Threads woven together tell stories about history, culture, and identity
Cynthia Brannvall enjoys making Swedish meatballs with turkey and kale and still calls them Swedish meatballs. Building on her grandma’s original recipe, she regularly cooks this special fusion dish for her family. As a California native who contains multitudes—American, African, and European roots—blending, transforming, and carrying on aspects of different cultures feels natural to her. It has become a central theme in her life and work.
Cynthia is an interdisciplinary multimedia artist, a community college professor, and the current Cubberely Artist in Residence, whose work explores identity, culture, history, and how to move forward in a world of conflict and uncertainty. She was raised primarily by her grandmother, a seamstress who not only taught her recipes but also introduced her to textiles at a young age.
One of her most important works, Continents, is a large three-panel textile painting consisting of off-white strips of linen, cotton, and lace that depicts themes of genomics and geology.“ These patterns represent sediment or histories, landscapes, and various patterns crossing from one panel to the next, like DNA traits passing from one ancestor to another,” she said. Her work also incorporates vintage and recycled textiles, such as blouses from the 1920s, which play into intergenerational themes in her paintings.
While sourcing materials, Cynthia was drawn to working with white textiles, which were never a crisp white. Many of her materials are thrifted, sourced from antiques purveyors or acquired through special collections such as those at Lacis Museum of Lace and Textiles in Berkeley. The fabric scraps she chooses naturally vary in color and come frayed, fragmented, and stained—yet enduring, which only adds more depth and meaning to her art. In another piece, titled The Threads That Bind a Divided Nation, she used off-white and beige colored antique textiles to construct a divided map of the United States. The states are disconnected at the MasonDixon line, which historically divided free and slave states.
While Cynthia was studying art history at UC Berkeley, she witnessed many conversations where artists used the color black, and people concluded that the artwork must be sending a message about race. However, that was never applied to works that were made in white. “It was kind of a defiant move. Like, I dare you to ask me, as a Black artist, why I’m working with the color white so much,” she said. But people rarely ask her that question.
In the past few years, Cynthia has built a new arm of her work, focused on black textiles. She aimed to push back on the obvious connotations of the color black, associated with darkness and mourning. To contrast those feelings, she adds flecks of mica, beads, and sequins to allude to a sense of whimsy and magic. She is currently creating a large black textile painting that will include at least a dozen panels. The use of black was inspired by dark matter and black holes that catalyzed the beginning of the universe, but they are also metaphors for the Black experience. “In my lifetime, I was not born into slavery. But as a Black person, I feel the gravitational pull of that,” she explained.
In addition to textile paintings, Cynthia also creates sculptures in a genre of works she calls “surreal textiles.” In her process, she takes clothing fragments or whole pieces of clothing and molds them into shapes that are often disorienting and thought-provoking. In her piece titled Roar, she molded a thrifted 1950s pink dress in resin to create a sculpture reminiscent of a target or a screaming mouth. She created the piece in 2022 and it helped her access and process her feelings that followed the overturning of Roe v. Wade that summer. Usually, Cynthia mattifies her resin pieces for a satin finish, but for Roar, she wanted a wet look. “It looks wet, so there is this erotic element. It’s clearly a dress, but I think it also evokes the body. It could be a screaming mouth or a vaginal opening. But it also has that sweetness to it because it’s pink,” she said. The juxtaposition of the ruffled pink dress and the way it is opened up evokes uncanny feelings and depicts psychological tensions.
As Cynthia’s past works have conjured questions about history, culture, and identity, she continues to ponder unanswered questions every day. One motivator for her in working with abstraction is that it allows people to come up with different questions and answers when viewing her artwork. Currently, she hopes her artwork can help people think about how to bridge cultural and political divides. She explained, “We live in a polarized time. What would it look like for us to belong somewhere together—whether we agree or not, whether we have hurt each other or not? Is that possible? And what would it look like?”
Image 1: Continents, 2014-2016 vintage and antique cotton textiles painted on stretched crinoline, 3 panels 48”x68”
Image 2: Not Quite Tame, 2024, vintage birdcage, globe, sea fans, vintage and antique trim, lace, and crocheted doilies and trim, 19”x36”x12”
Image 3: Shadow Work #2 A Pickaninny World, 2024, 19th century dress, vintage silk and velvet ribbon, vintage seam binding tape, polyester ribbon, acrylic paint and globe
San Jose-based professional pumpkin carver, Paulina (Goff) Stovall, started as an artist in high school. After graduating, she discovered a passion for pumpkin carving when she was commissioned to live carve pumpkins at a high-end party. Since then, she has fallen in love with the practice and continued developing her craft with CarvedFX. Her carvings blend artistry, imagination, and precision, transforming a seasonal tradition into a highly technical art form. Depending on the starting form required for different sculptures, Paulina also includes other vegetables such as butternut, carrots, sweet potatoes, and zucchini. Each varietal adds a different texture and form to her sculptures.
While most of Paulina’s carvings are commissioned to reflect a customer’s branding and vision, she always attempts to tie a piece of herself into her work. Inspired by mythical creatures and sci-fi horror films from the ’80s and ’90s, Paulina shares, “when I have the opportunity to carve for myself, I bring in things that inspire me, which tend to have a lot of teeth and look more scary and movie-inspired.” Even on family-friendly pieces, Paulina stays true to the spooky origins of pumpkin carving by including subtle elements such as bugs and critters. Paulina’s favorite works are standing 360-degree sculptures that make audiences question whether it was carved from a pumpkin.
“when I have the opportunity to carve for myself, I bring in things that inspire me, which tend to have a lot of teeth and look more scary and movie-inspired.”
Aside from carving pumpkins, Paulina has dreams of expanding her practice across mediums. “If I could branch out to another medium,” Paulina muses, “I’d love to start carving more with stone. Get into a permanent medium instead of a medium that rots.” That dream was sparked by interacting with a world-renowned stone sculptor who inspired her and made her feel like carving stone was meant to be. For Paulina, pumpkin carving goes beyond the practice and tradition. It’s about creating joy and lasting memories for people and their loved ones. Through her work, she hopes to inspire others to make art, pursue what they love, and remember the emotions they felt while watching her work or seeing the final piece.
This interview was done at The Tech Interactive during their 2025 Techtoberfest: Science of Beer and Brews. Paulina and her team, “Team Poisonous Perfection,” won Season 15 of Halloween Wars 2025 on Food Network, where cake decorators, sugar artists, and pumpkin carving experts battle it out as they create Halloween-themed edible displays.
