 I'm putting a link into the chat box. This is for tonight's shared document. It's a live document. It has library news, library information, and then it will also have links to our presenter. And as our presenter talks tonight, anything that comes up, I'll add those to it so it's a live doc. Anything you share in the chat, which we encourage you to definitely use the chat, it's our connection, it's our river of consciousness in the virtual world. And questions, definitely welcome. The closed captioning is on. If you don't see it, if you go under your CC button, you can enable it, or you can hide them as well. All right. So welcome everyone, so happy you're here. And of course, this is part of Latinx Heritage Month at San Francisco Public Library. And we call it diva and Latinx Heritage Month runs from September, mid-September to mid-October. But we always tend to make it stretch from September till the beginning of November so we can also celebrate Dia de las Muertos. So we'll have lots of events. There's an exhibit at the main library, if you haven't seen it, that celebrates Day of the Dead. And also Fernando's beautiful artwork you see there is just mammothly on the side of our main library. So please stop by, it's going to be getting a banner change up very soon. So if you haven't seen it, swing by. So there's a couple pieces of Fernando's work downstairs by the correct auditorium. Let's see. We want to acknowledge, our library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramitr Sholoni peoples who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco Peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland. And as uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pair respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramitr Sholoni community. And I'll just give a quick shout out to the Segurte Land Trust who is an all women led run organization out of Oakland. Check out their site, pay your Shumi tax. And there's been a lot of like if you just Google land back or land rights, you'll see a lot of news popping up about cities and locations gifting back land to the tribes that they belong to, including Oakland. So check that out. And if you don't know what territory you're joining is from, use this map. All right. So announcements, it is Viva. So we do have a lot of Viva stuff. And we are celebrating Mr. Roberto Lovato. His are on the same page out there for September, October on the same page is a five monthly read where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book, same time. And we are going to have a book club virtual and then in person. That's right. We're going to gather and I've gathered a couple of times and you can't beat it really honestly and mask up we mask up staff still masks up six floor, the beautiful Saroyan gallery if you haven't joined us on the sixth floor and lots of space it's going to be a lovely convo between Roberto and Vanessa and this is a partnership with Litquick and Alta Journal. Oh my God, it's our biggest biggest literary campaign of the season are 17 one city one book. The book is this is your hustle. Get the book now every single library, mobile library, mobile library, you all don't know what that means. The book mobile come to the big event with Earl on Woods Nigel for in convo with Piper Kerman from Orange is the new black, but along with this campaign we also have two months of programming that will that are surrounded by topics of this book if you don't know what your hustle is it's a podcast that started in San Quentin telling stories of folks inside, and it has now expounded to be outside of prison, because Erlan was released so that's awesome, but we'll have programs about abolition, social justice reform, reentry and all kinds of amazing things there's two exhibits it isn't the fullest campaign ever. Check it out, this coming up weekend, not this coming up weekend this coming up next weekend, the Filipino American International Book Fest and this is also just huge extravaganza crammed into two days, spanning several libraries several locations, and just huge amazing literary humans. So check it out we have some streaming we have some in person. It's all over the place. But before that we have the amazing Barbara Jane Reyes I am with her third year of her curating these amazing panels. And this one is going to be totally no joke fierce women. So come check it out Wednesday, October 12 right here easy you don't even have to leave your house. So come check it out October 23 in another amazing human alert Sunday October 23 the correct auditorium readings from uncommon ground living creatively by pop. And seriously I think there's already 23 people on the bill who are all just like amazing. So come check it out. Sunday October 30 and our correct will be doing a mini screening and discussion of plague at Golden Gate. Before COVID there was a play. Also the same day and I don't have a slideboard but at our Bernal Heights library we will be celebrating Dia de las Muertos with the amazing colleagues to Robles who is very just we all love him so much. He does amazing like crafts for us his whole family is like totally amazing. And but he'll be doing an altar and a history so you can bring your friend does to the library that day and we'll also be having music from the pin yet go beta family it's going to be an amazing gathering so I'm going to bust this program out and head over to Bernal that day so I hope to see you all there. All right enough enough of library but I'm so happy that you know these are the programs that give me the I'm so happy to have this job feel which we all need once in a while. We get to highlight artists and spotlight them and just shine on their amazing work and it's really democratic we pull the entire staff all the staff security custodial everybody building engineers nominate