Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA
FREE
Artist Tanja Geis will walk us through her solo exhibition in the west gallery, Recompose.
This event is free, open to all and no rsvp is necessary.
Immediately following the gallery walk through will be a film screening at 6:30pm of Jed Lee’s The Greenway. Both these events are part of The Greenhouse, an exhibition and speaker series focused on the climate crisis and environmental justice movements in Richmond, CA.
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA
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 Briel Pomerantz bpomeratz@gopublicschools.org
Did you know we have a school tours program? Bring your class to Richmond Art Center and enjoy a guided tour of current exhibitions. Students also get to visit studio spaces and engage in an art-making activity.
(Psssst Richmond youth organizations, groups and schools can book a tour for FREE thanks to funding from California Arts Council)
Richmond Art Center (courtyard), 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond
Spend your Saturday afternoon with us making art and celebrating the community-voices that demand Richmond residents’ right to clean air. This free, family event features art-making activities, community action groups, spoken word, and music.
Special guests from the frontline of environmental activism in Richmond are the Richmond Our Power Coalition and the FENCELINES project team. Spoken word artist Nyabingha McDowell will perform. And the UC Master Gardener Program will give away sunflowers.
Art-making activities by RAC teaching artists are mobiles with Cristine Blanco, sound art led by STEAM specialist Vince de Jésus, caricatures by Eli Africa, and screen printing by Alice Rice. Plus kids and families can enjoy coloring with recycled crayons, family photo booth, gallery search and find, music by Mueve, and healthy snacks!
Spring Family Day is free, open to all and no rsvp is necessary.
This event was made possible by a Richmond Arts and Culture Commission 2022-2023 Neighborhood Public Art Mini-Grant.
Special thanks to our partners who make this event possible, including our fabulous Teaching Artists and:
Top image: Drawing by Eli Africa
Español
Dia Familiar en la Primavera: Aire limpio en el viento
Sábado, 29 de Abril, 12pm-3pm | GRATIS
Richmond Art Center (patio), 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond
Pase su sábado por la tarde con nosotros haciendo arte y celebrando las voces de la comunidad que exigen el derecho de los residentes de Richmond a tener aire limpio. Este evento familiar gratuito presenta actividades de creación de arte, grupos de acción comunitaria, palabra hablada y música.
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA
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 Briel Pomerantz bpomeratz@gopublicschools.org
Saturday, April 22, 10am-4pm (Community Remarks at 3pm)
Richmond Parkway Bay Trail between Gertrude and Vernon Avenues
Take a stand along the fenceline!
The Fencelines public art installation event is happening 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.
About the Project: Fencelines 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
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA
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 Briel Pomerantz bpomeratz@gopublicschools.org
Three woven baskets hold round pillows, each painted with a bright sun-like geometric design. On the wall behind them, scrawled in curly cursive, is the message, “Hug a pillow/ Hug your ancestors/Notice, feel, breathe.”
When she was a teen, Amanda Ayala’s middle school teacher took her to her first art museum in San Francisco. Ayala hated that she couldn’t touch the art.
Today, she loves museums, but longing to touch the art is still the hardest part, she says.
At Ayala’s first solo show, “Connected Always,” at the Richmond Art Center through March 18, this rule doesn’t apply. Guests are invited to touch her work.
A visit to Ayala’s home in Santa Rosa further reveals why she wants her art to be tactile.
Ayala lives with her sister and parents in the home where she was raised. Before we sat for an interview, she showed me the house, pointing out additions and upgrades her father has made.
The living room is a carport he converted. He added a covered patio. In the garden, dozens of plants he potted hang from structures he built.
“I consider my dad an artist and craftsperson. You can touch everything he makes,” Ayala says.
Ayala’s home overflows with her art-making. A few times during the conversation, she mentions appreciating her family’s support and permission to take up shared space in their house.
She speaks of her parents with tremendous love and admiration, even as she notes that living with them as an adult can be challenging.
“Connected Always” captures both Ayala’s youthful spirit and timeless wisdom, captivating her audience with an interactive, multimedia exhibition focused on one’s ancestors.
Praying Over Ancestors
Ayala’s interest in her own ancestors emerged after she began Aztec dancing more than 12 years ago.
“I started dancing in ceremonies as a way of praying and connecting with my community and with the spirits of my ancestors,” Ayala says.