In 2000, a local school received a seed donation to grow an arts program. The school put out a request for applications and proposals, looking for a bright mind to guide its vision. Enter Ann Watts, a bubbly professional dancer with experience teaching and a scrappy tech startup attitude. Watts continues the story. “I applied, and I came in with the idea that we could do so much more than one art discipline at this one school. I wanted to bring in all the arts, provide for professional artists, and service the entire industry.” Watts’ proposal laid the groundwork for what is now Starting Arts.
Starting Arts is a hands-on, multidisciplinary arts program that implements art classes within public schools across the Bay Area. These classes are standards-based, aligned with Common Core, taught by skilled professionals, and take place during and after school. Watts grew Starting Arts with a combination of experience and an eager team of supporters. That growth further developed when she joined Mindshare.
This is what makes me want to get up every morning— meeting all of these creative folks and supporting them by just getting out of their way. They have so much to give; I just have to facilitate.”
“The nonprofit world can feel so siloed and isolating. Mindshare created a network and gathered a large group of people from different arts disciplines within the nonprofit sector,” says Watts. “We could ask each other anything; nothing was off the table.” These connections with arts leaders allowed Starting Arts to foster tangible partnerships with other Santa Clara County–based arts organizations such as Chopsticks Alley Art, Los Lupeños, and San Jose Taiko. “Those partnerships were really impactful for the community of kids and families that work with us,” shares Watts. Mindshare also included a one-on-one coaching program that further developed these leaders’ skills and knowledge. Watts’ coach helped her establish workflows for an expanding organization. In 22 years, Starting Arts grew from one school to 125, and six to 15 employees. “The number of contractors we worked with tripled. It was crucial for me to learn how to manage the growth of the organization’s infrastructure to remain sustainable.”
Today, Starting Arts provides art classes for thousands of students, and their schedule is booked through next year. Watts shares, “This is what makes me want to get up every morning— meeting all of these creative folks and supporting them by just getting out of their way. They have so much to give; I just have to facilitate.”
Holding Form, Letting Go: Inside Mark Engel’s World of Shifting Figures
Mark Engel stands in his Walnut Creek studio. Birdsong and the distant hum of a highway blend with the hush of his brush against the canvas. Around him, figures emerge and dissolve: faces freeze mid-expression, limbs smear into strokes of color and shadow. Some figures lean into each other while others yearn to separate.
“There’s sort of this atmospheric pressure trying to push through,” Engel said, glancing at a fresh piece still drying on the wall. “Having this pressure of allowing something bigger than myself to come through, to me, is where the art happens.” As a painter and an educator at Mission College, Engel is a driving force in the Bay Area’s art scene. His figures feel both intimate and unknowable. The forms merge, stretch, and fracture in ways that echo how we relate to each other and ourselves. In Shifting Terrain, his solo exhibition debuting at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara August 2025, Engel will showcase works exploring tensions and transformations within the human form.
Engel followed an unusual path to art. With no family or scholastic exposure to art, he found creativity through skateboarding, which quite literally opened a garage door to his artistic journey. “I had a friend’s house I’d go over to, and his dad had a darkroom that he built in his garage. And so that got me into taking photographs and playing around in the darkroom,” said Engel. “So that was kind of my very first introduction into anything related to art.”
Engel kept returning to photography while working through general education courses at junior college. Everything changed when he transferred to San José State University. There, a drawing class exposed him to a world of creativity that he had not known existed. “When I went there, I met a lot of painters,” said Engel. “I was like, wow, there’s a lot of cool stuff you can do with paint that you really can’t do with photography.”
Engel’s curiosity about figurative art led him to instructor Leroy Parker, who inspired him and became both mentor and close friend. “His approach to the figure and his philosophy on life and on the figure, it just really was inspirational for me,” said Engel. “That really got me into working with the figure and with painting.”
Engel switched his major from photography to the more flexible option of pictorial art, which allowed him to bounce between media and dive headfirst into painting. By the time he returned to San José State to complete his graduate studies, he was firmly hooked on depicting the human figure and its endless possibilities within distortion.
Today, Engel’s process balances structure with freedom. He lays out a loose composition, then lets intuition take over. “I have a starting point. I have sort of a general notion, maybe a loose composition, and then from there, it just kind of happens,” said Engel. “A really important part is to not really know exactly what I’m going to do and to sort of feel my way through it. I really like that idea of spontaneity and of just trying to allow something else to come through where I’m not controlling it as much.” His current works visually echo this mindset. Figures overlap, edges fade into washes of raw color, and shapes stretch and compress like half-remembered dreams. They feel like living organisms growing and stretching beyond his own intentions.
“How do you show transformation? You can’t really see transformation in yourself,” he said. “With my work, I really try to show this sort of fluid space between holding form and dissolving. For me, that’s how you do it.” The theme of transformation lies at the heart of Engel’s work. He traces this interest back to his fascination with psychology, attributing it to Carl Jung’s ideas about self and the fluidity of identity. In Engel’s world, figures and people are never static; they are always on the cusp of becoming something else. His BloomSeries encapsulates this theme: in works like Cross Pollinator and New Skin, humans metamorphose into organic shapes like petals and leaves.
This series draws inspiration from his move from Santa Clara to Walnut Creek in 2020, a shift that drew him away from Silicon Valley’s urban sprawl and closer to nature. “There’s just more nature out here. I think that has a lot of influence as well in my work, just being around plants and trees and flowers and all of that,” Engel said. “It’s kind of creeping into my work. The heads were sort of an extension of heads that I’ve done in the past, but in this case, this metamorphosis of the head shows change and growth and flowering.” Even in his pieces without overt botanical references, the organic feel remains. His newest works tangle human figures or let them drift apart, visual metaphors for how relationships bind and reshape us.
Engel’s painting Drawn Together, Pulled Apart anchors his current exhibition at the Triton Museum, embodying a concept people feel more than speak about. “Drawn Together, Pulled Apart is really about relationships and how we’re affected by other people,” said Engel. “In a relationship, everybody has their own perspective. That interaction with people is really instrumental in how we change and grow individually and as a group.”
