s also written extensively about transportation and covered Contra Costa County for The Chronicle. He’s ridden high-speed trains in Japan, walked in the Transbay Tube, been tear-gassed in Oakland and exposed to nude protesters in the Castro. Cabanatuan worked at the Paradise Post (long before anyone heard of the town), the former West County Times (in Richmond) and the Modesto Bee before joining The Chronicle. He is a two-time graduate of UC Berkeley.

Top image: The Fencelines art installation prior to its disappearance last month in Richmond, near the Chevron refinery. 

San Francisco Chronicle: A huge Bay Area art installation near the Chevron refinery vanished. The artists say it was stolen

Weblink: https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/richmond-chevron-art-installation-missing-18136796.php

San Francisco Chronicle

A huge Bay Area art installation near the Chevron refinery vanished. The artists say it was stolen

Michael Cabanatuan | June 6, 2023

A Richmond public art display championing social justice, criticizing Chevron and brightening a dreary industrial part of the city has vanished weeks before it was scheduled to end — and the artists are trying to figure out who’s responsible.

A colorful collection of wooden slats woven into a fence along the Richmond Parkway near the Chevron refinery, titled “Fencelines: A Collective Monument to Resilience,” “has been completely disappeared,” the sponsors announced in a statement.

“We are seeking the public’s help in locating hundreds of ‘slat’ painted wood art pieces,” the statement said. “It is believed the art pieces were stolen or deliberately removed between the evening of May 15 and May 16. We ask you to stand in solidarity with the Richmond community in demanding that our art pieces be found and returned.”

The exhibit was installed and unveiled on Earth Day, April 22, and stood undisturbed along the 1,000-foot stretch of Richmond Parkway, a busy connection between Interstates 80 and 580. A person associated with the installation who lives in North Richmond near the fence line noticed it was missing on the morning of May 16.

So far, none of the pieces of the art project have been located, said Graham Laird Prentice, lead artist on the project, and team members have no solid leads on who is responsible for their removal.

“We don’t have any direct evidence, so we’re not making any accusations,” Prentice said. “What we’re pointing out is that we’ve been working on this project for three years now in collaboration with the city and Richmond community organizations.”

Spokespersons for Chevron did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Richmond police and the Contra Costa County Sheriff’s Office have been contacted, and the team behind the installation were seeking footage from traffic cameras in the area. They’ve also checked with the city’s Public Works Department to make sure the slats weren’t removed as part of a cleanup or maintenance effort, Prentice said.

The public art project, three years in the making, consists of the wooden slats painted red, yellow, blue or white with each bearing a message from an individual or family promoting environmental justice or community solidarity: “My home is not your profit,” “We deserve clean air,” “No more oil — for our children’s future.”

Some, not surprisingly, criticized Chevron, calling for the oil company to stop polluting the air or to shut down altogether.

For decades, Richmond has had a  strained relationship with Chevron, whose refinery and related offices are its largest employer. But while the oil company provides jobs, it’s also brought concerns over pollution and the effects on residents’ health. The refinery, its impacts on Richmond and its future have long animated the city’s often bitterly divided political scene.

The artists are convinced that whoever tore down the public art display — done with approval of the city and its art center, which had a more traditional indoor exhibit in conjunction — did so deliberately.

“Our view is that this was a deliberate act of erasure,” Prentice said, “and an attempt to silence what people have to say.”

If that was, in fact, the goal of the thieves, Prentice said, it didn’t work. During the exhibit at the Richmond Art Center, visitors were given the chance to paint their own slats and deliver their own messages. And “Fencelines” organizers are deciding where and how they should be displayed.

“We have hundreds more slats,” Prentice said.


    Written By Michael Cabanatuan

    Michael Cabanatuan is a general assignment and breaking news reporter who’s covered everything from wildfires and sports fans to protests and COVID masking requirements. He’s also written extensively about transportation and covered Contra Costa County for The Chronicle. He’s ridden high-speed trains in Japan, walked in the Transbay Tube, been tear-gassed in Oakland and exposed to nude protesters in the Castro. Cabanatuan worked at the Paradise Post (long before anyone heard of the town), the former West County Times (in Richmond) and the Modesto Bee before joining The Chronicle. He is a two-time graduate of UC Berkeley.

