San Jose-born fiber textile artist Alyssarhaye Graciano has stitched herself into the heart of the city’s creative ecosystem. As curator for MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana) in the SoFA District, she balances her own textile practice with the responsibility of shepherding new artistic voices into the public eye. Her creative reach also extends beyond the gallery walls: She’s the author of Chunky Knits: Cozy Hats, Scarves and More Made Simple with Extra-Large Yarn, a book that champions accessibility in knitting.
At MACLA, Graciano continues the organization’s legacy of elevating Latino artists, helping them connect with audiences across the Bay Area. “At MACLA, we pay artists when they’re exhibiting their work or if they’re doing some sort of program or workshop because we believe in trying to create a sustainable art career,” said Graciano.
Graciano’s vision threads together art, access, and belonging in the SoFA district as well as the community at large. “I would like to see more folks being able to stay in San Jose, being able to afford to stay as creatives, as artists, and [see] how we can all give back to the community that helped raise us,” said Graciano.
Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) 510 S. 1st Street (408) 998-2783 maclaarte.org IG: macla_sanjose
Zuri Alexa is a DJ and experience curator known for bringing good vibes to any function. Her DJ sets are multifaceted and blend genres like R&B and house. You can find her spinning at all types of events and places throughout San Jose and the greater Bay Area—including Tech at Nite at the Tech Interactive, local coffee shops like Academic Coffee, the Silicon Valley PRIDE Parade, and even more low-key block parties.
She is also a producer at Universal Grammar, a music event production company that highlights emerging artists and fosters communities around soul, R&B, jazz, and electronic music. In the past, Universal Grammar has brought artists like the Internet, Omar Apollo, Snoh Aalegra, and Kaytranada to San Jose years before they started to play larger venues. Universal Grammar tends to put on small intimate shows of about 150 people—the kind of show you look back on and can’t believe you were there before the artist blew up. “Talent and culture has always been here in San Jose, just underground,” said Zuri. “San Jose is an ‘if you know, you know’ kind of place. We have a lot of hidden gems.”
rafa esparza is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, working across live performance, sculpture, installation, drawing, and painting. Known for his work with adobe brick, a skill he inherited from his father, Ramón Esparza, his process is a means of connecting the artist to community and centering inclusivity within contexts of historical exclusion.
rafa’s use of adobe can be traced back to his father’s life in Ricardo Flores Magon, Durango, Mexico, where he worked with the material before migrating to the United States in the 1970s. When rafa came out as queer in college, it created an emotional distance and strain in relationships with friends and family, especially with his father. Seeking to overcome that strain, rafa asked Ramón to teach him how to work with adobe. Although their interactions during the adobe-making process were focused on the technical aspects of the craft, working with his father allowed them to gradually mend their relationship and culminated in Ramón Esparza leading the production of rafa’s first large-scale adobe brick installation in 2014.
This origin of medium informs rafa’s current work, where he uses adobe as a platform to “probe a history of institutionalized racism in traditional art spaces”. A collaborative process is central to the work, often involving other BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) and Queer artists. By bringing this process into historically exclusive institutions, he explains, the work is designed to “ground conversations that are about inclusivity”.
“Bringing adobe into traditional art spaces, to me, is a way of collapsing modernity and reminding us that all of these buildings are built over land.”
The physical presence of sun-baked earth within the white walls of a gallery is both a physical and a philosophical challenge. Bringing adobe into art institutions often runs counter to institutional requirements for organic materials. Such venues have required the adobe to be sprayed with pesticides or irradiated to kill any living matter. Drawing parallels to the exclusion and sanitization faced by immigrants and marginalized communities, rafa sees these institutional challenges as extensions of long-standing systems of exclusion and control in art spaces and society more broadly.
rafa shares, “Bringing adobe into traditional art spaces to me is a way of collapsing modernity… reminding us that all of these buildings are built over land.” In his 2025 installation, Casi Casa: De Borrado, at MACLA in San Jose, rafa is collaboratively creating a large slab constructed from adobe. The installation is meant to prompt visitors to reflect on heritage, familial legacies, and humanity’s relationship to land. rafa wants audiences to imagine what it would mean to “pause” the relentless drive to build and instead imagine the Earth swallowing up life as we know it.
rafa’s 2025 installation will be featured in the group exhibition From Their Hands to Ours at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana in San Jose. The exhibition (December 2025 – March 2026), presented with Montalvo Arts Center, focuses on how ancestral wisdom and childhood experiences shape identity.