For years, Engel focused more on teaching than exhibiting his own work. He has taught art to at-risk youth in alternative schools and juvenile detention centers and has been a college instructor at De Anza College, Mission College, and other Bay Area schools for decades. The students, he says, constantly remind him of how vital it is to feel awkward, even after so many years of creating art. “They’re struggling with it because it’s something new,” Engel said. “It just always reminds me of how I need to be with my own work. If I want to make the work better or different or push it into new territory, I have to be comfortable with that awkwardness.”
Engel has shown work in group exhibitions in New York and Chicago as well as shows closer to home. His recent focus has been on making a name for himself through solo work. During his recent sabbatical, his exhibition Shapeshifters, at Know Future Gallery in Japantown, San Jose, marked a return to the solo stage after so many years of prioritizing the classroom.
With Shifting Terrain, Engel hopes to reach a broader audience and secure gallery representation to help take his work worldwide. “I really want to put my work out there as much as possible and go as far as I can,” said Engel. “The Art Basels or any of the big shows, all of that is definitely what I’m trying to do.” Engel stands on the edge of the next phase of his career, pondering what lies ahead. He lets the brush hush against the canvas once more, capturing what most can feel but rarely see: every form we hold is always shifting, always becoming something new.
“You can’t really separate the work from yourself,” said Engel. “Anything you do is really about yourself.”
In a time of noise, uncertainty, and collective exhaustion, multi-disciplinary abstract artist Sieglinde Van Damme is offering something rare: a visual sanctuary to just breathe.
Sieglinde Van Damme’s path from economist to full-time artist may seem unconventional, but her work reveals a consistent focus: human behavior. Born in Belgium and now based in California, Van Damme brings a thoughtful, introspective lens to her art—one shaped by systems thinking and lived experience. Her guiding mantra, “Re-imagine what else is possible”™, informs both her process and her message.
Working across painting, mixed media, and installation, Van Damme builds her pieces through a slow layering process. Each layer represents a life phase—some joyful, others painful—resulting in textured works that reflect the complexity of personal growth. A recurring element in her practice is the use of white, often applied as a final gesture. For Van Damme, white symbolizes a clean slate: a space to release the past and make room for what’s to come.
In her 2025 solo exhibition, Below the Surface: a life philosophy made visible, at Whitney Modern in Los Gatos, Van Damme presents three recent series that explore these themes. At the center of the gallery is a new mirror installation, offering viewers a literal and metaphorical reflection of themselves within the work.
Each piece in the show is accompanied by a handwritten letter from the artist to its future owner. These notes share the emotional landscape behind the work and express her hopes for its place in someone else’s life—adding a rare layer of intimacy to the viewing experience.
Below the Surface: a life philosophy made visible is part of Whitney Modern’s 2025 exhibition calendar. For gallery hours and information, visit whitneymodern.com.
#1 – “B U R (S) T (H)” – ink and acrylics on photograph on canvas, 40 x 60 x 1.5 inches #2 – “Dance of What If”, acrylics and oil on canvas, 36 x 24 x 1.5 inches #3 – “Below the Surface”, acrylics and oil on canvas, 48 x 40 x 1.5 inches
The vibrancy of San Jose’s creative culture can be found on its streets, in its art galleries, infused in local businesses, and in the work of neighbors who use creativity to connect, reflect, and inspire. The City of San Jose’s Creative Ambassador program awards artists who champion the power of creative expression. Chosen for their commitment to an artistic practice and community engagement, these ambassadors represent a wide range of disciplines and cultural perspectives that capture the city’s creative pulse.
Selected by the City of San Jose’s Office of Cultural Affairs through a competitive panel process, each ambassador begins a yearlong role dedicated to uplifting local voices through public art projects, workshops, and storytelling. Their projects are rooted in the neighborhoods of San Jose and are designed to invite hands-on participation from residents, meeting people where they are and inviting them to participate. Whether through film photography, collaborative murals, theater, or zine-making, the ambassadors’ projects offer opportunities for all residents to tap into their unique creative voices and to see their city and each other with fresh eyes.
Their work reminds us that art belongs everywhere—it lives in community.
For Matthew Casey, the journey to theater was accidental but transformative. Initially attending San José State University for ecology, he later found interest in political science, drawn to the study of human ecosystems. Meanwhile, he was getting increasingly involved in theater, taking on leadership positions that would define his artistic trajectory.
As a production manager for San Jose Stage Company and More Más Marami Arts, Matthew is dedicated to creating meaningful, community-oriented theater. More Más Marami was established in 2008 to help expand access to the performing arts in the South Bay. He explains, “We were all trying to break into the performing industry, but in the South Bay, where there isn’t really a big scene, it’s difficult to get in. So we created a space for ourselves.”
Since its establishment, More Más Marami has been a platform for experimentation in the arts. Their regular programming includes six weeks of script development for local writers that culminate in a staged reading with a director and full cast. Matthew says, “It’s been great to see it evolve from simply developing scripted work to developing full performance pieces.”
As part of his role at More Más Marami, Matthew spearheads the Bay Area Story Archive, a project launched in 2019 to document personal histories from San Jose residents. He is inspired by his own family roots in New Mexico, where multi-generational connections are the cornerstone of local identity and wishes to see that replicated in San Jose.
As an artist, Matthew describes his work as maximalist and sensorial. His signature style isn’t just directing or producing, but curating immersive experiences. He says, “I want to create interesting things with people I care about. For me, theater is about connection between artists, audiences, and the places they inhabit.”
Tasi Alabastro uncovered the definition of “flâneur,” a French word that describes a man of urban affluence who can wander and observe urban life, while working on a play called “Three Days of Rain.” In his own life, Tasi views being a flâneur as walking around his hometown of San Jose, being present, looking at murals, and occasionally running into people he knows. He uses walking as a way to process creative problems or gather thoughts. That ability to be an observer is reflected in his work as an actor, visual artist, writer, and director.
Tasi’s observant nature extends to his art as he drifts between roles as an actor, director, and photographer. However, his journey into the performing arts was anything but conventional. Originally a microbiology major at San Francisco State, Tasi left for Hawaii after a breakup to help with his brother’s business. By chance, he discovered acting when he walked into the dark black box theater, and something about the environment – the smell, the nervous energy of other students – intrigued him. He became drawn to the competitive aspect of the class, where everyone had a chance to perform. His curiosity and desire to “make something out of nothing” attracted him to acting. The class sparked his interest in performing arts and became a turning point in his creative journey.
