Happy Hispanic Heritage Month! National Hispanic Heritage Month takes place September 15 to October 15 every year and is a time to recognize the histories, cultures and contributions of Hispanic/Latino/Latinx people living in the U.S.. During this month (and throughout the year) at Richmond Art Center we have activities planned to celebrate and explore the creative accomplishments of the Bay Area’s Latino community.
In the galleries are two exhibitions highlighting Latinx art. Daniel Camacho’s De Fantasías y Realidades presents murals, paper mache sculptures and paintings that fuse elements of Mexican popular culture with the social and political experiences of Camacho’s community. And From the Pueblo, For the Pueblo is an exhibition by print collective Liberación Gráfica and their friends. Liberación Gráfica is a Richmond-based screen print collective whose art practice is rooted in the Chicanx art tradition of revolutionary print workshops. Their work speaks directly to the struggles and resilience of the people of Richmond.
And don’t miss it: on Saturday, October 15, 12-3pm we are celebrating Día de los Muertos at RAC. We’ll have calaveras, art making, live printing, and more!
Latinos contribute so much to the rich diversity of the Bay Area, especially in Richmond. I encourage you to visit RAC and also find your own way to celebrate and explore Hispanic Heritage Month.
Hasta pronto,
José Rivera Executive Director
Top image: Daniel Camacho, Mexico te Ilevo adentro, 2004
Dewey Crumpler has long been preoccupied with the ways in which objects can be sites of exploration for what it means to be African American. One day in the mid-1990s, while out on his daily walk, he was transfixed by a tower of colorful steel shipping containers stacked at the Port of Oakland in California. To him, the looming rectangular structures were mysterious and foreboding. He saw them as monumental metaphors of the geopolitical power that moved goods across space and time, possessing the history of commerce and oppression in their hidden cavernous interiors. Compelled by a fascination with this form and its shadow, he began to sketch and paint the crates daily. “Dewey Crumpler: Crossings,” his exhibition here, showcased 122 of these prophetic images, which he began making roughly twenty-five years before the collapse of the shipping industry brought on by the pandemic. Vibrant dreamscapes were weighted with the gravitas of their subject matter: mass migration, globalization, and the tangled yoke of capitalism within the Black diaspora.
When Crumpler started as a young artist in San Francisco in the 1960s, he couldn’t find any art in the museums that portrayed Black life. As a result, he sought inspiration from an eclectic array of sources, among them European art, coffee-table books on African American art and culture, the work of social-realist muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros (which he got to see in person during a trip to Mexico), and the improvisational sounds of jazz greats including John Coltrane and Miles Davis. By establishing a practice that focused on a specific object for an extended period, Crumpler was able to ground the panoply of influences he brought to each body of work.
The artist has said that he is drawn to an object because of its capacity to create a shadow, an element that is continuously affected by light and time—i.e., the thing and its shape-shifting companion serve as a jumping-off point. After a trip to Amsterdam in the early 1990s, he created a series of tulip paintings and dioramas that investigated the power of beauty, trade, Blackness, and genetic manipulation. A few years later, he used his son’s discarded hoodie as a subject for a number of cartoonish caricatures and videos, adapting it as a metaphor that delved into Black Futurism and cultural narratives of marginality. Like the tulips and hoodies, the container paintings are conduits for unraveling patterns of empires and capital.
In Crumpler’s renderings, each vessel is a locus of awe, wonder, and terror. Ranging in size from small sketches to large-scale paintings executed in saturated acrylic hues, the works depict wrecked cargo ships overflowing with the colorful bounty of plunder and trade. In a pen-and-ink sketch, Untitled (Crash), 2014, a cascade of crates topples, domino style, off a dock. In Collapse, 2017, more than forty containers sink into a raging turquoise sea. Shimmering gold leaf surrounds them, a nod to the practice (and utility) of employing glitz as a distraction from the darkness that is too often concealed within the politics of trade negotiations. Crumpler’s receptacles are vehicles that not only transport actual goods, but also represent the positive spread of art, culture, and religion wrought, ironically enough, by capitalism. In Untitled 2, 2018, marooned and shattered boxes pour forth their contents—including a phalanx of shell-pink tennis shoes washed up onto a poppy-red shore, calling to mind a herd of sea creatures, bloodied and dead. In Green Bananas, 2017, a beached cargo carrier offers up a giant spill of the titular fruits. Yet hidden among them is Duchamp’s Fountain, 1917. Crumpler has painted the urinal before; its rounded shape recalls the form of a hoodie. Yet here the placement of the porcelain toilet protruding from a pile of green banana skins represents both an homage to one of avant-garde art’s most legendary innovations—the readymade—and a comment on transcultural diffusion.
