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
We’ve achieved a lot together in FY2022-23. Help us keep going!
Over the past twelve months:
Please make a donation to Richmond Art Center before the end of the fiscal year (6/30/23).
Your donation – any amount – will support RAC’s free gallery admission, exhibitions, education programs, and community outreach.
Thank you for your support!
Donations are tax-deductible as allowed by law. (Richmond Art Center’s Tax ID is 94-6104204.)
Top images (left to right from top left: a family making glass art at the Holiday Arts Festival; Printmaker Art Hazelwood demonstrates Emmy Lou Packard’s press in action; Solo exhibition artists J.B. Broussard and Donna Gatson; Calaveritas workshop instructor artist Daniel Camacho; a young student on a Youth Art Tour; teaching artist Colleen Garland; a student in the metals studio; ‘Stitching Stolen Lives’ book talk with Sara Trail; and volunteer Bree at the spring exhibitions reception.
Link: https://richmondstandard.com/community/2023/06/23/richmond-mayors-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.
Volunteers at Richmond Art Center assist our teachers and staff, help out at events, support community outreach, and more. If you have a passion for art, a desire to help your community, or are just looking to get more involved, fill out a volunteer application today!
SUMMER EVENTS WE NEED VOLUNTEERS FOR:*
* We especially need volunteers who can assist with light physical duties such as setting up and breaking down events.
Volunteer benefits include a discount on studio classes. We can also support students wanting to complete community service hours for class credit.
Apply to volunteer HERE.
Questions? Contact Kimberly A. Ross, Public Programs Coordinator, kimberly@richmondartcenter.org
**We request that volunteers be 16 years or older.**
Top image: Volunteers at Richmond Art Center this June
Last week we celebrated Juneteenth early with a special paint and sip event at Richmond Art Center. Thirty community members gathered in the main gallery as artisan Elishes Cavness guided them through the steps to paint their own ‘black panther’ masterpiece.
Set-Up through Deinstall: Tuesday, June 13 – Monday, June 19
Carnival Dates: Friday, June 16 – Sunday, June 18
Starting Tuesday, June 13 through Monday, June 19 the City parking lot opposite Richmond Art Center (on the 400 block of 25th Street between Barrett and Nevin Avenues) will be reserved for the Juneteenth Carnival being sponsored by the Richmond Police Activities League.
PARKING OPTIONS:
For information about the Juneteenth Carnival Celebration call Richmond PAL at 510-621-1221 or visit their website at www.rpal.org
Congrats to the students who received Artistic Achievement Awards in the WCCUSD Student Show!! These artists will have their artworks on display in Richmond Mayor Eduardo Martinez’s office at Civic Center Plaza until September 17.
Artistic Achievement Awards: Jasmin Alfaro Capybara, Pinole Valley High School; Mario Lopez, Richmond High School; Isabel Gil, Pinole Valley High School; Ivy Hu, De Anza High School; Shahzain Malik, Mira Vista School; Olivia Elices, Fred Korematsu Middle School; Madison Wyatt, Fred Korematsu Middle School; Anya Troll, El Cerrito High School; Andrea Zavala Cruces, El Cerrito High School; Ashley Mejia, Kennedy High School
Weblink: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/chevron-removes-public-artwork-pollution-2317611
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.”
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.”
Weblink: https://www.sfchronicle.com/eastbay/article/chevron-admits-took-public-art-project-18140972.php
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.