Creating an atmosphere of connection and inclusion through performance has also become core to his work. Tasi traces his care for the audience back to growing up in American Samoa, where the island community must rely heavily on one another. He also notes that humor and performance can be ways of coping with challenging circumstances like natural disasters in Samoan culture. In contrast to feeling like an outsider during his school years, the culture of inclusion encourages Tasi to create experiences through his work where everyone feels welcome and can participate.
Tasi’s multifaceted career spans acting, directing, stage design, and photography. He was featured in “Yes, We’re Open,” a film on Prime Video where he worked with Perry Shen, an actor he had admired since his early blogging days. Another pivotal role was in a City Lights Theater Company production of “Three Days of Rain,” where he tackled the challenge of portraying two contrasting characters—a neurotic son and his reserved father. These roles were pivotal in helping Tasi grow as a performer and expand his understanding of his craft. Currently, Tasi is working toward creating a graphic novel that combines his interests in theater, illustration, and storytelling.
In this conversation, Tasi shares his unlikely transition from science to the stage, how his upbringing in American Samoa influenced his perspective on community, and his thoughts on fostering inclusion within the arts while embracing his identity as an occasional outsider.
Join Tasi Alabastro on July 26, 2025, at San Jose Stage for The Contemporary Asian Theater Scene’s (CATS) second annual Playwright Festival. This year’s festival proudly features five newly commissioned 10-minute plays by a dynamic mix of emerging and established AAPI playwrights. Under the direction of Artistic Producer Jeffrey Lo, these staged readings are brought to life by AAPI actors and directors, including Tasi, committed to bold, authentic storytelling. Get Tickets.
Artists and students gathered on the campus of West Valley College in Saratoga to showcase their work at the college’s annual STEAM’D Fest. 2025 marked the fourth year of collaboration between Content Magazine and The Cilker School of Art & Design in producing The Cilker Grad EXPO and Pick-Up Party 17.3, “Perform,” which celebrated the latest issue of the magazine.
Before the main event and Pick-Party began on May 16, 2025, college students attended a networking event. With portfolios in hand, they practiced their elevator pitches and shared their coursework with industry professionals from various fields, invited by Content Magazine. Adding to the pre-party festivities, a mobile screenprinting press run by OaxaCali Studio supplied visitors with commemorative tote bags and shirts with the Cilker School of Art and Design’s logo. Attendees lined up excited to receive their EXPO swag.
At 7p, nearly everyone on campus made their way down an incline led by string lights to the college’s visual arts building; they followed the sound of a music duo, MindFi, comprised of guitarist Mark Arroyo and vocalist Kia Fay Donovan, and were greeted The Content Magazine check-in table, guest received food and drink tickets, and picked up their copy of the new magazine.
Art lovers cycled in and out of the glass facades of the visual arts buildings, enjoying student work in one gallery and a pop-up exhibition featuring artists from the pages of the magazine in the other. The blend of magazine members and college supporters made the event feel like a party hosted for the city, as all ages enjoyed the artwork and snacks on a crisp Friday evening.
Mild Monk, previously featured in Issue 12.0, “Discover,” performed a rare live performance in front of a massive 12 ft wide King157 backdrop featuring the magazine’s name and his iconic graffiti characters. The piece, produced in partnership with 1Culture Gallery for the Winter 2025 edition of Content, was hauled in and built for the event. At the same time, attendees snacked on ice cream and churros from food trucks.
In the theater behind the stage, students practiced their sales skills at booths set up like an art fair, selling stickers, ceramics, crochet pieces, and art prints.
After Mild Monk wrapped their half-hour set, attendees migrated upstairs to a beautiful second-story courtyard to experience the annual Cilker Fashion Design fashion showcase, which began fashionably late and had more attendees standing than sitting. As models strutted down and around the square catwalk, the designs were met with complete attention and applause.
Student designs brought a wide variety of wardrobes to the show, with some resembling those from the set of Dune and others looking red-carpet ready. With thick eyeliner and confident strides, the models presented themselves to an enthusiastic crowd, some sporting trailing capes and knit face masks, as the designers concluded the scheduled portion of the evening with a bow.
Join us on Thursday, August 21, 2025, at CURA Contemporary gallery in Morgan Hill for Pick-Up Party 17.4, “Profiles”. The party will celebrate the artist featured in the issue, including the 2025 Content Emerging Artist Awardees, and feature a pop-up gallery, live music, and food and drink from Véra restaurant and its master chef’s curated menu. The party will be produced in partnership with CURA contemporary, The Gilroy Foundation, Heritage Bank, and The City of Morgan Hill.
Join South FIRST FRIDAYS ArtWalk SJ on Friday, June 6, and Saturday, June 7, for the 16th Annual SubZERO Festival to celebrate local subcultures of art, music, craft, and tech in San Jose’s SoFA District. This two-day celebration features outdoor stages, vendors, artists, designers, musicians, and performers, forming a creative mashup of indie spirit and innovation.
When Cherri Lakey and Brian Eder first launched Two Fish Design, their plan wasn’t just to continue their graphic design work—it was to build something radically different. Inspired by a yin-yang logo of two fish swimming upstream, the duo adopted the motto: “Those who swim against the stream come to the source.” This philosophy of challenging the status quo and seeing what others overlook became the heartbeat of their now-iconic creative ventures: Anno Domini Gallery, Kaleid Gallery, Phantom Galleries, South FIRST FRIDAYS, and SubZERO Festival.
When they chose San Jose over the more established art hubs like San Francisco, they saw possibility within the void. San Jose could be viewed as a cultural wasteland at the time, but Brian and Cherri were determined to see what others didn’t. While Anno Domini Gallery started slow with its first show, its second, featuring a young Shepard Fairey, was electric, with a crowd forming around the block. That spark expanded their vision to include impact-driven experiments, such as Shark Bite Art, a massive public art initiative that raised $300,000 for local nonprofits while paying artists fairly.
To Brian and Cherri, Anno Domini was never just a gallery; It was “The Second Coming of Art and Design” —a sanctuary for street art, counterculture, and art as activism. Their curatorial philosophy is radical yet straightforward in that they curate the artists rather than the work. This belief in autonomy and trust, especially toward first-time or nontraditional creators, allowed for a space where raw and urban voices could thrive. Furthermore, when opportunities were scarce, they launched Phantom Galleries with the intention of revitalizing downtown San Jose by transforming empty storefronts into art spaces and creating safe environments for all artists.