Similar to a container, a painting is a vehicle that delivers information as it forges new relationships—Crumpler’s “vessels” do this while encapsulating codependent histories of destruction and creation. In Bright Moments and Bitches Brewing in Space, both 2020, the stacked rectangles have been reduced to their most elementary forms: steel bands. Here, the artist’s grids look more like jail bars than like Mondrian’s pure abstract compositions, to which they also allude. Yet, in these more recent works, shadows dance in syncopated rhythms across the surface, reminding us that art, like commerce, has the power to alter the world.
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond
Artists across all disciplines who live, work, play, or create Richmond are invited to participate in a focus group at Richmond Art Center that will explore how we can shape and invest in the future of public art and cultural arts programming for the city and artists.
Calling all artists, artisans, crafters and makers! Be part of Richmond Art Center’s 60th Annual Holiday Arts Festival!
To apply to be a vendor at Richmond Art Center’s Holiday Arts Festival please review the information on this webpage and complete the application form below.
Deadline to Apply: Monday, October 10, 2022, 11:59pm
Richmond Art Center’s Holiday Arts Festival
Event Date: Sunday, December 4, 2022, 10am-5pm
The Holiday Arts Festival returns to Richmond Art Center! After running for the past two years as a virtual event due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the festival is back in-person to celebrate its ‘diamond jubilee’ 60th year in Richmond.
Each year the Holiday Arts Festival offers over 1,000 visitors a chance to buy unique gifts from local arts and crafts vendors, enjoy food and beverages, and participate in art-making activities for the whole family. The Festival’s gift sale runs from 10am to 5pm at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond.
Call for Arts and Crafts Vendors! Richmond Art Center is now accepting applications from local artists, artisans, crafters and makers to sell their work at the Holiday Arts Festival. This shop-local event is a great way to expose your work to a creative audience that appreciates hand-crafted gifts. The deadline for vendors to apply is October 10. Applications are juried and selected vendors will be notified by October 21. There is no application fee and first-time vendors to the Festival are encouraged to participate.
Can’t attend the event in-person? The online Arts and Crafts Hub will be back! Hosted on Richmond Art Center’s website, the Hub is non-juried and serves as a gateway for artists to share their work during the Holidays. CLICK HERE to see a sample Artist Listing
IMPORTANT DATES
Application Deadline (online application form below): Monday, October 10, 11:59pm Vendor Notification: Friday, October 21 Contracts and Vendor Fees Due: Monday, November 7 Vendor Set Up: Saturday, December 3, 10am to 5pm Holiday Arts Festival: Sunday, December 4, 10am to 5pm
VENDOR INFORMATION
*Covid-19 Safety: Note, this is an indoor event. We will do what we can to keep people safe. Covid-19 safety protocols will be announced closer to the event date. Please contact us if you have questions: amy@richmondartcenter.org
Richmond Art Center provides: Vendor contract, table, chair/s, vendor sign (if needed), wall space (as requested/as available), electrical outlet (as requested/as available), time for set-up (12/3, 10am-5pm) and deinstall (12/4, 5pm-6:30pm), online vendor listing
Promotion: During the holiday season, Richmond Art Center will be promoting The Holiday Arts Festival via online and print advertising, social media, our e-newsletter, via community partnerships, and at community events. Vendors will also have the opportunity to promote their websites in our online Arts & Crafts Hub on Richmond Art Center’s website.
Jurying Process: Unfortunately we don’t have space to accept all vendors who apply for a table at the Holiday Arts Festival. As a result applications are juried by a panel made up of RAC staff. Things we look for when reviewing applications include: Artistic Quality; Sales Potential; Media Range Across Vendors; and Community Connection. Vendors who are not selected for a table at the Festival still have the opportunity to present their goods in our online Arts & Crafts Hub.
FEES
6 Foot Table Fee: $190 for RAC members; $200 for non-members*
4 Foot Half Table Fee: $110 for RAC members; $125 for non-members*
Online Listing in the Arts & Crafts Hub Only: $20 for RAC members; $25 for non-members*
*Vendors selected to participate at the in-person event automatically received a listing in the Arts & Crafts Hub.
These are flat fees. No sales commission is charged.
Four new exhibitions — all free and open to the public — are coming this Fall to the Richmond Art Center at 2540 Barrett Ave. Gallery hours are 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday.