artists for whatever month it is Viva is the month and then we narrow it down they vote it down and it comes back and we're so lucky to have Fernando Marti as the winner of our 2022 Viva artist spotlight. Marti is a printmaker community architect writer and poet based in San Francisco. His etchings lino cuts screen prints and constructions explore the clash of the third world within the heart of the empire and highlight the tension between inhabiting place reclaiming culture and building something transformative. He brings his formal training in architecture to urbanism to his public projects including his altar or friend does. Fernando studied architecture and urbanism at UC Berkeley and has taught design studio design studios at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. Today he works on housing issues as a co-director of San Francisco's Council of Community and Housing Organizations. Originally from Ecuador he has been deeply involved in San Francisco's community struggles since the mid 90s creating art for and with many local organizations including the SF print collective the Center for Political Education Poder and SF Community Land Trust. His art and poetry can be found in an occasional zine entitled Amor Yalucha and on his Facebook notes. One of his biggest frustration is keeping his house plants happy. And Marti is part of the Just Seeds Artist Cooperative and this is a decentralized network of 41 artists committing to social environmental and political engagement and that's another huge amazing human alert is Just Seeds and I'm going to pop all of that in the chat box but it's in that link that I provided and welcome and I'm turning it over to you Fernando Marti. Thank you thank you and there's my son I think bringing me some something delicious for dinner so it's really great to to be here thank you so much to the library and to all the folks at the library who supported me being part of this event it's weird being on a webinar where I can't see you all we know there's like 40 of you out there maybe more but I will just launch into sharing the screen let's see if this works all right how's that looks good there's there's a there's me doing a little bit of screen printing with my son who just walked in he's 13 now Caramelo as he was probably like probably five years old when I took that picture that's at Mission Grafica at the Mission Cultural Center and I'll talk a little bit about that as soon as I want so this is great for me I um typically do these talks is kind of a 20-minute talk with some question answer conversation library asked me to do kind of a bigger talk so we'll see see how it goes um sort of uh here's my life story here's my adventures and these are some of the things I'm doing um I'll start off with uh with roots it's kind of where I come from and how that dates from the artwork that I do today so I'm originally from Ecuador I was raised until I was five in a little town called Borlice that's a picture from the 80s the 70s maybe when I was living there and the search was getting hollers and you can see the power of the search as it is today um and my parents lived on a farm um just a little bit down from the village my mom studied architecture she built this house um and that's the house I grew up in and that's me that's my dad my dad is from Spain he came to Ecuador my name is in his 20s um and they try to make a go at it as as farmers for for a while that's me in the 80s it's some unfortunate sorts um standing in front of a sable tree which means um sacred tree um this kind of sable that grows coastal area why yes and when will be Ecuador you get pop up again um but I came to the United States when I was five living with my auntie and moved back and forth and so growing up was really a life of of experiencing the U.S. the heart of empire and an Ecuador as kind of a post-colonial country dealing with all the challenges that situation I came to the U.S. and discovered lots of different things comic books being among them and I learned to draw just by tracing over comic books these are a few covers from one of my favorite artists Jaime Hernandez who he and his brothers created love and rockets and I would recommend the stories and I think part of why I wanted to bring in Jaime Hernandez was I think he really taught me not just by by reading his stuff and copying it the beauty of comic books and of telling stories in a sequential manner but also telling stories of real life and how people live and the challenges that we all have as well as kind of fantastic stories of Mr. Hernandez they also discovered science fiction I loved as a kid I was a science fiction nerd and these are a few of the books given that we're at at the library of books that really influenced me growing up the authors that would be influenced me or so when Samuel Delaney, Fabia Butler really I think investigated what what it meant to be living in the present by looking at the future that is something that has also stayed with me as an artist so I grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in Los Angeles but I came to the Bay Area in 1990 to go to school at UC Berkeley studying architecture and so I just want to reflect on some of the influences from from architecture I just came from a memorial for Christopher Alexander Chris picture there with one of his Turkish rugs who was very influential at UC Berkeley he sort of had the the audacity of showing examples of modern buildings many of them you know either designed or admired by his colleagues and asking his students why the buildings were so ugly and how we could create beauty in the built environment this is a project that he did as a participatory design project in Peru in the 1970s but that idea that Ulster and has embedded in it the patterns of how we live and how we design the built environment