The SubZERO Festival emerged from this same impulse. What began in 2006 as the “Street Market,” a simple stage and vendor tables outside the gallery, has grown into a flagship celebration of subculture and creative rebellion. Today, SubZERO offers a platform for emerging voices and unconventional formats, featuring experimental fashion shows, live music, and interactive installations that present raw, accessible art.
In this conversation, Brian and Cherri recount their journey from design to street art, their curatorial risks, the birth of SubZERO, and how they continue their hand in shaping San Jose’s cultural ecosystem.
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
“I think instrumental music is the most compassionate form of music, because it listens to what you’re feeling instead of telling you how to feel.”
As a teen, Yvette Young dreamed of being in a band. But while studying performing arts education and fine arts at UCLA, she dreamed of showcasing work in a gallery. During the day, Yvette taught afterschool art classes in Cupertino and Sunnyvale, and for a short while even did tattoos.
Ironically, art school taught her to break the rules. During peer critiques, she and her classmates trained to stand in front of the class and explain the choices in their paintings. “I learned that nobody can argue with ‘because I wanted to,’ ” she says. “There’s so many resources out there telling you the right way to do something, but at the end of the day, it’s okay to do something you want to do because you want to.”
Eventually, this would guide her through the darkest tunnels in the music industry. But first, she fortified others as they asserted their own voices. As a portfolio coach helping high schoolers apply to art school, she often found herself asking them: “Cool, I know your mom wants you to go to Stanford, but what do you want to do? It’s not your mom’s life, it’s yours.”
Yvette understood the battles they were facing. In her childhood, on top of achieving perfect grades at school, she prepped for piano competitions up to four hours a day—unsupervised. No sleepovers, and no shows. Thankfully, there was MySpace, and Yvette found local bands online. She snuck out to shows and made friends there. But at sixteen, buckling under the intense pressure to compete, Yvette developed an eating disorder and got pulled out of school.
While in the hospital, her parents bought her a guitar. “I’m so thankful to them for that,” she says. Though her upbringing was relentlessly driven by her parents’ dream to raise a classical prodigy, Yvette appreciates that her parents introduced her to different forms of art. “I think the best thing you can do is to expose your kid to a lot of different art forms, and then teach them that they are autonomous,” she shares.
As Yvette taught herself to play acoustic guitar, her own music took shape—intricate and meditative, but also “angular and surprising.” She delighted in the way it amplified anything she felt. “Lyrics are good at telling you how to feel, right? It dictates the mood of the song in general,” she says. “But I think instrumental music is the most compassionate form of music. It listens to what you’re feeling instead of telling you how to feel.”
She also wanted to subvert stereotypes. “I kind of detested the thought that people would hear my gender through my music.” At the time, witnessing a tendency for women to be written off as singers, Yvette didn’t want to be pocketed into a singer-songwriter genre like “coffee shop core.”
In early 2014, Yvette released her first EP Acoustics. Still an art teacher living in San Jose, she started a band with friends—the first iteration of Covet. With her virtuosic style in the spotlight, Covet grew to prominence in the math rock scene. Two years later, they were on tour. But when one of her bandmate’s behavior became erratic, Yvette had to lean on her closest friends as she navigated the hostile work environment that Covet had become for her.
“I never thought that I would have to devote my energy to a legal battle. I was like, ‘Yo, I just wanna write music.’ ” While playing at Bonnaroo, in Tennessee, she had a breakdown backstage. When she looked up, she was surprised to hear clapping. “They were like, welcome, you’ve passed the rite of passage!” she recalls. Her peers in the guitar community assured her: “Everyone goes through this once in their career. Everyone gets deceived at some point…it’s just how the industry works, unfortunately.”
Yvette took about two years to extricate herself from the situation. Instead of trashing the project, she brought in a new drummer and bassist in 2022 and plans to continue touring with them. “Covet represents a little bit of my past where I still love it to death,” she says. “Guitar riffage? Hell yeah!”
But just as playing guitar for herself—all those years ago—led her to fall back in love with piano and violin, Yvette is following her curiosity towards her present interests. “The key to staying an artist isn’t curating who you are to what people expect of you,” she says. “It’s actually supposed to be the opposite.”
Lately, Yvette’s been falling in love with music production—creating soundscapes with violin, trumpet, or cello. She’s interested in supporting a larger narrative, versus being the front person. “I can work behind the scenes and actually become even more fulfilled artistically,” she says. Between long, lazy drives to her home in the mountains and joyful afternoons creating field recordings, “I’m just trying to figure out how I can stay home more, tour a little less, and just pursue what I actually find really fulfilling.”
MindFi Performance of “The Many Faces of Men” in Content Black Backdrop at the end of this post.
What happens when a hair salon becomes a stage, a friendship becomes a band, and a guitar and voice create a whole universe of sound?
MindFi is a genre-bending musical duo formed by Kia Fay and Mark Arroyo. Combining their unique talents, they have created something they describe as a wireless mind connection, a performance philosophy, and a creative community rooted in the heart of San Jose’s Japantown.
The name MindFi is a play on “Wi-Fi for your mind,” and that is exactly what their music feels like—tapping into an unseen, deeply intuitive frequency between two artists who listen as much as they play. Born from a long-standing friendship and shared vision for musical purity, the project came to life post-COVID, blending logistical simplicity with artistic depth. With just guitar and vocals, they challenge themselves to make music that feels expansive, spontaneous, and emotionally raw.
MindFi’s core performance takes place on the last Wednesday evening of every month at The Curl Consultant, Kia’s salon-turned-sound-lab on Jackson Street in Japantown. What makes MindFi especially captivating is their intentionality. Every element—from the curated audience and the timing of their Wednesday shows to their strategic approach to growth—is designed to create connection and community. The band values intimate live performances and how each set is never quite the same. Each breath, mistake, and laugh becomes part of the show, immersing listeners in the moment and the music.
Their sound is the product of weekly rehearsals, conversations, active listening, and an ongoing “what if” approach to creation: what if we play this differently? What if we strip it down? What if we rebuild it entirely? Whether covering Depeche Mode with just a guitar and voice or experimenting with chord voicings and layered effects, their goal is always to make the music feel full beyond what most would expect of a duo.
While this collaboration between artists was long in the making, Kia received a 2025 San Jose Jazz Jazz Aid Fund commissioning grant, which acted as an accelerator for the project’s artistic vision. The fund validated their presence in the local arts scene and gave them the resources to launch MindFi with autonomy and intention. They continue to grow the project on their own terms—developing recordings, videos, and plans for future performances—while bypassing the traditional struggle of new bands constantly chasing gigs.