The Main Gallery exhibition, set to run from Sept. 14 though Nov. 17, is called From the Pueblo, For the Pueblo, and is the culminating exhibition from Liberación Gráfica’s residency at the RAC.
“Liberación Gráfica worked alongside youth and community members to create prints that uplift local voices, and raise awareness of the struggles and resilience of the people of Richmond,” RAC officials state. “These works have been printed live and distributed at events in Richmond including Low Rider Cruise Nights, Juneteenth Festival at Nicholl Park, the United Farm Workers march, and La Pulga Flea Market.”
An opening reception for From the Pueblo, For the Pueblo is set to take place Saturday, Sept. 17, from noon to 2 p.m.
In the South Gallery this Fall, also set to run from Sept. 14 though Nov. 17, will be New Visions, an assembling of emerging Black Bay Area artists Kim Champion, Tiffany Conway, Ashara Ekundayo and Bertrell Smith. Their works employ painting, photography, collage and vibrant color palettes “to engage viewers in the fullness and vibrancy of Black expression,” according to the RAC. Using different mediums and approaches, their art demonstrates the diversity of artworks coming from Black Bay Area arists.
An opening reception for New Visions will take place Sept. 17 from noon to 2 p.m., while and Artist Talk will be held Saturday, Oct. 1, from noon to 2 p.m.
The RAC’s West Gallery will feature Melanin: Color, Composition and Connection this Fall, from Sept. 28 to Nov. 17. The solo exibition will feature abstract paintings by Daniel White that “bring to the foreground geometric forms, lines and color that reveal the intricacies of melanin and its power of connection,” according to the RAC.
“Through his abstracted compositions, White encourages us to challenge our perceptions and interpretations of color and in the process find connections that join us together beyond our degrees of melanin,” RAC officials said.
An opening reception and Artist Walk will take place Saturday, Oct. 1, from noon to 2 p.m.
The Richmond Art Center has operated since 1936 and features classes, exhibitions and events at its downtown facility, along with off-site activities that bring free, high-quality art making experiences to WCCUSD schools and community partners. For more information, visit richmondartcenter.org.
Images (clockwise from top left): Daniel Camacho, De Fantasias y Realidades, 2022; Francisco Rojas, Pasando Regalos, Passing Gifts, 2022; Tiffany Conway, Your Soul Knows the Way, 2019; Daniel White, Secrets at Giza, 2022
Fall Exhibitions at Richmond Art Center
September – November 2022 Richmond Art Center 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond, CA 94804 Gallery Hours: Wed-Sat 10am-4pm Exhibitions and events are all free and open to the public
Main Gallery Exhibition Dates: September 14 – November 17, 2022 Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 12pm-2pm
Liberación Gráfica is a screen print collective whose practice is rooted in the Chicanx art tradition of revolutionary community print workshops. As artists-in-residence at Richmond Art Center, Liberación Gráfica worked alongside youth and community members to create prints that uplift local voices, and raise awareness of the struggles and resilience of the people of Richmond. These works have been printed live and distributed at events in Richmond including Low Rider Cruise Nights, Juneteenth Festival at Nicholl Park, the United Farm Workers march, and La Pulga Flea Market.
From the Pueblo, For the Pueblo is the culminating exhibition from Liberación Gráfica’s residency. Staying true to the concept that there is no liberation without community, Liberación Gráfica has also invited artists in the community to join them in presenting work that opens up conversations around ideas of liberation.
Community Gallery Exhibition Dates: September 14 – November 17, 2022 Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 12pm-2pm Calaverita Paper Mache Workshop led by Daniel Camacho: Saturday, October 8 & 15, 12pm-2pm
Daniel Camacho fuses elements of Mexican popular culture with the social and political experiences of his community, blending them together in images that blur lines between reality and fantasy. In particular, Camacho paints the immigrant experience, our political struggles, and the culture that holds us together. These realities are often illustrated through expressive faces with eyes that command a strong gaze towards our shared struggles.
De Fantasías y Realidades brings together a selection of large-scale portable murals, paper mache sculptures, and paintings that Daniel Camacho created over the last 25 years.
South Gallery Exhibition Dates: September 14 – November 17, 2022 Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 12pm-2pm Artist Talk: Saturday, October 1, 12pm-2pm
In honor of the 25th anniversary of Art of the African Diaspora, New Visions assembles a group of four emerging Bay Area artists whose work is on the cutting edge of their disciplines: Kim Champion, Tiffany Conway, Ashara Ekundayo and Bertrell Smith. These four artists employ painting, photography, collage, and vibrant color palettes to engage viewers in the fullness and vibrancy of Black expression. Though the artists work in different mediums and approaches to creating their artworks, New Visions places the works in dialogue with one another to demonstrate the diversity of artwork coming from emerging Black artists in the Bay Area.