with something else that stayed with me I'm also a writer a poet and and June Jordan has always been one of my favorite poets someone I've learned a lot from but I only recently discovered at the Afrofuturist exhibit at the Oakland Museum that her background was in architecture and that she had collaborated with Buckminster Fuller on projects to kind of deconstruct what was um keeping people back in the city how to break through in a lot of ways maybe an opposite of Chris Alexander in the modernism that she embraced but also in the how to create participatory spaces and how the creation of spaces for an agency um after school after college I moved to san francisco uh lived in the mission district at the Forkman or Miss Forkman of moving to the city right at the start of the dot com boom and experiencing what it meant when the city that had embraced artists had embraced immigrants was suddenly becoming extremely expensive in a very rapid way um many of my friends were being evicted I just come through an eviction saga myself the folks have been hauling my facebook they know know about that um but living in the mission in the late 90s and early 2000s I got to experience around me the way that artists were transforming urban space as a reaction to what was going on around them I was had been doing some artwork but not street art I was an organizer I was volunteering with a group called the mitten anti-displacement coalition and through that work I met an amazing group of artists in san francisco print collective and it was through the print collective that I took a turn from doing etchings and linoleum cuts to doing screen prints and learning how to repace and put put work out into the world um and that's what kind of a typical wall on mitten streets would have looked like in 2000s were created by print collective and by others reflecting the struggles of unity the other thing that I learned from the print collective was bringing um that artwork uh into the world of planning and architecture so the pre print collective helped to create um the headquarters for the people's plan which was the work that I was involved in as a volunteer with the mitten anti-displacement coalition in preparing an alternative plan for development in the mitten district that really sponsored people and the print collective brought their skills to bring people together to imagine a future university um I've had over the years um the whole number of uh teachers who I learned from many of them from the Chicano and Mexican community here in San Francisco Javier Viramontes is who I learned etchings from but I think more than that Javier really created a community at San Francisco City College in Port Mesa County involved in the changes City College closed down so an important part of you know how will we learn our craft in communities Juan Fuentes and Calixto Robles were kind of the teachers for the young people who were involved with the print collective um and were thankful to Juan for um with Greg Morizumi inviting me to I think one of my first exhibits ever being you know with someone who I admired very much this is a young person be be in this exhibit um and then at Mission Grafica Calixto over the years has been a great great supporter and as was mentioned earlier he's going to be at the Bernal Heights Library and I think done some other work at the library recently um but I think the person maybe who who has been most important to me in the last few years has been Yolanda Lopez who passed away about a year ago just a little over a year ago and I got to know her by starting to investigate the history of Los Yetes de la Graza which was a movement in San Francisco particularly centered in the Mission District and now Noe Valley around seven young men who were wrongly accused of selling a police officer in 1969 and Yolanda became the particularly the free leader of the cultural work related to Los Yetes looking up with the work that the Black Panther Party was doing and the memory Douglas was doing with the Black Panther newspaper that donated part of the space of the Panther newspaper to Los Yetes. I was able to do the exhibit to curate an exhibit about Los Yetes de Yolanda and over the years I think her conversations around what artwork is, what it does, how it can be used and how we can use art to question our own culture, the way that he used iconography, whether it's based in Guadalupe or Mesoamerican iconography, reclaim it, challenge it, say with me, I think Yolanda is part of that very vision and learning. As was mentioned, I'm part of a collective of that feed. We are cooperative of 40 artists in the United States, in Mexico and in Canada who all do politically engaged artwork and again I think the work that we do as artists is often very dependent on the communities and the companionship of that feed. It's not just a means to get my art out there but as a friendship and learning that we do from each other. The last two things before I get into a little bit of my own artwork is, as I mentioned, I recently went through an eviction. I'm very thankful for the work that Tenant activists have done over the years in San Francisco, the fact that we have current control, that we have eviction protection, the fact that we have the right to counsel that was won over the years by organizations and the help and rights team. I know for myself I wouldn't be in this city doing the work that I do if those things just make this and I think a lot of myself artists are in similar situations. It is only through my control that the city is able to make its art and its culture. Finally, we are on indigenous land. This is one of my favorite land. There's a lot of work being done right now in San Francisco by the Association of Pharmacists alone and they have done some amazing presentations at the library at the