Past Events
Get ready for a day filled with holiday cheer, fantastic finds, and local one-of-a-kind gifts for your loved ones (and yourself!).
La Peña’s r much anticipated Holiday Mercado will feature local vendors of hand-crafted goods and unique imports from Latin America! They will have traditional foods for sale, too! Bring the entire family.
📅 Date: Sunday, December 3rd, 2023
🕚 Time: 11:00 AM – 5:00 PM
Let’s support and celebrate the incredible creativity of our communities 🎉
Holiday Art & Book Fair on Sat Dec 2. The time is noon – 5pm at EastSide Cultural Center. Along with a diverse selection of work by artists and artisans there will be music, poetry, fresh tacos made onsite, and other refreshments.
Dignidad Rebelde will be tabling at 2285 International next to the Cultural Center
October 26, 2023, 5-8 pm
James Dunn Theater, College of Marin
Free and open to the public
Register here: https://emorydouglas.eventbrite.com
Join us for an unforgettable evening honoring Emory Douglas’s lifelong commitment to resistance, self-determination and Black liberation. As the former Veteran Revolutionary Artist & Minister of Culture for the Black Panther Party, his images in the Black Panther Newspaper were a clarion call to oppressed and colonized peoples throughout the world.
An Evening with Emory Douglas, the culminating event for the month-long art exhibit The Revolutionary Art of Emory Douglas: Black Liberation, Global Justice, features poetry by Meres-Sia Gabriel, music by Tarika Lewis, and a conversation between Bay Area-based Xicanx artist and activist Melanie Cervantes and Emory Douglas.
Reception with light refreshments to follow. Attendees will be able to visit the gallery before and after the program.
All Power to the People.
Since the mid-20th century, California has been a beacon of both inventive design and political activism. Exploring the intersection of these realms, this exhibition uses case studies from LACMA’s collection to demonstrate how designers and artists championed civil rights, opposed wars and injustice, and pressed for change. Skilled communicators by profession, they distilled complex issues into eye-catching images, often appropriating commercial art techniques—from newspaper broadsheets to screen prints to digital downloads—to distribute powerful imagery despite limited resources. Others led workshops and formed printing collectives, providing movements with new methods for disseminating their messages. Their works express both outrage and optimism, going beyond protest to envision alternative ways of living.
Key figures and organizations including Emory Douglas of the Black Panther Party, Sheila Levrant de Bretteville of the Woman’s Building, Self Help Graphics & Art, and street artist Shepard Fairey achieved widespread acclaim and notoriety, galvanizing political movements and empowering marginalized communities. This presentation features generous loans from The Center for the Study of Political Graphics in addition to select objects from private collectors.
OPENING RECEPTION: MARCH 25, 2023, 6:00 PM – 8:00 PM
Image credit: Rupert García, Libertad para los Prisoneros Políticas! (Liberty for Political Prisoners!), 1971, screenprint, made for the National Committee to Free Angela Davis, 26 × 20 in., Los Angeles County Museum of Art, gift of Allison and Larry Berg and Suzanne and Ric Kayne through the 2017 Decorative Arts and Design Acquisition Committee (DA²), © Rupert García, photo © Museum Associates/LACMA
The Latinx Research Center will host an all-day symposium celebrating the historic retrospective Amalia Mesa-Bains: Archaeology of Memory at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Feb. 4-July 23, 2023), co-curated by María Esther Fernández, inaugural Artistic Director of the Riverside Museum of Art’s Cheech Marin Center of Art and Culture, and Laura E. Pérez, Professor of the Department of Ethnic Studies, and Chair of the Latinx Research Center.
The public, all-day series of events will begin with an altar-building workshop, prioritizing students and local young artists, led by nationally recognized artist and UCB Instructor Jesus Barraza and Laila Espinosa, a US-MX performance artist and a Theater, Dance, and Performance Studies doctoral student at UC Berkeley. The afternoon symposium will feature presentations by exhibition catalog essayists, other invited Latinx Studies scholars, and curators: Ella Díaz, Anthony Graham, Ann Marie Leimer, Ronald Rael, Terezita Romo, Ani Rivera, Melissa San Miguel, Susanna Temkin, Mary Thomas, and Adriana Zavala. The symposium will conclude with a keynote by the artist, followed by a buffet dinner, and two short documentary films featuring the artist, Amalia Mesa Bains at de Saisset Museum by Elizabeth Sher and Amalia Mesa-Bains: In Her Own Words by Ray and Daniel Telles.
