“Spring exhibitions at the Richmond Art Center shine a light on the beautiful, ongoing cycle of teaching, learning and growing through art,” according to the center.
An annual crowd-pleaser for nearly six decades, the teacher-curated WCCUSD Student Art Show features the creative works of more than 300 middle and high school students originating from 13 West Contra Costa Unified School District schools in Richmond, El Cerrito, El Sobrante, Hercules, Montalvin Manor, Pinole and San Pablo.
A reception will kick off the WCCUSD Student Art Show on Tuesday, April 16, from 5 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. An award presentation will occur at 5:45 p.m. and the event will include music by the De Anza High School band.
The other two exhibitions opening in April, Home Show and Art Blooms Here, illuminate both teacher and student artwork created within the RAC studios and demonstrate the creativity thriving there, said the RAC.
Shown in the art center’s South Gallery, the Home Show will showcase the works of Eli Africa, Ned Axthelm, Colleen Garland, Julia LaChica, Travis Meinolf and Kristin Satzman.
Artwork by Colleen Garland for the Home Show.
Over in the Community and West Galleries, Art Blooms Here will spotlight the works of Alice Armstrong, Maggie Burns, Larry Craighill, Julissa Duran, Ana Gadish-Linares, Mara Greenaway, Zamira Ha, Beatrice Hartman, Marion Henon, Eugenie Hsu, Susie Kelly, Jen Kelly-DeWitt, Juniper Kirkwood, Jolie Krakauer, Paula Kristovich, Michelle Lin, Susana Macarron, Ahmaya Maroney, Elijah Martinez Ruiz, Jessica McDowell, Jeanette Nichols, Tatyana Ryevzina, Maya Soichet-Yampolsky, Hanneke Steenmetz and ‘Beginner Handbuilding’ students.
All are welcomed to the reception for Home Show and Art Blooms Here Thurs., April 18, from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.
Find the Richmond Art Center at 2540 Barrett Ave. in Richmond. Visit the gallery during its open hours Wednesday through Saturday, 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Admission is free to the exhibitions and events.
Art by Jen Kelly-DeWitt, Hold Complexity, 2023, for Art Blooms Here.
When the Richmond Art Center lost its biggest donor last year, Executive Director José Rivera said he was worried about the future.
“Over many years, that donor contributed $100,00 annually, making him the most significant benefactor in the center’s history when considering the cumulative sum of his contribution over time,” he said. “We lost him since last year he closed out his foundation.”
For a while, it wasn’t clear how the RAC would make up that shortfall.
But things are looking brighter.
So far, the center has raised more than one-third of the $300,000 it needs to cover registration fees and tuition for 2024. In addition, it met its $30,000 scholarship goal.
The scholarships, Rivera said, allow the center to offer art classes, which attract newcomers and grow the membership. They also make classes accessible to people who could not afford to pay $40 to $50 per session.
“We are in the black now, not red,” said Rivera, who attributes the turnaround to several factors that have increased revenue and donations.
The RAC has been holding more exhibitions and partnering more with sister museums to raise visibility and draw crowds from outside of Richmond. In 2022, for example, it partnered with the SFMOMA on the exhibition “Emmy Lou Packard — Artist of Conscience.”
“We also have a good amount of returning students who want to continue taking art classes after their first quarter,” said Elaine Moreno, the center’s visitor services coordinator. “A lot of students feel comfortable and love the space, so they return, and some even take multiple classes at a time.”
In addition to classes, the center holds events in community gathering spaces like the farmers market, flea markets, and schools. The community programs are free to the public. Some are funded through partnerships or grants, said Irene Conde, the center’s education director.
The center also recently hired Kimberly Ross as public programs coordinator Her goal is to help the center reach more people.
“My priority is to expand our reach and connect directly with the people of Richmond, making the Richmond Art Center and our offerings accessible to everyone,” she said. “As a Richmond native and artist, I can achieve this goal by tapping into my network to create opportunities for program collaboration with local organizations and businesses.”
In an arena where they’re often in the shadows, Black artists are creating spaces to recognize and celebrate their talent.