    Top image: The “Fencelines” art installation prior to its mysterious disappearance last month in Richmond, near the Chevron refinery. The installation, made up of hundreds of painted slats, is missing after what the organizations behind the project say was a deliberate act to silence its message of environmental activism. Provided by Graham Laird Prentice

    East Bay Express: From the Ashes

    East Bay Express

    From the Ashes: Richmond Art enter Captures the Devastation of California’s Wildfires

    Article weblink: https://eastbayexpress.com/through-the-fire/

    Digital copy of the East Bay Express: https://edition.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/html5/reader/production/default.aspx?pubname=&pubid=8808aae8-e6fe-4270-adb0-c95bab71909c

    Through the Fire

    By Lou Fancher | May 17, 2023

    Ruth Morgan’s stark and provocative works at Richmond Art Center highlight climate change’s role in CA wildfires

    If artist Ruth Morgan’s 10 large-scale photographs currently on display at Richmond Art Center don’t send one’s ticker beating double time or one’s blood boiling, they must go immediately to the ER. They might be in cardiac arrest or have a circulatory system out of whack.

    “Requiem: The Remains of the Day, August 4, 2021,” is part of RAC’s Spring Season themed environmental justice exhibits. Along with the community-based participatory art project “Fencelines” that addresses environmental issues specific to Richmond, Morgan’s “Requiem” introduces the impact of climate change and the uptick of massive, monumental wildfires in greater California.

    The full color photographs—nine 40 x 60 inch images and one entry image 56 x 84 inches—document the aftermath of what happened during the summer of 2021 in Greenville. In a mere 45 minutes, the town was completely destroyed by the Dixie Wildfire. The photographs, taken months later and presented in Morgan’s signature large scale format, are not only sizable, but they are in their details compelling, devastating and profoundly moving without being in any way strident.

    In the stark perspectives and landscapes rendered in full color rather than her signature black-and-white style, Morgan avoids melodrama but manages to create an intensely dramatic vibe that is dignified, respectful, egalitarian, even elegant. Unexpectedly, there is a haunting, eery and quiet beauty to the portrayals. The charred buildings, streets, homesteads and public spaces are entirely devoid of people but resonate with the full tragedy of human lives that have been cast into disarray and a community devastated by wildfire.

    As a model of visual storytelling and proof of the impact of climate change on real people with real lives, the images themselves hold ironic magnetism. Striking a viewer as a kind of propellant, something visceral, with power equivalent to a wildfire, the accumulative effect instead might spur a person into action that goes far beyond passive observational or unexpressed empathy.

    Importantly, the facts are these: In less than an hour, the Dixie Fire reduced 100 family homes, a gas station, church, hotel, museum, bar, schools, restaurants and other commercial business to rubble. Over 1,000 residents were displaced; many of them low income, marginalized people whose small homes were likely valued at $30,000 or less. 

    DISPLACED Entirely Devoid Of People, Morgan’s Images Resonate With The Full Tragedy Of Human Lives That Have Been Cast Into Disarray. (Photo Courtesy Of Richmond Art Center)

    These were not the CEOs of Silicon Valley with multimillion dollar homes and fire insurance to cover any damages and rebuilding costs. Most Greenville residents lost everything they owned, including generations of family photographs and heirlooms. Fortunately, everyone was able to evacuate and no lives were sacrificed.

    Morgan is widely known in the Bay Area as the founder/director in 1997 of Community Works West, an organization that works directly with people impacted by incarceration and uses art to address issues related to social justice to bring healing and restoration to marginalized communities. She recently retired from her leadership role at Community Works West, but her interest in the stories of underserved people who exist on the margins of mainstream society is lifelong and continues to be expressed through her body of work as a photographer. 