Although she had limited knowledge of her own ancestor’s stories, the impact of one’s ancestors—both blood relatives and chosen family—was impressed upon her, as was the understanding that she will be an ancestor with an impact on generations going forward.
She has researched her own family history, but the stories she can find are limited. Ayala’s mother is a fourth-generation Xicana whose ancestors are Yaqui. Her father migrated from Michoacan to Mexico City and then to northern California in his late teens.
“I don’t have access to everything I would like to know. People who are targeted by different oppressions have different access to their ancestry,” Ayala says.
EMBRACE Guests are invited to hold a pillow to hug seven generations of their ancestors. Photo by Chelsea Kurnick.
The Ancestor Wheel
A few years ago, Ayala saw an infographic about ancestral mathematics and wrote about it in a journal.
Many people would be embarrassed to share their personal journals even with close friends, but not Ayala. The journal in which she first started thinking about the ancestor wheel is on display at “Connected Always.”
To be fair, most people’s journals don’t look like Ayala’s, which combines diaristic writing and scrapbooking with collage and painting.
She hand-sews the pages together with big, visible seams, often creating books that fold like an accordion rather than with pages that turn. Her bookbinding techniques replicate and honor Mesoamerican books.
Ayala took the ancestry infographic she saw and started sketching what seven generations of parents would look like, depicted in a circle. Across seven generations, that’s 254 people.
Images similar to Ayala’s ancestor wheels are easy to find online, but always in the context of an infographic; they never make the leap to artistic design.
Ayala creates her wheels as complete circles, starting with two halves in the center to represent parents. Each previous generation fans out from this center. The result is an eye-catching abstract pattern reminiscent of a compass.
The image of the ancestor wheel repeats throughout Ayala’s exhibit.
“Soft Landing,” the largest wheel in the exhibit, is almost seven feet in diameter. A nod to the textile part of Ayala’s practice, it is made of a satin tablecloth and canvas tarp, sewn together with thread, stuffed with pillow fluff and dyed with pink and yellow fabric ink. It is in the center of a large wall in the gallery, with hundreds of hand-dyed silk pieces hanging around it.
On Instagram, Ayala shared a timelapse process video revealing what it took to make “Soft Landing.” The fabric is taped to the floor of her living room, filling almost the entire room as she sketches it. In the caption, she says that after a sleepless night spent stuffing it, she laid on top of it feeling grateful, exhausted and amazed.
Roberto Martinez, exhibitions director at Richmond Art Center, says that “Soft Landing” is one of the most popular parts of the show.
“The colors are rich, and it’s so big that I think it’s almost shocking to people when they enter,” Martinez says. “But then when you touch it, it allows you to land in this place of connection, surrounded by softness.”
Martinez met Ayala several years ago through Oakland’s Chiapas Support Committee (CSC), which educates about Chiapas and Zapatista communities through an annual festival of Zapatista art called CompArte.
When there was a CSC talk at California Institute of Integral Studies, Ayala created an altar that Martinez says set the tone for it.
“The altar was a space we could all connect around—to express honor and reverence for the land we’re on, and also for the energies we were bringing into the space,” Martinez says. “I thought it was pretty incredible.”
Ayala’s collaborators at CompArte knew about her ancestor wheel project. As he planned this winter’s exhibitions at Richmond Art Center, Martinez realized that “Connected Always” would be a great fit.
Alongside Ayala’s art, Richmond Art Center is showing a large annual group show, “Art of the African Diaspora and The Remembrance Project.” The latter, presented by Social Justice Sewing Academy, is described as, “a cloth memorial of activist art banners commemorating the many people who have lost their lives to systems of inequity and racist structures.”
Martinez says he is moved by Ayala’s ability to visualize the magnitude of interconnectedness.
“I thought Amanda’s ability to create space for us to show care for one another would work really well [alongside the other shows], which gets us thinking about our ancestors, our neighbors and people affected by systemic violence,” Martinez points out.
Recently, Ayala visited the show to meet with Martinez about an artist talk and journaling workshop that happened on Feb. 18.
A school teacher approached Ayala and told her that her students really loved the show. Their favorite part? They could touch the art.
‘Connected Always’ is on display through March 18 at Richmond Art Center. There will be a closing party on March 18 from 2-4pm. Admission is free. richmondartcenter.org.
Top image: ENVELOPED Amanda Ayala wraps herself in purple silk she dyed in her yard. Photo by Chelsea Kurnick.