Clouette where I got to first hear Drake Astro and Jonathan Cordero and Marina Gould from Segoire City really taught the history and the responsibility that we have living on as people who are not native. We need to remember it all the time. All of the things that we are doing here are on stolen land and we have responsibility here doing the best that we can in the responsibility. I'm going to go through some different types of artwork that I have done over the years and circle back to the work that's now at the library and maybe finish up with some of the more public work that I've been doing recently. Where I'm at, I'm not seeing what's on the chat but once I turn it off, hopefully folks are throwing questions or comments and I'd be happy to see that as I move along. I first began doing more serious artwork after I left college, learning as I said through Javier, the art of etchings and of lino cuts. This is an etching that I did. Here's my sable from Ecuador. A tree that lasts through droughts and uses its bark to photosynthesize and see the green bark. When it's young it has some sparty spikes all around it and the spikes start to go away as it matures and it's more solid in the ground and it produces a cotton that was the original life preservers that were created. If you're out at Parcel San Francisco, at Incheon Cajun Park in the Michigan, there's a bunch of staples that have been planted remarkably well. I talked a little bit about my fascination with science fiction and the future in fantasy. A lot of what I try to do is to meld the fantastic with the world that I'm experiencing and that we are experiencing as a culture. This piece is called Frontera, a magical reed boat from Bolivia that is crossing the border of Tijuana where the border fence goes into the Pacific Ocean. Folks might remember the 17 reasons sign that was for many, many years in the 1940s into the late 90s or early 2000s at the corner of 17th Mickley Street. I love that sign. It was a mysterious piece. I think when I moved to San Francisco, the why had already fallen off. Thrift town has gone and the sign is gone. It often happens thinking about the context of stolen land. This was a San Francisco voters pass an initiative that said that no more billboards would be allowed in the city. The billboard company immediately said, well, this is a pre-existing billboard. Let's tear it down and put up a beer. You go by there now, the 17 reasons gone that you might see something for mobile phones or for beer or gambling online. I do a lot of walking around and sketching in the neighborhoods. This is how red flags were on Dada Fulham. It was based on some sketches in 22nd Folsom. When I first did this, there was still a lot of clothes hanging in the midst of this. I think one of the signs in the neighborhoods is that you see less and less of that kind of lived in the city. My own experience in Noe Valley was where I moved after not facing an eviction but facing the harassment of the lonely lords and making it very difficult. Over the 24 years that I lived there, all our laundromats started to disappear and the signs of gentrification in the neighborhood. Some of the images that I create are associations that come up. This was done in early 2000s, images from Guantanamo, poppies from Afghanistan and just seeing those images and thinking of the orange that I associate with poppies. This is probably California poppies that that was the association that came to my mind seeing the image. Prisoners in sensory deprivation. This was done in 2016 and I don't think I need to say much more about that except that's Woody Guthrie's guitar and it is unfortunately still as relevant as ever. I do a lot of figure work. This was done after a friend had major operations when I cancer that he was experiencing and we were both fans of Silvia Rodriguez and the song Explaining Conservantes. Last night I had the amazing experience of teaching my first class. I've done a lot of one-day workshops but I haven't really done an ongoing class. I'm now teaching in a linoleum pet class. I'm really excited about it. I don't know. It's a teacher. It's a strange thing for me. I consider myself an experimenter in all sorts of things and not necessarily a master of any one thing as soon as I'm kind of accomplished something. I move on to the new thing. What felt good about this class yesterday is what I admire about the people who I've learned from is that really teaching is about creating a community and creating a space where people feel safe and comfortable doing this work. I'm excited to be able to do that with this. This is a piece that I did for a project about Almutanabi Street that a local poet and bookstore owner created after the booksellers street in Baghdad was bombed after the occupation by the U.S., not bombed by the U.S., but part of the chaos that was created through the occupations. The text in Arabic is a reference back to when the famous library of Baghdad was burned, the word ran down the river last one. Here's a couple of my early etchings and over time I've done a lot of playing with with the linoleum pets playing with that and adding color to it. So this is something that I'm doing for an organization called No More Death in Arizona that helped and does policy work migrating the border and this is a piece that I did for the guys. So working in the linoleum color. That's sort of how I got started in this and then over time I've been doing a lot more illustration for other projects around a lot of them local but then more increasingly and largely through just the meeting folks nationally and internationally in different kinds of projects. These are some of my early posters that I did for the other linoleum in the mission district. Doing some posters for different book fairs, the anarchist book fair, how it's been book fair