The symposium is made possible with the support of BAMPFA, the Center for Race and Gender, the Chicanx Studies Program, the Department of Ethnic Studies, and more.
This event is free, open to the public, and wheelchair accessible. For more information or accommodations, please email latinxresearch@berkeley.edu
Join me on Friday April 7th at 12 PM PST as I present a bit about my life and work as part of this series on suicide prevention. I will share about the healing that comes from my art practice and speak a bit about some of my latest works. This is part of a weekly series organized by Crisis Support Services of Alameda County.
Estampas de la Raza chronicles the unique heritage, history, and experience of Mexican Americans and Latinos in an exhibition of 61 eye-catching screenprints and lithographs from the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio. This body of prints comprises an essential but largely overlooked aspect of contemporary American art, focusing on prints made by Mexican American and Latino artists between 1980 and 2010. Inspired by the Chicano art movement of the 1960s and 1970s, many of these artists activate Pop Art aesthetics and powerful messages to explore the complex identities and struggles of Latinos living in the United States. The exhibition highlights Mexican icons, including Frida Kahlo and Che Guevara, and celebrates Latino cultural traditions.
Let’s Get Free: The Transformative Art and Activism of the People’s Paper Co-op showcases nearly ten years of cultural organizing campaigns and collaborative public art by the People’s Paper Co-op (PPC), an ongoing project of The Village of Arts and Humanities in North Philadelphia. Looking to women in reentry as society’s leading criminal justice experts, the PPC uses art to amplify their stories, dreams, and visions for a more just and free world. Curated by Raquel de Anda, Sharita Towne, and Daniel Tucker, the exhibition explores the PPC’s work as a model for effecting change through art and helping free people from an exceptionally adversarial and punitive criminal justice system.
Opening Reception, Friday, March 24, 5 p.m. -7 p.m., Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery
Imaging Abolitionist Futures Symposium, March 23 & 24, VCAM
Since its opening in 1954, the McNay has consistently collected and presented artwork by women. The Museum’s founder, Marion Koogler McNay, was an artist and a supporter of the arts–and we strive to honor her legacy.
Womanish: Audacious, Courageous, Willful Art features artwork by women acquired by the McNay from 2010 to the present. In 2010, the McNay presented the landmark exhibition Neither Model Nor Muse, which celebrated artwork by women from all of the Museum’s major collecting areas. Envisioned as a second chapter to this exhibition, Womanish features over 70 artists and demonstrates the McNay’s ongoing commitment to women.
The title of this exhibition is inspired by Alice Walker’s essay Womanist, in which she defines womanish as, “Usually referring to outrageous, audacious, courageous or willful behavior.” By highlighting the wide variety of ways women express themselves through art, this exhibition aims to celebrate the term “womanish,” which is all too often considered derogatory.
The artwork represented spans over 90 years and includes portraiture, abstraction, landscapes, and more. This exhibition includes regionally, nationally, and internationally known artists, who exemplify a range of lived experiences as well as many sources of inspiration.
In the 1960s, activist Chicano artists forged a remarkable history of printmaking that remains vital today. Many artists came of age during the civil rights, labor, anti-war, feminist and LGBTQ+ movements and channeled the period’s social activism into assertive aesthetic statements that announced a new political and cultural consciousness among people of Mexican descent in the United States. ¡Printing the Revolution! explores the rise of Chicano graphics within these early social movements and the ways in which Chicanx artists since then have advanced innovative printmaking practices attuned to social justice.
More than reflecting the need for social change, the works in this exhibition project and revise notions of Chicanx identity, spur political activism and school viewers in new understandings of U.S. and international history. By employing diverse visual and artistic modes from satire, to portraiture, appropriation, conceptualism, and politicized pop, the artists in this exhibition build an enduring and inventive graphic tradition that has yet to be fully integrated into the history of U.S. printmaking.
This exhibition is the first to unite historic civil rights era prints alongside works by contemporary printmakers, including several that embrace expanded graphics that exist beyond the paper substrate. While the dominant mode of printmaking among Chicanx artists remains screen-printing, this exhibition features works in a wide range of techniques and presentation strategies, from installation art, to public interventions, augmented reality and shareable graphics that circulate in the digital realm. The exhibition also is the first to consider how Chicanx mentors, print centers and networks nurtured other artists, including several who drew inspiration from the example of Chicanx printmaking