The Fort Mason Center for the Arts and Culture (FMCAC) has announced a new outdoor mural painting commission 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. In addition to this debut, the event will feature new art, artist talks, and art-making activities from FMCAC residents For-Site Foundation, 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.”
The world often takes for granted the workers that help turn the gears of society.
Lopez was born and raised in Mexico City and immigrated to the United States, settling in San Francisco. He has sought “to understand our complex society through a Mexican immigrant’s lens.” He was inspired by his grandfather’s experience in the World War II-era Bracero Program that recruited Mexican farmworkers 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 20th century and the reimagination of those artists in San Francisco’s Mission Muralismo movement of the 1970s. 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. Frank Smigiel, FMCAC’s director of arts programming and 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 Aug. 11. Additional activities with FMCAC resident SF Children’s Art Center and an artist-designed coloring book are planned for this fall.
Oscar Lopez: Your Food, My Work, Our Land, May 30–January 2025 Public Art Corridor between Landmark Buildings B & C, Fort Mason Center for Arts and Culture, 2 Marina Boulevard, fortmason.org