In this conversation, Kia and Mark reveal their approach to music as a creative outlet, a community hub, and a sonic experiment. They discuss their careers making art in other contexts and how MindFi is a place where they decompress, reconnect, and remember why they fell in love with music in the first place.
Experience MindFi’s sound at Pick-Up Party 17.3 on May 16, 2025 at West Valley College. They will be opening the event at 7p. You can also experience their magic at The Curl Consultant every last Wednesday of the month in Japantown. RSVP.
The San José State University (SJSU) Master of Fine Arts 2024-2025 cohort presents their Lift Off 2025 group exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art San José, curated by Zoe Latzer. The group exhibition, titled Who ‘am’ I, without you? will be displayed in a two-part exhibition. Part 1 opened on April 4, 2025, at ICA San José, and the second exhibition opened on June 19, 2025.
In addition to their solo thesis exhibitions, SJSU MFA Candidates participate in a group exhibition and collaborate with MA Candidates in Art History and Visual Culture to create the annual Lift Off Catalogue. Hosted in 2025 at the ICA San José, the twelve students showcase a wide range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital art, and multidisciplinary installations.
Part 1: April 4th, 2025 – June 8, 2025 Participating Artists: Andrew Marovich, Chelsea Stewart, Erin de Jauregui, Mary Morse, Samantha Saldana, and Timna Naim. (Profiles in a previous post)
Part 2: June 19, 2025 – August 24, 2025 Participating Artists: Michelle Frey, Xiao Wu, Lisa Heikka-Huber, Mona Farrokhi, Sam Swenor, and Shea Windberg. (Profiles below)
Michelle Frey is a visual designer, painter, and installation artist working in San José, California, and completing her MFA at San Jose State University. Her provisional pictorial prints and sculptures are gestural extensions of her thoughts in tactile mediums, as well as site-specific exhibits. Frey vacillates between figuration, observation, and abstraction in paint, paper, wood, and pewter. Her work responds to the effects of current events, unseen caregiving, and labor that keep families and the environment functioning. Her current art practice focuses on interactively sharing aesthetic rituals of processing grief and the gravity of loss through various materials.
Xiao Wu is a digital media artist currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts at San Jose State University. His skill set spans various areas, including coding, real-time interactive multimedia programming, web interactions, and AI.
He reflects on subtle changes in societal norms and the impact of technology on daily life. By experimenting with new technologies and aesthetics, he aims to translate his thoughts into tangible objects and spaces while also exploring and redefining the boundaries of digital media.
By integrating cutting-edge technologies into his art, Xiao aims to push the boundaries of digital media and engage audiences in meaningful experiences.
Lisa Heikka-Huber is a transdisciplinary artist working on her MFA in Spatial Art at San José State University. Born in Los Angeles, CA, Lisa comes from a family of accomplished sculptors. She moved to the Washington, D.C. area for high school before returning to California to pursue her studies in glass blowing at Shasta College. She holds a BFA in Sculpture and Small Metals, a BA in Political Science focused on global water policy, a Museum and Gallery Practices certificate, a minor in Art History and in Scientific Diving from Cal Poly Humboldt.
In addition to her MFA studies, Lisa is pursuing an MA in Social Sciences through Cal Poly Humboldt’s Environment and Community graduate program, where she continues to explore the intersections of art, science, and environmental advocacy.
Shea Windberg is a contemporary photographer who engages with an experimental and process-driven approach to the film medium. Blurring the boundaries between photography and abstract painting, Windberg uses analog techniques such as reprinting, re-photographing, burning, and chemical manipulation to create richly textured, highly caustic images that explore memory, anxiety, materiality, and impermanence. Their work challenges traditional notions of photography as a documentary medium, instead emphasizing the transformative potential of material process and the instability of perception. Windberg conveys a chaotic, anxious, and raw condition of being through the deployment of abstracted, deteriorating images that consist of industrial landscapes, fragmented bodies, and a world on the precipice of consuming itself.
Through digital media, graphic design, and professional knowledge of corporate marketing and communications, Sam Swenor builds graphic systems that take a stand, hold information, educate others, and communicate visual messages through digital and physical touchpoints. Her work operates in the space of institutional critique as it pertains to artifacts that have been displaced through time, with a focus on Hellenic antiquity.
Sam Swenor currently works at eBay as Lead Designer, Global Communications and as a Lecturer at San José State in the Department of Design. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Graphic Design from Chapman University in 2017, and she graduated with her Master of Fine Arts in Digital Media Art from San José State University in the fall of 2024.
Mona Farrokhi is a multidisciplinary artist and designer whose work explores visual noise, sensory distortion, and interactive technology. Trained in industrial design and based in the Bay Area by way of Tehran, she blends procedural visuals, projection mapping, and spatial systems to investigate how perception breaks down—how glitches, hallucinations, and interference shape self-image.
Her installations utilize tools such as TouchDesigner, StreamDiffusion, and Kinect sensors to track bodies, process image data, and fragment reality in real-time. Projects like DOYOUSEEitNOW and The NOISE I See examine neurological and optical phenomena such as visual snow and derealization.
Her approach is both technical and personal—built by hand, wired from scratch, and shaped by feedback, distortion, and the tension between presence and misrecognition.
The San José State University (SJSU) Master of Fine Arts 2024-2025 cohort presents their Lift Off 2025 group exhibition at The Institute of Contemporary Art San José, curated by Zoe Latzer. The group exhibition, titled Who ‘am’ I, without you? will be displayed in a two-part exhibition, which opened on April 4, 2025, at ICA San José, with the second exhibition to follow in summer 2025.
In addition to their solo thesis exhibitions, SJSU MFA Candidates participate in a group exhibition and collaborate with MA Candidates in Art History and Visual Culture to create the annual Lift Off Catalogue. Hosted in 2025 at the ICA San José, the twelve students showcase a wide range of mediums, including painting, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, photography, digital art, and multidisciplinary installations.
Zoë Latzer, Curator and Director of Public Programs at ICA San José, presents a question from Judith Butler’s Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence: Who ‘Am’ I Without You? as the title for the San José State University 2025 MFA exhibition. In the context of the Anthropocene and the sixth extinction—a time defined by both devastation and interconnection- the MFA graduates all explore and grapple with their understanding of being artists during a time of technological advancements and socio-political turmoil.