and both of these kind of playing with iconography and images here I was really trying to get at again kind of the heritage that I've learned from as an artist by other poster makers and other movements around books might recognize the occupation of Alcatraz, the iHotel struggle, the 1934 general strike, the farm workers, the Eagles, the Black Panthers and then the White Knight riot, the no apologies poster, the line of burning leaves from the kind of substance that was used in the city. An image of young people taking it from there to the next generation struggle. I have a lot of fun doing work where I combine hand drawing with digital work, putting in a guy over an image that I've drawn doing work in many languages, which is always a challenge trying to figure out how to do multi-lingual posters in a way that respects those languages and uses the language in a creative way to kind of a list of alternate versions. And a lot of the work comes from the connection, I've been involved in a lot of different activities and mostly around housing but connections to for example a year to SF Island that works with immigrants in San Francisco and at some point I as I was becoming a U.S. citizen had reason to go to SF Island and get some advice in my papers. I mentioned already the lociete and this was kind of where I first got to know Yolanda Lopez was through research around creating the poster that holds the history of lociete for a project and Dr. McPhee was one of those kind of members of the series every year. The library has a copy of either the first or the second edition of Celebrate People's History. There's now hundreds of posters around all sorts of many pieces of people's history and always makes me happy to see those when I'm going to a school classroom and there's a Celebrate People's History poster. This is a piece I recently did I think there's you know in in this realm of you know how we use the fantastic to try to tell stories about of what's going on around and here we were trying to use a phrase and that's Ruthie Gelmore used around the prison industrial complex. I mean how all these are connected to so many things. One piece of prison that exists on and that's been here to enforcement around in the grapes and across the borders and militarization surveillance that happens on the border the prisons themselves and then on into into the city the way the prison complex tries to keep people in a civil service. Post I recently did around with Rainforest Action Network around forest deforestation and protecting people's self-determination against large corporations in this case sent me a while to figure out what CG was. It's the new name of Procter and Gamble who's been tearing down forests to create paper mills and destroying the libraries of in my day job until last April I see it's correct that I'm no longer at the council of community housing organizations that speak to until April of last year now trying to dedicate myself much more to art and to that connection of art and policy but through that work I've had a great relationship building in this horizontal justice or with the national nurses united in the union. One of the things about creating these illustrations that are a combination of traditional work digital work is that if we're for many of us in justice anyways we're able to free images very quickly and turn them around so they can be used instead of a needy animal around some things so this was from a sketch out of my sketchbook after the Roe B. Wade overturning at the Supreme Court wanted to create an image around astronomy but also we'll get into that a little bit more in some of my other posters around looking at medicinal plants that have been used for different medicinal purposes these were some of the uses of or if it's since the dictionary I believe I'm not fighting in the weight plant that is that I do think that brings me to the screen prints which are the work that I really learned to do through the print collective and then later with Juan Fuentes and Calixto Roble. The screen prints are a lot of fun in that you can take a photograph and start playing with them that's really kind of what I first started doing was using photographs some of them just downloaded from Google and playing with them. My partner was part of a group called prison moratorium progress in the annual fundraiser bowling event so that led to the image of bowling down the prison. I was also involved for a long time with the Center for Political Education again one of my my early screen prints was using a photograph of 518 Valencia and now the Eric DeSalle census for Polka and Politics and using that to create some images that reference back the Russian deconstructivist type images. This is the last of kind of the work where I was using photography I did some interviews with the daily labor program when I was developing that other image for my racist and for legal. You'll see a lot of maps in my work. A map of Palestine from 1914 and all of you know, how it sounds that it didn't exist in 1440 years and symbols of resistance. I often struggle with kind of I think what I was doing this was a time of the Arab Spring when so much of the organizing was done through social media and through text but I wanted to kind of plan some of them were positional symbols of resistance in this process. This was done again through kind of the connections that we developed with that thing with Escuela de Contura Puebla de Martí de Sistema y Orto with Sistema de Valle. Cisco organization in Mexico City with that long-standing relationship with the Tapatisa leadership had called for support around autonomy in their community. The architectural training that I had in the architectural administration was kind of creating a poster where day of the dead work, this work came out of conversations with