    Her acclaimed, award-winning photo series, publications and exhibits include “San Francisco County Jail #3,” “San Quentin: Maximum Security, 1981-83,” “Ohlone Elders and Youth Speak,” ”Piqua Shawnee: Cultural Survival in Their Homeland” and others. 

    Morgan’s photographs are in private collections and exhibited in museums including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Houston and San Diego museums, the Matrix Gallery and the University Art Museum Berkeley. Most recently, her “S.F. Jail” archive was purchased by the San Francisco Public Library, and her “Ohlone Elders and Youth” archive was purchased by the Bancroft Library.

    Exhibit notes for “Requiem” explain the Dixie Fire was later determined to have been caused by Pacific Gas and Electric Company equipment failure. Even so, human actions and inactions exacerbated and fed the fire’s intensity. Overgrown forests resulting from short-sighted, man-made fire suppression policies and housing development located near forests created an incendiary situation. 

    With climate change causing years of drought and more virulent storms during California’s increasingly extended wildfire season, there was high propensity for the volatile terrain to ignite. It was only a matter of time—and remains so—before a town like Greenville would suffer a blow.

    Morgan said in an interview she had originally gone to the area intending to gather interviews from people who had been displaced. Upon her arrival, she found Greenville was like a ghost town. “Originally, the idea was to photograph the people impacted by climate change and the fire. To photograph the people most invisible. But there was no one there, other than a few people living in RVs outside of the area. The first two trips, I saw no one. The third time, I saw occasional people bulldozing, trying to clear the land. Eventually, it was totally razed and the rubble taken away. Now, it’s being reborn with people trying to rebuild,” she noted.

    Although there are no physical people in the photographs, signs of human life are everywhere. In charred, residential areas, burned-out vehicles in driveways and crumbled chimneys in yards stand like ominous sentinels or gravestones where once an entire house stood. Personal items are visible—a typewriter, a bicycle, pots and pans, broken dishes, gardening pots and tools, children’s toys, a child’s desk. In one image, “#107” on a sign is the only thing that marks a family plot. In another, a street lamp having lost its verticality to the intense heat folds upon itself and curves downward, as if bowing like a supple, graceful ballet dancer. 

    Compellingly, black-and-white murals painted by Mendocino-based artist Shane Grammer on several burned and fragmented walls after the fire bring humanity back into the picture. One, painted on an exterior wall of a former movie theater, is of a glamorous film star-like woman, against which leans a detached, upside-down neon sign that reads, “Pioneer.” In another photograph, the image of Jesus adorns a chimney.

    “Grammer came before I was there and on his own came and I assume wanted to make something of beauty in the space,” said Morgan. “Those murals were mesmerizing, and seen in the midst of the devastation, it was breathtaking. It was incongruous. It added to the mystery of everything that happened in Greenville.”

    Aside from her reaction to the murals, Morgan said her initial and overall response to what she saw in Greenville was devastating, overwhelming. “Because of that, I became interested in photographing landscapes instead of people, which had not been my experience before,” she explained. “Initially, it was the enormity of the tragedy that struck me. To get there, you cross over mountains and drive into this valley. There, you come upon eight-square miles of total rubble. These were the homes of people who, many of them, had probably lived there for generations. I found solace only in connecting to the people through the remnants left. 

    “It was three to four months after the fire, so people had already come back and retrieved anything that meant something to them, anything that was still intact. But what remained still told a story. Remember, these lives weren’t shattered by an Act of God. It was human impact on climate change. Yes, a fire might have happened naturally, but that was not what happened here,” she continued.

    Morgan said what happened in Greenville was such a monumental event that the exhibit needed large-scale imagery to capture the impact of the fire on the town. “If I could have, I would have had them all seven-feet wide, or larger. The large scale gives you a way to enter the work, and it’s powerful to be as close to the scene as you can. You have to see the details and those, you can only see in a larger format,” explained Morgan.