Andrew Marovich is an MFA in Spatial Art whose work addresses questions of process, puzzles, and riddles. He is a skilled craftsman and mixes media, but always comes back to working with hand-done metalworking processes.
Chelsea Stewart was born in 1997 in San Mateo County, CA. She lives in San Mateo and works in Palo Alto, CA. Stewart is currently attending San José State University while working towards her MFA in Spatial Arts. Stewart completed a residency in the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, CA, and currently works as the Gallery Manager at the Pamela Walsh Gallery in downtown Palo Alto.
She was a 2022 Content Emerging Artist Awardee and featured in Content Magazine’s issue 14.3, “Perform,” published by SVCreates, as well as in issue 12.4.
Erin de Jauregui is an MFA Candidate in Photography who focuses his work on time, place, and storytelling. His work takes the viewer on a journey to see the world through an unimaginable perspective. He will be showing photographs that challenge perceptions and tell innovative stories.
Mary Morse is an MFA candidate in Spatial Arts at San José State University, working in various mediums while exploring texture, color, and memory in her work. Her interdisciplinary approach enables her to create work that is unique, introspective, and innovative. She is showcasing work that combines soft materials and rigid forms in felt, incorporating painting and metalwork into her installations.
Samantha Saldana is a lens-based interdisciplinary artist whose scholarship explores community social justice issues, identity, family relationships, and intersectionality. Saldana is a graduate of the Visual and Public Art Department at California State University, Monterey Bay, and is currently an MFA candidate in the Photography Program at San Jose State University.
Saldana’s work engages accessibility to arts education, advocacy, and mentorship opportunities.
Timna Naim is an MFA candidate in Spatial Arts whose work is playful, tactical, and socially engaging. They work primarily in clay and utilize performance, social practice, and experimental glazing techniques to make the fantastical tangible. See their performance art, ceramics, sculpture, and installation at ICA San Jose.
Gilroy, California, often known as the “Garlic Capital of the World,” holds a rich cultural tapestry that extends far beyond its famous crop. Nestled in the heart of Santa Clara Valley, Gilroy is a town where agricultural roots blend with creativity.
The city’s growing community of artists, musicians, and creators is carving out space for art within its evolving culture. From public murals that reflect the town’s history to local art collectives chanting diverse voices, Gilroy’s art scene is blossoming and ready to share its unique voice.
One of Gilroy’s prominent artists and art advocates is Joey Castaneda, a fourth-generation native who discovered his passion for art at a young age. His love for tattoos, along with inspiration from his uncle José, drove Joey to bring his artwork to life by getting his first tattoo when he was just 14. By the time he was 15, Joey was deeply immersed in the world of tattooing. He quickly dove into the craft by exploring various styles and developing his skills.
Adopting the name Chokotattoos, Joey took his tattooing journey to the next level. Although he started with drawing as his first art medium, his true calling as a tattoo artist emerged during an apprenticeship with a friend. This pivotal experience allowed Joey to refine his craft, transitioning from casual experimentation to professional expertise. He quickly mastered various styles, including traditional, fine-line, and black-and-gray work, each of which requires a unique blend of precision and creativity.
Reflecting on his growth, Joey recognizes the importance of timing and mentorship in his development. His ability to adapt and learn from others has become a cornerstone of his success, fueling both his personal growth and his contributions to the artistic community. He shares, “Being in the right place at the right time and learning from the older generation, I feel like all the styles I learned early on were crucial to my career today.”
When Joey creates art, he explores a genre called Chicano surrealism, which draws inspiration from dreams and the unseen aspects of life. For Joey, the journey of art is never-ending. New mediums continually appear on the horizon, and he is eager to explore airbrushing and ceramics as his next craft. “I try everything if I can, especially if there is someone there who knows it well. If they want to teach me, I’ll sit and try it out and give it my best,” he says.
After serving in the army, Joey’s passion for tattooing remained strong. Yet his desire to amplify the voice of artists in his community grew even stronger. Together with his wife, Jade, he founded the Shades of Brown Alliance (SOBA), an alliance dedicated to providing resources, opportunities, and work for local artists. Serving as SOBA’s collective founder and executive director, Joey’s mission is rooted in the culture of the Gilroy community. Beyond SOBA’s mission, Joey is committed to nurturing the next generation of artists by helping them become self-sufficient and ensuring they receive the recognition they deserve. His goal is to empower artists to fully utilize the resources available to them and to embrace growth and appreciation for their talents.
A major challenge SOBA deals with is exploitation. That’s because the community in Gilroy often lacks knowledge on how to approach art commissions to ensure that work is fairly valued and compensated. Compared to San Jose, Joey believes that Gilroy lags 10 years behind in terms of its artist community.
To create opportunities for SOBA’s artists, the organization helps iron out pay discrepancies, streamline invoicing, and equips artists with necessary tools. Joey explains that “most of the time artists sell themselves short. Even though they know their work is worth $300, they will say they can do it for $50. If you keep this pattern going, you are not going to the next level.”
The organization also hosts bi-monthly meetings, which alternate between board meetings and artist networking sessions. Workshops that would provide opportunities for artists to learn figurative drawing, spray painting, and more are in the works for the coming year.
SOBA brings the community together through events that showcase a vibrant mix of culture and creativity, from vinyl DJs and lowrider enthusiasts to a diverse group of vendors and artists. These collective efforts are central to SOBA’s fundraising initiatives, which support both the artists and the community. SOBA embraces a wide range of artistic expressions, from traditional art forms to more unconventional ones, like baking and tattooing. Currently, Joey’s vision for SOBA is to secure larger and more impactful projects for the artists to expand their reach and influence while embracing a stronger, more connected community of artists. For example, SOBA is in the process of securing fiscal sponsorship through Local Color, which will provide the group with opportunities to grow.
In collaboration with Emily McEwan-Upright, founder of 6th Street Studios & Art Center and 1202 Contemporary gallery, Joey’s next major project for SOBA is a large mural that will serve as a centerpiece for the Youth Mentorship Program and will emphasize nurturing the next generation of artists. Known for its vibrant support of the arts community, 6th Street Studios & Art Center offers a range of resources, from rental spaces and art classes to creative programs. The center also leads youth mentorship initiatives and cultivates creativity across all ages and skill levels. Through their shared vision, Joey and Emily aim to foster a strong, inclusive artistic community that uplifts local and marginalized voices.
