Originally published in The Voice of San Francisco in May 2024
Massive New Murals Celebrating Farm Workers Coming to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture
The Fort Mason Center for the Arts and Culture (FMCAC) announced a new outdoor mural series by artist Oscar Lopez. The murals, which depict historical sequences of agricultural labor in the Bay Area, will be unveiled during a campus wide art walk on May 30, 2024. In addition to this debut, the event will feature new art, artist talks and art-making activities from FMCAC residents FOR-SITE, SF Camerawork, Haines Gallery, American Indian Cultural District, Museo Italo Americano, and the San Francisco Children’s Art Center.
Farmers and the Meaning of Essential
The world often takes for granted the workers that help turn the gears of society. Our existence is entirely dependent on a few inches of topsoil and rain necessary to produce food. The critical role of farmers is largely overlooked, and Your Food, My Work, Our Land asks us to see these essential individuals whose necessary work has rendered them invisible, like the infrastructure we use but take for granted every day.
“During the pandemic, I saw this debate and discourse about whether or not farmworkers were essential,” says Lopez. “We didn’t have vaccines. The entire world was paralyzed due to the health crisis. If we want to define the essentials of humanity and human needs, food is number one. The people who are producing food should have some value as well.”
Oscar Lopez was born and raised in Mexico City and immigrated to the USA, settling in San Francisco. He has sought “to understand our complex society through a Mexican immigrant’s lens.” Lopez was inspired by his grandfather’s experience in the World War II-era Bracero Program that recruited Mexican farm workers to work on U.S. farms and the temporary focus on “essential workers” during the pandemic shutdowns. This mural project expands upon Lopez’s original screen-printed poster of laborers toiling in the hot sun. In conjunction with the Haight Street Art Center, Lopez conducted pop-up printmaking workshops to create and distribute the image at farmer’s markets from Pacifica to the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
A Local Touch
The mural sequence touches on the history of agriculture in the Bay Area but also includes portraits of individuals working the land today. Lopez conducted extensive interviews with laborers at small farms and markets across the region, picturing them in a visual grammar drawn from the great Mexican muralists of the twentieth century and the reimagination of those artists in San Francisco’s Mission Muralismo movement of the 1970’s. These murals elevated cultural heritage and uplifted national pride. Lopez’s art aims to help us remember cultural and social histories of Mexican immigrants and the ancestors who did their best to survive under white supremacy and colonialism. FMCAC’s Director of Arts Programming & Partnerships says “Our hope in hosting this larger expression of Oscar’s work sparks crucial conversations around land, labor, and food justice while creating a stunning new public art visual on this special arts and cultural campus.”
The exhibition will be on view through January 2025, and during this time Lopez will again work with the Haight Street Art Center offering pop-up printmaking workshops on Sundays at the Fort Mason Center Farmers Market on June 9, July 14, and August 11. Additional activities with the FMCAC resident SF Children’s Art Center and an artist-designed coloring book are planned for this fall.
May 30th Art Walk Events
FMCAC’s Spring Art Walk is on Thursday, May 30th from 5pm to 8pm. The art walk is free and open to the public with registration, and features a variety of talks, exhibitions, performances and artmaking activities. Fort Mason Art presents Shiny Things for My Quartermaster: Seven Swallowtail Flags, a public art commission by Los Angeles- based artist and filmmaker Cauleen Smith. The suite of artist’s flags will be installed in various locations throughout the Walk. In Building C, Haines Gallery presents a solo exhibition by Patsy Krebs. SF Camerawork presents EBTI: Ma-kan in Landmark Building A. The San Francisco Children’s Art Center will host a family art-making workshop in Building C. Two additional new murals in Landmark Building D will debut from The American Indian Cultural District complementing a collection of historical posters commemorating decades of Indigenous arts and cultural events held at FMCAC.