    Working with RAC exhibitions director Roberto Martinez to curate the show, the two made the decision not to include in the exhibit the black-and-white photographs versions of the images Morgan has also printed and plans to exhibit in smaller venues. Morgan said those photographs are much smaller and have a different aura. “It felt like the 10 four-color photographs were enough to tell the story. I tend to think less is more,” she said.

    Martinez has a masters in museum studies from JFK University and has worked with community-centered institutions like the Museum of Social Justice, the East Side Arts Alliance and LA Plaza de Cultura y Artes. He first met Morgan through Robbin Légère Henderson, a Berkeley-based artist, curator and writer who will be in conversation with Morgan at the gallery on May 27. 

    “I knew that during the spring I wanted to focus on the impact of the climate crisis. I felt Ruth’s work resonated with that. She has a wonderful eye and in the past has captured so much of humanity with her photographs from San Quentin or with the Ohlone community here in the Bay Area. This series was a striking contrast because there were no people in these photographs,” he noted.

    Martinez said the human impact that fuels the climate crisis is huge and wants the images to wrap the viewer in a haunting embrace, but in a space that also feels safe. The exhibit design is intentionally quiet: The photographs have little additional interpretive content or labeling. “People can be there contemplating the images and not being told what to think,” he said. “They confront the images that are themselves quiet, despite the destruction you can see. There’s a somber tone to any place after a devastating force passes through it.”

    One image that struck him deeply upon first seeing it shows a broad landscape of mountains and trees in the background. “You see that, and then in the foreground, you see a massive tangle of destruction. Then you see one of Shane’s murals, painted after the fire. In the mural, you see hope in humanity and how it might re-flourish,” he said. 

    The photograph with the collapsed streetlight, according to Martinez, also immediately grabbed him. He called it a powerful symbol suggestive of the connections that human actions have on the environments in which people live. Streetlights illuminate and increase community safety; wildfires also illuminate, but human carelessness can unleash flames strong enough to bend metal, destroy man-made inventions and diminish safety.

    Martinez has definite ideas of the dialogue and action he hopes the exhibits will initiate. “Art opens doors and windows into difficult conversations. The mirror on harsh realities shown through art allows for transformations in our minds towards actions,” he said. “In Ruth’s exhibit, we see the devastating impact of climate change and a world devoid of humans in which we’ve destroyed ourselves. She’s helping us see the future in a foreboding sense, but it forces us to reckon with the possibilities.” 

    But seen in their totality, Martinez suggested the exhibits this season invite a participatory response that might result in hopeful solutions to alleviate the crisis. “I want to paint a picture that can be dark because it is, but a picture that motivates people to take actions to not walk toward that dark future, but to a different one. We want to plant, nurture and grow ideas around environmental justice,” he explained.

    Morgan agreed and said the response she has received to the exhibit thus far has confirmed her overall purpose, which is to better understand what happened in Greenville and to cause people to become involved in protecting and preserving the natural environment.

    “People are moved and sobered by ‘Requiem.’ For me, I am compelled to do this work, whether it’s to expose the criminal justice system or climate change. Greenville sounded an alarm for me and hopefully will for other people. We need to meet this moment. Individually and collectively, we can make a difference. We need to understand how much damage humans are having on the planet. We need to know we can still change course,” she said.

    Asked for her thoughts about the power of imagery to convey complex matters relating to social or environmental justice, Morgan said, “For some people, the visual is more impactful than any words I can use. You can look at the photographs and see climate damage right there, unmistakably. As a photographer, I think there’s nothing like an image. One image can say a lot. The power of art is palpable.”

    KneeDeep Times: Humanity on the Fence

    KneeDeep Times

    Humanity on the Fence

    by Jasmine Hardy | May 16, 2023

    A new public art installation, called Fencelines, redefines the only barrier separating Richmond’s residential neighborhoods from the Chevron oil refinery: a wire fence. 

    “It is a participatory project meant to engage folks and get a message to Chevron, but also gather visions that offer a future that is different and will hopefully transform this situation,” says Graham Laird Prentice, one of the co-creators of the installation.