Follow the Lucas Artists Residency Program on Instagram at lucasartres
rafa esparza was an artist in residence at the Montalvo Arts Center Lucas Artists Residency Program, January 2020 – March 2020 & November 2025 – December 2025
Image 3: Casi Casa: De Borrado, 2025, Adobe floor
Driving through the streets of Oakland or San Francisco, you may come across ginormous painted calla lilies bursting along the side of a building in a gradient of greens. Lines of gold tracing birds and leaves might catch your eye through an office window. These blossoming worlds are the works of Jet Martinez, a Mexican American painter based in the East Bay.
“It’s in the making of things,” says Jet Martinez, who has been an influential figure in the San Francisco Bay Area public arts scene for nearly three decades. After studying Spanish literature, he pursued a formal arts education at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1997, where he earned a BFA in painting and printmaking. Since then, he has left his mark on walls around the world in places like Java, Oaxaca, and Zurich, as well as cities in the United States, such as Denver, Miami, and New Orleans. “Painting is a way of processing. It helps me process my life, whether an argument or a problem. It’s how I process my sense of self.”
Many of Jet’s murals feature a variety of flora and fauna, deriving his composition and bold color choice from traditional Mexican folk art. Born in Tuxpan, Veracruz, Mexico, and raised in Cuernavaca, Morelos, Jet is inspired by his native culture’s roots in pottery, weaving, and embroidery. He creates rhythmic patterns in his public artwork, allowing him to bridge the gap between his life in Mexico and his teen years in the United States. “I grew up with graffiti, White Walls, and Juxtapoz, but I also come from the melting pot that is Mexico. I developed my mural style so I could just step up to a wall and go. Before, I would try to make an intricate painting, and it just took too long.”
“When you expose your vulnerabilities, it allows others to do the same. It’s a much more nutritious conversation.” -Jet Martinez
Jet is best known for his murals, but his artistic practice extends beyond public art. He’s applied his designs to prints, installations, and streetwear, allowing his work to reach different audiences. Over the years, Jet has worked with several big-name companies and brands. A quick Google search will show large walls covered in brightly colored roses and birds surrounding public parks and black and white peonies printed on sweatshirts. “A lot of times, people ask me to do some iteration of something I’ve already done. And I’ve had this major hang-up with like, qué dirán?” He adds, “Creating art is a fast lane to someone else with mutual understanding. My work gives me access to other people, and it allows others to access what I want them to have.”
When working on commissioned art, an artist often must modify their artistic vision in order to make a client’s dream come true. Whether considering branding or the color palette of office furniture, Jet finds himself constantly refining his florals into another’s aesthetic. “The murals are jobs. In 2022, I had a lot of work, a lot of commissions, but I didn’t have time to do my art—to think, to dream, to experiment.” After that realization, Jet rented his own studio away from home, having shared a space with his wife and fellow artist, Kelly Ording. “I began to carve out more space and time. Now, three years later, I feel back in touch with being an artist.”
Between big mural projects, Jet problem-solves personal work in his studio day and night. Bordering the Oakland Estuary, its big open windows, exposed brick wall, and mini fridge make up an artist’s ideal studio. Years of work sitting kitty-corner to stacks of milk crates holding a seemingly endless supply of aerosol cans. The space is complete with a few roof leaks, a thriving monstera plant, and a desk for the occasional email. Jet sits on his futon, enjoying a pastry from a local bakery and drinking licorice tea to get in a creative mindset. “Making art in private is essential to our society. The creation of a project is the creation of a problem to work on or solve. I think that’s a lot of what artists do. We make problems for ourselves. El hacer por el hecho de hacer.”