New Visions is organized by Oakland-based artist, educator, and independent curator Demetri Broxton.
West Gallery Exhibition: September 28 – November 17, 2022 Opening Reception and Artist Walk Through: Sat, October 1, 12pm-2pm
Daniel White‘s abstract paintings bring to the foreground geometric forms, lines and color that reveal the intricacies of melanin and its power of connection.
White’s solo exhibition, Melanin: Color, Composition and Connection, invites the viewer to simultaneously look inwards, outwards and towards each other and reflect on the pigments that make up our world. Historically, color has shown to have the power to fragment and create differences between us, yet White’s paintings suggest that melanin has the power to bring us together in our common bonds. Through his abstracted compositions, White encourages us to challenge our perceptions and interpretations of color and in the process find connections that join us together beyond our degrees of melanin.
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About Richmond Art Center
Richmond Art Center has been sharing art and creating with the community since 1936. Our programs encompass classes, exhibitions and events at our facility in downtown Richmond, as well as off-site activities that bring free, high-quality art making experiences to WCCUSD schools and community partners. richmondartcenter.org
For more information contact: Amy Spencer, amy@richmondartcenter.org
Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue, Richmond
Please note: Mask wearing is a condition of entry to RAC’s galleries, studios and public indoor spaces. Vaccinations are strongly encouraged. Masks may be removed in our courtyard.
This Saturday at Richmond Art Center is going to be big! There will be edible art, vintage object assemblages, interactive art, and so much more! It’s also your last chance to view the critically acclaimed Emmy Lou Packard exhibition.
“Too many artists are contemptuous of the public,” said Emmy Lou Packard. “Art which loses contact weakens.”
This was the defining principle of Packard, whose work is being shown at an exhibition at the Richmond Art Center. “Artist of Conscience” (aclosing reception takes place on Sat/20) is a timely look at the work of the master linocut printmaker, Diego Rivera protégée, and mentor to Mission muralists.
Emmy Lou Packard, Illustration for Kaiser Shipyards newspaper ‘Fore ’n Aft’, 1944-46, Newspaper. Courtesy of John Natsoulas Gallery and Richmond Art Center
Packard was a largely-unsung San Francisco artist who painted murals throughout the Bay Area, and developed a signature print-making style of modest but highly technical mid-century linoleum prints with humanist subjects, made to be widely available to the public. Packard worked in many mediums and forms, including fresco, oils, watercolor, tile mosaic, wood block, inlaid linoleum, and bas-relief in concrete.
As a venue for the exhibition, the Richmond Art Center connects to Packard’s career at Richmond’s Kaiser shipyards, a time which she called “one of the most interesting and positive in my life in the United States.” At the shipyards, the artist worked as a draftswoman, designing transport vessels in WWII and illustrating the shipyard worker newsletter Fore ‘n’ Aft. Her illustrations for the publication promoted racial desegregation, women’s participation, and safety and dignity in the workplace.
Emmy Lou Packard, Illustration for Kaiser Shipyards newspaper ‘Fore ’n Aft’, 1944-46, Newspaper. Courtesy of John Natsoulas Gallery and Richmond Art Center
“You could say that Packard’s art in and of itself is not explicitly political, but the fact that she made it certainly is,” says Rick Tejada-Flores, a co-curator of the current exhibition alongside visual artist Robbin Légère Henderson.
Packard’s work promoted a strong internationalist humanism. Children of all races are repeated subjects in her prints, urging the viewer against war and environmental destruction.
During her career, Packard also illustrated textbooks for San Francisco public schools, led the effort to save the Rincon Annex Post Office from Richard Nixon’s chopping block, co-founded the Artist’s Equity artist’s union, organized the annual San Francisco Arts Festival, restored the WPA murals at Coit Tower, and spearheaded a campaign that saved the Mendocino Headlands from commercial development.
Emmy Lou Packard, Peace is a Human Right, 1949, Linocut. Courtesy of Ian Thompson and Muna Coobtee, and Richmond Art Center
In 1940, Packard served as Rivera’s principal assistant in the installation of the “Pan American Unity” mural, the largest of Rivera’s “portable” murals at 75 feet high and 22 feet wide, comprised of 10 cement panels, framed by steel. The fresco was painted by Rivera, Packard, and other assistants on Treasure Island over a four-month period and was part of “Art in Action,” a Golden Gate International Exposition program that allowed attendees to observe artists in process.