Poder who holds an annual the other month of event for the community that they're involved in in those conversations with members. The phrase that in the land, in the afterworld, there are no walls, there are no borders. I say this one in just now because I'm going to be in New Mexico tomorrow, so I just wanted to give a shout out to New Mexico. One of the things that's been really in screen printing is playing with colors so a lot of the screen prints that I showed you are done with multiple colors which means multiple screens. This is done with one screen when I just get a roll from blue to red of bandera ripping on the US flag. In the sense of the standing rock, what you see below is a map of the river bringing the standing rock reservation. I've been involved for a very long time with a group called Poder, an environmental justice organization based in the Michigan District, and this is a project that they've run for a long time, the Secret Garden hidden away in some backyards in the Michigan District for the California IED Day Alliance. Another project that I've been involved in is a particular something that I particularly love not just because I was the co-founder 20 years ago, but because I think it relates back to this question of our responsibility around being on stolen land is the San Francisco community land trust, which is an effort to bring land back under community control and creating permanently affordable housing. Stole this from the sprays from an organizer of the housing rights committee, Tommy and we call them who would scout out in our rally land trust the whole city. So that led to this poster the first 20 years of building that had been bought through housing preservation programs. More fun stuff around Dia de los Muertos. I think I probably did this or that may have even been the picture that I first showed of what I was pre-imprinting with my son. When we was five, six, seven, he would always ask me for paletas and we always look at the labels and see what sorts of artificial flavors. So I had this image after life, we'll have all the paletas we want all be organic. More stuff around, you know, children and education. One of my colleagues at just seed put together a portfolio or a library for education and learning. Then more recently, I've been having a lot of fun with this idea of things that might be like flags of the sea surface. This is a wrap. The Austin Sinclair epic campaign, which has been revived by the former mayor of Stockton, Edmund, and the phrase in his campaign, the closest that we've had to a socialist governor in California in 1936, the phrase of his epic campaign was, I defend, I produce in the middle of the Great Depression. And I turned that around to a phrase that we've been using in the housing movement around protecting preserving producing. And then thinking about intersectionality and what that looks like. That was another fun thing around thinking about a flag around intersectionality and struggles. I'll just zoom through some of these because I want to get to the logo I did for the United States of Michigan. My bunny rabbit, Benicula. And for folks who've watched The Handmaid's Tale, that's a phrase in The Handmaid's Tale that Margaret Outwood. Supposedly, it was something that she found scrawled in her desk when she was a student. Don't let the bastard get you down in a fake Latin. It wasn't an actual Latin phrase. Something I think is that times are hard. We all need to remind ourselves to surround solutions for a particular campaign. And a collaborative print that I did with Monica from the Chicago around, I think this is the first year of the pandemic. This is a piece I did, again, during the pandemic, with a demilitarization campaign at Chicago. And then a piece where I was riffing on a ballot measure, our city, our home, and thinking of an old, what is the thing that we have and what is this other city that is trying to impose these huge powers and unpersonalize or depersonalizing folks recognize as city-like? And then one of the last images in this section, just thinking of land and territory that we've done before, another portfolio looked at different words and standards around the idea of length. In particular, the idea of propiedad social. Striding in the Mexican constitution is a very foreign concept in the United States, what is the collective property? I think one of the things that as somebody who's an activist and an artist I've been very interested in is maps. Mapping, I took a number of different maps of the Michigan district for a project that I did around cartography, looking at the past. The recent past is going to be in the 70s and the future. And that's all owning on the person. U.S.P.S. maps, 1859, brass and drool, all over the city, putting in the names of the villages within the Michigan Bay and some of my experiences of living in the New Perpet. I've had a lot of fun being invited, for example, to do a project with people, power, media, to sell through the history of the Bay Area that has led to a lot of gentrification and displacement that we experienced today. So that was a series of there was a talking mural that looked at the past of the 30s and 40s and then moved into white flight, the expansion of the suburban urban renewal, and then kind of the latest phase of struggles against the plate, what people still living in the city. So maybe I will finish with this project now. Some of these images are at the public library right now. There's a project from the San Francisco Arts Commission. So thank you, Arts Commission for their individual artist grant. Yay! Supporting artists in San Francisco. I did a series of print. Originally going to be green printed, but as the pandemic took over and I didn't have access to a screen printing location when it's like to burn my screen because that's