For the 28th year, the Richmond Art Center will present the “Art of the African Diaspora” exhibition, later this month. AOTD gives local artists of African descent a way to share their work with the community and each other.
The showcase, which will run from Jan. 24 to March 16, will feature 160 Bay Area artists working in a variety of mediums.
“You have artists who are at different stages of their career and success. This allows younger and mid-career artists to show their art,” said Stephen Bruce, a Richmond artist who chairs the steering committee.
The idea of this Black art mecca was first nurtured by the late Jan Hart-Schuyers, a revered Bay Area artist, art educator, and community organizer, according to the AOTAD website. Lauded for her many sculptures, Schuyers established a partnership with Los Angeles-born painter Rae Louise Hayward, and the two would go on to produce the first AOTAD showcase in 1997 under the name “Art of Living Black,” which featured 35 artists. Though they didn’t live to see the event’s growth, their vision was fulfilled.
But when the showcase ends each year, many of the participating artists return to a harsh reality. Since the first museums opened in America, Black people have had their likeness on display but seldom have had the chance to be recognized for their own works: a pattern noted by scholar Bridget R. Cooks in her book “Black Artists and Activism: Harlem on My Mind.”
In 2022, Julia Halperin and Charlotte Burns, who created the Burns Halperin Report to analyze representation in the art market, surveyed 31 American museums and found that African American artists were underrepresented. Work by Black female artists comprised 0.5% of acquisitions of all the museums surveyed. And of the top 20 artists, only one — Julie Mehretu from Ethiopia — was of African descent.
AOTAD seeks to give more Black artists a platform to showcase their creative skills.
“This is like our Harlem Renaissance,” artist Kelvin Curry said, referring to the Black cultural revival in the 1920s.
This season’s showcase offers variety. Illustrator Virginia Jourdan, who’s been participating since the first showcase, is displaying acrylics. She’s produced works ranging from portraits to urban landscapes, and says her work is focused on “uplifting African American images.” Jourdan said she’s grateful for a space that allows her to celebrate her craft.
“Art is very relaxing for me and something that’s innate,” Jourdan said.
Curry’s work also is featured. A multimedia artist, Curry describes his work as “figurative, abstract, and symbolic.” He incorporates African-inspired shapes and color schemes into his work.
With the showcase, Curry said, “I hope to gain new collectors and more exposure.”
Bruce, who’s participated in AOTD since the beginning like Jourdan and Curry, said that the showcase benefits Bay Area residents as much as it does the artists, giving people a chance to experience art they otherwise might not have seen. After months of planning, he is excited for opening day.
“It’s a great opportunity for people to see an array of artists in their community,” Bruce said.
More information about the exhibit is on the AOTAD website.
RAC celebrates Indigenous Peoples’ Day through artmaking
October 9, 2023
By Mike Kinney
Dozens of community members and their families celebrated Indigenous Peoples’ Day through artmaking at the Richmond Art Center on Saturday.
It was part of the art center’s annual “Fall Family Day,” a fun, free event that invited the local community to get a taste of the RAC’s offerings while celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day.
The event enlisted families to work on a community mural facilitated by muralist Luis Garcia. In other activities, the Native American Health Center of San Francisco held a powwow reading corner. Printing, knitting and leaf activity sessions were offered, and families could also contribute to a photographic portrait series by Anne Wolf and Lisa Levine.
DJ Freddie J of Hotmixx Entertainment provided guests with the best RB and jazz fusion, and tamales were served at a popular food pop-up.
The spirit of Indigenous Peoples’ Day was definitely here today; I am glad people had a chance to come and celebrate it with us,” said visitor Dee Brown, a Native Lakota.
Added Ruby Johnson, another guest, “My family really enjoyed helping to paint the community mural, it gives me a real sense of how important art is to our community.”
Kathy Driskill said it was her first visit to the RAC.
“And I had such a wonderful time being with the community celebrating Indigenous Peoples’ Day with arts and culture! I can’t wait to come back here next year,” Driskill said.
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
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.
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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