The panel, originally installed in the Diego Rivera Theater at San Francisco City College, is currently part of the large SFMOMA retrospective of Rivera’s work. The show, on display through next summer, features as its lead curator James Oles, who also knew Packard personally.
Emmy Lou Packard and Frida Kahlo. Photo via Rick Tejada-Flores
Through their shared work Packard became a close personal friend to both Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and captured their relationship in some of the most well-known photographs of the artists.
Born in Southern California, Packard spent time as a child in Mexico, where her father worked as a consultant on agricultural projects. It was there she came into contact with Rivera. Packard was a graduate of UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Art Institute, and a member (along with muralist Victor Arnautoff) of San Francisco’s Graphic Artists Workshop. The Graphic Arts Workshop was formed following the closure of the California Labor School, which “promised to analyze social, economic and political questions in light of the present world struggle against fascism,” and once had an art department as large as the San Francisco Art Institute before it was effectively shuttered by McCarthyism. At GAM, she worked on a mural series depicting a visual history of Japanese, Chinese, Filipino, and Pacific Islanders.
Packard left for Mendocino in the late 1950s and returned To San Francisco at the end of the 1960s, settling in the Mission District. Soon after her return, according to Tejada-Flores, word got around the neighborhood about a woman who had worked under Rivera. Packard’s last artistic contribution became the support and mentorship of a generation of Mission artists who would go on to found the community mural movement. She helped to provide a direct link between the artistic lineage of Rivera and contemporary Mission District muralists, resulting in the murals found on the Women’s Building and Balmy Alley, among others.
She died in the Mission District in 1998. At the time of her death, her block prints were stored at the Precita Eyes Muralists Association.
Emmy Lou Packard, Landscape Near Half Moon Bay, 1950s, Linocut with hand coloring. Courtesy of Donald Cairns and Richmond Art Center
Several of the many murals in whose design Packard took part can still be viewed around the Bay Area. A mosaic piece she constructed from found objects with the help of 650 schoolchildren in 1956 is located in the courtyard of Hillcrest Elementary School in San Francisco.
Two of her murals are at the UC Berkeley campus, including a cut concrete bas-relief depicting the California landscape that adorns the facade of Chávez Student Center at Lower Sproul Hall, and another on the exterior of the student union.
Packard oversaw the creation of “Homage to Siqueiros,” a mural inside the Bank of America building at 23rd Street and Mission that was painted by Michael Rios, Jesús “Chuy” Campusano, and Luis Cortázar. Painted “for the people in the Mission who stand on the long lines in the bank on Friday afternoon,” it depicts a narrative history of the Mission District.
But as occurred throughout her lifetime, Packard has largely continued to be ignored by the art world establishment. When organizing “Artist of Conscience,” its curators found that most major museums and historical societies in the Bay Area were not interested in hosting a retrospective of her work (despite at least one institution, the Oakland Museum, already being in possession of more than 40 of her pieces.)
Perhaps this is a testament to the populist nature of her art—Packard intentionally worked in mediums that do not lend themselves to commodification. She often refused to number her prints, re-printing in different colors, sometimes for decades after the original was created.
Or maybe the reason for her relative obscurity is simply the continuing conservatism of the art world. After all, when an opportunity to host Kahlo’s first West Coast exhibition was turned down by SFMOMA, Tejada-Flores says it was Packard who worked with René Yañez and the Galería de la Raza collective to put together a show.
Ultimately, there is a certain joy in the perennial re-discovery of unknown artists like Packard. And there couldn’t be a more perfect venue for her work than the Richmond Art Center: a hidden treasure in the Bay Area, teeming with activity, free, and open to the people.
“EMMY LOU PACKARD: ARTIST OF CONSCIENCE” CLOSING RECEPTIONSat/20, noon-2pm, free. Featuring the Great Tortilla Conspiracy. Richmond Art Center. More info here.
Natalia Robyns-Kresich: Natalia Kresich was born and raised in San Francisco. She has been writing about local issues for 48 Hills for several years.
“Ultimately, there is a certain joy in the perennial re-discovery of unknown artists like Packard. And there couldn’t be a more perfect venue for her work than the Richmond Art Center: a hidden treasure in the Bay Area, teeming with activity, free, and open to the people.” – Natalia Kresich, 48 Hills
“What looks like non-political work is deeply rooted in her [Emmy Lou Packard’s] politics of equality and her belief in the importance of art in daily life.” – Rick Tejada-Flores, The Activist