what they've been the combination of traditional and digital prints that I've been trying to do with white print. And it's really kind of, I think, where I'm at right now in a lot of my explorations of what I want to do with my skills as an illustrator and an artist and a writer and a poet is looking at the work that many of our young people, especially many of the folks that I know associated with that, are doing to reclaim ancestral traditions and to reimagine those for the present part of one. I owe my conversations with Yolanda about that sort of reimagining and reframing that those experiences. So for folks who know the mission, this is a mission armory at the corner of Mithun in 14. Folks might know that that building used to be a National Guard Armory. Apparently, I heard once from John Ross that during riots in Bayview Center's point, people in the Mithun District grounded the armory to scoop the National Guard from moving out their weapons and whatever it is that they were trying to move out of the armory. It had been abandoned for a long time and it sits on a mark. It has a basement that floods every time it rains. And so I imagined it being an essential to a rebuilt bus for this aquaculture of Mithun City that was mostly destroyed. It's a small part remain in part. And as I was exploring this and researching, I came across amazing images from those times, some of them from Mesoamerican ruins, some of them in those early years. I tried to imagine the 63 Plaza, which was going through a big fight over what the future of that corner would be. Would it be a big luxury development? Would it be affordable housing? A lot of people in the neighborhood were mobilized to get the city to buy that one. See landmarks for the entire New York City. There's a landmark that I imagined as a sacred space and a sacred place. Many of the mobilizations around the Plaza were part of the ritual restraining of the space. I wanted to bring that in as well. This is a big piece that's out in front of the library right now. It's my reimagining Nick and Street. And as I said, some of my screen prints that were thinking about new flags or new signs that might fill up on the sword of the future of our post-capitalist future. This is an idea of looking at some of those signs, some of the existing signs and some of them being. What is it that we may have reclaimed of our ancestral position? So whether it is in a place or bone centers in the side, whether it is a feed bank, whether it is a midwife's location, whether you have a birth center. When I first moved to San Francisco, we actually had one independent birth center in San Francisco on cap three, we'll no longer have that. And I brought some of the boats, boats we need to go floating down or an owl. My friend Jackie's dog and my friend Indy. There's a long history. I gave a little talk at an elementary school. One of the kids said, oh, yeah, this is Street. This is Street extends all the way down California but long before that idea was afraid that it was happening all across California back over the Mojave Desert into Arizona and New Mexico to some of the sacred places, center place, Taco Canyon, and then down through to Deltiwacan. Archaeologists have found minerals and other things that go that there's a lot of things going on. And so as I looked south on Miffin Street, one of the many eclectic things done to Deltiwacan, the map of Deltiwacan in the sky, and then youth members, I think they're no longer considered youth activists. This is Poved. Poved runs a bike program. And I was imagining how these histories of the sport, how we use port of activity as next in the sacred spaces. You know, that this imminent brought in the fall court recreated in gaming is the story of the heroes when going to the underworld and bringing back what we as humans get to survive. This is my friend Daldondra, who is one of the farmers at a farm, urban farm that, or that runs in Crocker, Amazon. And her child, Donito, when thinking about, you know, now being a parent at the time, you know, those roots that we pull up in soil. Image ground of the underworld feeding up to the world free. I think it's in, but then, and then, this is my friend, Sotil Flores, who is the master gardener at this farm, and who really has taught me a lot about thinking about agriculture's clear ecology. Thinking about breaking through the binaries that we've been taught in the western plant understanding to a much more open and diverse way of understanding ecology and all the things that we're doing. Celia grew a household nation. One of my favorite places in 15th century, just go magic donuts. Used to be on vixen in 20th and was before the unknown, so a lot of old farmers used to hunt donuts over in 25. And the last of these images is my friend, Theré and Maguer, who is a long time organizer, activist, but that have been also an herbalist at Yerveda, really understand plants and plant medicine. And as I was doing this during times of the pandemic, thinking about the plants, Celia bring up immunity, that farm, I mean, great farming, a lot of part of it, elderberry, over the spring, summer, and I mean, crazy farming that we've seen every time we've seen it. And the background is an image of Yerveda, healing is a good one, and also death is funny. So I am looking at the time. I've been talking for a whole 54 minutes. So maybe this is a good place for you to stop. I told you you could fill it, Fernando. Well, let me find my doctor and hello. The time does fly, doesn't it? So there are lots of comments, lots of questions. There was one in the questions that I really thought was great, which was, can you talk more about how you came to blend traditional artwork with digital artwork? Was that a gradual process, or did you take a class in digital art? The only class that I took was through