Concentrated time in his studio has allowed Jet the space and time to question his process and what his work represents. “I feel like I let my family down when I’m not creating. My practice is ingrained in my well-being, and I’m a much more balanced person when I’m making art…when I’m making something that wasn’t there before.” While Jet’s body of work is layered with personal narrative, it may not be apparent at first glance. His recent practice has allowed him to traverse his mixed-race background, combining the cultures and communities in which he grew up. The English and German heritage he inherited from his mother doesn’t tend to show up in his work as overtly as his time living under the Mexican sun. “Often, I feel just fine with who I am, but I sometimes question whether I have access to certain Mexican traditions.” Jet immigrated to the States at the age of 14. “Not knowing whether I have permission to access this lineage of work is a real question that is always in my head. At the same time, I also feel like my intention is to create something that feels like it belongs here, specifically in the Bay Area.”
Jet’s work has been shown in commercial galleries, both nationally and internationally. A combination of solo exhibitions and group shows have featured his distinctive linework and ornate details, the pieces finding homes in the hands of collectors. In 2024, his solo exhibition A Language of Flowers was on display at Heron Arts in San Francisco. His next solo show will open on June 6, 2025, in Downtown San Jose at MACLA (Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana).
The exhibition will feature work five years in the making, beginning with an experimental concept developed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “At the time, I was making a lot of really quiet, muted work just because everything felt so murky. I didn’t feel like doing bright, exuberant stuff.” As the pandemic waned, Jet found himself needing more light in his work. He returned to his colors and penchant for strong, decorative design. “Sometimes, art feels so persistent. Especially in these times—in times of war, in times of great conflict—to make something beautiful feels like an act of resistance.” The series of twenty original works examines the passage of time and the motifs that make Jet’s work uniquely his own while interrogating the need to start over and try again.
“This new process has been a total deep dive into my fear of repeating myself. In that process of repeating myself, I’m seeing that none of this is the same. When you expose your vulnerabilities, it allows others to do the same. It’s a much more nutritious conversation.”
Join Jet for the opening of his solo exhibition, “Arbolito” at MACLA/Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana on the first Friday of June 2025, 06/06/25. This exhibition presents new work, drawing inspiration from the rich traditions of his native culture, where ornate patterns and abstract forms are combined to explore the passage of time.
“Arbolito” is on view at MACLA June 06, 2025 – August 10, 2025
SPANISH VERSION
Un Puente Sobre El Río San Juan: A Story of Borders
Join Imara at Movimiento de Arte y Cultura Latino Americana (MACLA) on Friday, September 6, for the opening of her duo exhibition “Un Puente Sobre El Río San Juan: A Story of Borders,” Featuring work from her and San José-based artist Irene Carvajal—part of South First Fridays ArtWalk SJ.
Imara Osorno is a Nicaraguan-American multidisciplinary artist who paints, draws, and sculpts. She began her artistic studies at San Jose State University, where she delved into various materials, including clay, glassblowing, and metalsmithing.
Since moving to California at a young age, Osorno has returned to her birth country once as a child. Growing up in the US, Imara has faint memories of her time in Nicaragua and an interest in reconnecting with her Nicaraguan cultural roots. Her artwork explores themes of identity, immigration, and memory, often infused with a deep appreciation for mythology and storytelling.
Her upcoming exhibition, “Un Puente Sobre El Río San Juan: A Story of Borders,” explores the complex and often contentious relationship between the neighboring Nicaragua and Costa Rica. A collaborative effort with her former art professor, Irene Carvajal, each uses their cultural origins to untangle the overlooked conflict. Osorno was born in Nicaragua and Irene Carvajal was born in Costa Rica. The show’s title, “un Puente Sobre El Rio San Juan,” or “A Bridge Over the San Juan River,” symbolizes bridging divides between the countries—both literal and metaphorical. It will feature a blend of painting, printmaking, and performance art, offering a multi-dimensional exploration of what bonds, rather than separate, artists born in each country.
In this conversation, we discuss Imara’s artistic evolution, her upcoming exhibition, and the personal experiences that inform her work.