    Fencelines incorporates community-painted slats along the fence, which is also decorated with ribbons intended to indicate which way the wind is blowing. Pollution from the Chevron Richmond Refinery, also the largest greenhouse gas emitter in California, doesn’t confine itself to the refinery’s side of the fence.

    Photo: Lonny Meyer.

    In addition to transforming the actual fence, Fencelines also occupies space at the Richmond Art Center, where visitors can find a sculptural fence with more painted slats. During free community events held at the center, people can come and decorate their own slats with messages regarding their feelings around Chevron, the Richmond community, and climate justice to place on the fence.

    This past April, photographer Lonny Meyer attended Spring Family Day to document how a community coming together for a day of art, positivity, and love can also be an act of resilience against environmental injustice.

    The event produced an incredibly positive turnout according to Laird Prentice, but he has been mostly moved by what the voices of the community have had to say. “The messages have been incredible. They’re about climate justice, but they’re more specifically about community care, self care, and love. The way they’ve all been woven together–there’s a deep humanity in it. We could have never predicted how powerful it would be to give over the microphone.”

    Photo: Lonny Meyer.

    Visual Portfolio, Posts & Image Gallery for WordPress

    All Photos by Lonny Meyer.

    The Richmond Standard: Guillermo the Golden Trout undergoes repairs for 25th anniversary

    The Richmond Standard: Guillermo the Golden Trout undergoes repairs for 25th anniversary

    Article link: https://richmondstandard.com/richmond/2023/05/15/guillermo-the-golden-trout-undergoes-repairs-for-25th-anniversary/

    By Mike Kinney

    On Monday, repairs on Guillermo the Golden Trout, which hangs above the Richmond Art Center on Barrett Avenue, was completed.

    A small team replaced two metal scales on the 50-foot-long fish. The repair is in honor of the fish’s 25th anniversary at Richmond Art Center.

    This reporter was admitted to the rooftop to get a bird’s eye of the fish sculpture.

    Richmond Art Center Executive Director Jose Rivera expressed excitement over the repairs.

    “We had been working for months for to get the parts,” Rivera said. “Our team and the City government did a wonderful job to help make this amazing day finally happen.”

    RAC Community Engagement Director Amy Spencer noted that once the scaffolding had been put in place, two scales were repaired. One had fallen off and had been lost.

    Luckily the artist had a single replacement at her studio. The other one had become bent out of shape, possibly from the wind, and needed to be flattened.

    “The replacement scale was the important part…the fish had gone many years with a hole in the middle of it where the missing scale had been,” Spencer said.

    Guillermo the Golden Trout embodies artist Andrée Singer Thompson’s ongoing concern with healing and survival. The artist chose California’s state fish – the golden trout – as a symbol of hope, since at the time it had just been declassified as endangered by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

    “I made it because I was involved in the environment, Thompson said. “I am extremely happy it has lasted so long hanging at the Richmond Art Center.”

    It was installed at Richmond Art Center in 1997 as part of Thompson’s ‘Making Waves’ interactive EcoArt installation. Messages of hope from the community are inscribed on the back of the fish’s scales. The eye is made of a metal lampshade. It was made from 800 pounds of recycled metal and is 50 feet long. Guillermo was repainted back in 2008.

    On Saturday, Aug. 5, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., a free community party will be held at the Richmond Art Center (2540 Barrett Ave.) called “Go Fish! Celebrating 25 Years of Guillermo, the Golden Trout.”

    The RAC states: “Join us for a community party to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Andrée Singer Thompson’s iconic fish sculpture that adorns Richmond Art Center’s building. We’ll be wishing Guillermo, the Golden Trout happy birthday with art-making, games, live music, auction and cake.”

    All photos by Mike Kinney

    East Bay Express: Light in the Dark

    Link: https://eastbayexpress.com/light-in-the-dark/

    East Bay Express: Light in the Dark

    By Janis Hashe | Mar 29, 2023

    ‘FENCELINES’ fights back in Richmond

    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)

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