the amazing work that the San Francisco Print Collective did in teaching all of us who didn't know anything about creating a screen print or putting something together with Photoshop. I barely know any illustrator. I'm trying to teach myself some other digital platforms, but it's mostly Photoshop, and it's been a lot about just scanning the images that I draw. I often draw and then watercolor. I'll often scan the line drawing so that I can drop it back in over the watercolors so that the blacks go up really dark. Again, that's sort of my love of comic books and how comic books are a bit more overdone with black ink drawn with a separate coloring. And then, yeah, pulling in images from the Mesoamerican Mayan or other rubbings. Someone mentioned in the chat how you can really see the sci-fi interest in your work, for sure. Let's see, how about, what year was the prison complex piece done? Oh, that was just done a year ago. Yeah, and it was done with an activist Mizzouie Kenney. I hope I'm not pronouncing their name wrong, who's in New York City, and they've been doing a lot of their activism and their research around border surveillance and the connection between border policing and the prison. I saw one in chat that just triggered me, which was, do you think all art should be political art? Very interesting. I think that art, for a lot of us, art is reflecting our experience. And that's where this, I love the phrase of the personal is political, and vice versa, I think the political is personal. If we are engaged in our world, I think the politics will come through in one way or another. They don't have to be necessarily explicit or hit you over the head or have a slogan, but all of the choices that we make, what we choose to represent, the mistakes we make, when we represent some on how we learn from that and things that I think reflects how we're engaging politically with the world. So I don't think art needs to be over the head political. It's just sort of, if it's true to yourself and you're engaged politically, then that will come through. Thank you. That was really such a thoughtful answer, and I love bringing up our mistakes and learning from that because, man, we can learn daily. One question. Let's do one more. I see hand raised if that person would like to speak. I'm going to unmute you now, or it could be a false hand raises too. I'll ask the question, and then if that person, you can unmute if you ready. Such an amazing and wide collection of work. What is one way that you'd love to inspire us as your SF neighbor to do or take action? To take action? That is interesting. I am still no longer in doing housing work at my day job, and I'm still very much involved in that work. I think there's, and in particular, I think, housing that so many other issues have, or we have electives, we're going to have these ballot measures, and I don't necessarily want to use this forum to promote the ballot measure that I've been working on, but I think that there's digging deep into what's behind these things, reading. We spent a lot of time trying to get, in my view, the truth about land and the importance of land, the value of land, and how to make the city affordable to the most people. I think that's one part. I think the other part is related to the contribution that many of us make to creating a living, lively city. For me, a lot of that is the visual artwork that I do, but as somebody who's a city walker, you know, the gardens that I see people do, the creative use, so I'm now in Bernal, so I've got a whole new set of neighborhoods that I've been getting to know, and how we make the city a really personalized, but not kind of an impersonal set of units to box people into, but that really allows for that self-expression in whatever way that comes to you. And then there was one last chat that came through, which was a link for you to check out protest exhibit at the letter form archive, and I have thrown that link into the chat box. I've been wanting to see that one. And here's another reminder. This link right here has all of the links that I tried to keep up with, and Fernando threw down the resources just like I thought he would, and I'll just shot out one of those, which was all sorts of great books. Love, Samuel Delaney, but the celebrate people's history. If you have a San Francisco library card, you can instantly gain access to that with our hoopla digital format. All right, friends, we have successfully done an hour and 15 minutes on the art of Fernando Marti. I know there's lots of clapping, I could feel it out there. Everyone, it's so nice to see you, feel you. River of Chat, love you. Fernando, thank you so much. There was a last question on there about art communities, and I just, I love the Michigan Cultural Center. There are other places that also have kind of cultural resources at the Michigan Cultural Center, and you can drop in, learn, screen printing anytime, you can rent the space for the day. Come drop in on my line cut class. It's got such a long history from the 1970s as the African-American Arts and Culture Complaints as the so-marts. So, yeah. Our city is amazing. It really is. Mission Graphica for sure has produced just amazing historic works, and I saw a retrospective there like, I'm going to say this four years ago. Dang, it's just, it's deep. It really is deep. So, you come from a long line before you, Fernando. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Yeah, if you haven't seen the ginormous Fernando Marti outside the 100 Grove Street, get there and see it. Also, there's the D&D Los Moretos exhibit right outside those doors as well. Lots of family members, lots of library family members are photos there, and then lots of authors that we love. So, come check it out, friends, and thank you again, and we'll see you at the library. Yay.