Joey’s deep-rooted connection to Gilroy drives his passion for supporting local artists. For him, providing these resources is a personal mission to uplift the community. While Joey envisions expanding SOBA beyond Gilroy, he remains committed to making his hometown the heart of the collective. Joey envisions the town as not only the birthplace of SOBA but also as a cultural hub whose unique character and artistic contributions are celebrated. Gilroy’s identity will anchor SOBA’s growth, allowing it to influence and inspire both local and regional art communities.
Elena Sharkova balances her baton deftly on the tip of her finger, demonstrating the balancing act that is her life. “I consider myself fearless,” she says. “I’m not aggressive, I just roll my ‘R’s.”
Ever since she emigrated to the U.S. from her hometown of St. Petersburg, Sharkova has been learning how to juggle her expectations and her enthusiasm. Coming from a world of subsidized art performed only by highly educated professionals, she needed to learn to temper her approach to suit American choruses. Sharkova felt that she had lost that balance when she taught at San Jose State. Telling students that they could teach orchestra, band, and choir simultaneously felt disingenuous—quality demands time.
As she explains to her singers at Symphony Silicon Valley Chorale, where she serves as Chorale Director, “Mozart did not write one requiem for amateurs and another for professionals. There is only one.” Sharkova knows that her singers have families and demanding jobs, “but half of them sing 90 minutes of Verdi by heart. Can you imagine how much they practice?”
Breaking through the glass ceiling as a female conductor was not easy, especially behind the Iron Curtain. Because her career options were so limited in Russia, Sharkova now feels compelled to talk with children, their parents, and teachers about music and reaching their potential. As an inspirational speaker, she tells people not to “just marinate in your own mediocrity.” Too many of her audiences consider the arts to be just the ‘cherry on the top’ of an education.
Sharkova is also artistic director for Cantabile Singers of Silicon Valley, a youth chorus with 300 singers aged four to eighteen. Although it is challenging to accomplish her goals in just one rehearsal per week, the children rise to the level of her high expectations, despite their heavy academic schedules.
Curiosity drives each facet of her life and she has no patience for singers that do not share her thirst for knowledge. In Russia, “you took a train to the public library and you dared to ask for a dictionary. The librarian would follow you and ask what you are translating.” She gestures at her phone and says,” Now it takes 0.2 seconds on Google. I timed it.”
Ultimately, Sharkova admits, her balance is found in the music. “Musicians are explorers of the human heart. Nobody cares what you do from 9 to 5. You have a two-minute chance for the audience to fall in love.”
The Coterie Den is a multimedia space in Japantown, San Jose that differs from other studio spaces and venues in the area. It’s a multimedia space that resembles Eric Foreman’s basement from That 70’s Show, a place that’s made for artists to feel comfortable in. “Friendly, welcoming, creative” is how Coterie Den audio engineer Isandro describes it. Down a narrow set of stairs—walls covered in classic album covers—is a multimedia space that includes a recording studio, a sound stage for live performances, a photography studio, and six hungry and talented artists who help keep the creative engine running.
The Coterie Den consists of rapper and owner Lucas Millan (aka “L James”), lead audio engineer Isandro Biaco, photographer and videographer Danny Cardona, web and graphic designer Wyatt Perkins, intern audio engineer Angel Cabebe (aka “Mac”), and graphic designer Bryan Reed—six different personalities from various backgrounds with one common goal: to grow themselves and the artists they work with. “Trying to get out of the harsh reality and make our lives better,” Mac says when asked what influences him and the rest of the Den to work hard and make The Coterie Den a hub for San Jose. Each member of the team is unique: Isandro moved to San Jose from the Philippines. Wyatt is a 19-year-old former skater who showed up to Coterie Den and ended up developing their website and now runs the business side. “I see [The Coterie Den] the same as skating: take that risky jump down some stairs, take that risky jump in life. It’s all the same,” Wyatt says. Dan, a gym rat who does CrossFit competitions and creates gym content, joined the team as a photography intern. A year later, he’s done photography for various artists and even some 49ers players. Brian, a former tagger, is now able to produce artwork that provides a legal income through graphic design. Lastly is Mac, the latest member to join the team as an audio engineer. Bringing people out of their element and networking in a very direct way is a big part of Coterie Den. L James describes it as a “gym feeling,” where artists visit to get their reps in. “If you’re hungry, here’s a real opportunity,” L James says.
“I see The Coterie Den the same as skating: take that risky jump down some stairs, take that risky jump in life. It’s all the same.” – Wyatt Perkins
The space is bookings-based, unless the team has their own projects to work on. Every month, the Den hosts three open mic nights to keep that feeling of repetition going for participating artists. During these nights, an artist can sharpen their tongue in front of other creatives, which can result in a song being made and later recorded at The Coterie Den. Another monthly event hosted by the Den is a thrift and vintage market. These events are intended to bring people to the space and show artists that the Den can be a creative home where similar people are looking for a creative community. In the past, groups in the valley chose to be gatekeepers instead of building with other creatives in the city. The Coterie Den wants to bring a more unselfish vibe to the creative scene in Silicon Valley. “Extending the web” is how the group describes their space. Their location next to Jubo Clothing’s Coldwater store and partnerships with EMLN, SJ Foo’s, Tankshop, among others, is an example of the web they are expanding. Even with their quick rise, they see their growth as a step-by-step process.
Even though the Den has every means for an artist to make a project, promote it, and grow their creative business, the crew at Coterie Den is honest enough to say that it’s too early to become a record label or to start managing artists. The Den, as of right now, is about growing what they have and ensuring good time management. “The house isn’t built, but we see the foundation and structure from the bricks we put in place.” L James says. “Expansion is on our minds, and it starts with us too, mastering ourselves so that we’ll be able to expand, mastering our own systems, mastering the open mics, mastering our thrift markets, mastering our recording services, mastering our photography services—expanding using our systems that we already have put in place.”
In 1977, the New York club CBGB was famous for being the home of punk rock. Bands like Blondie, the Ramones, and Sex Pistols didn’t just perform there during the early years, they also bonded and became a family. CBGB is also where Andy Warhol met the Velvet Underground and formed their relationship. For San Jose, The Coterie Den has that same energy, a place where artists can come together and, as L James says, “get their reps in.” The Den is a creative gym where artists can grow and build on top of what already makes them unique. The web they’re expanding doesn’t just stop in San Jose. They look to hopefully have a Den in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. But until then, the team wants to create the place where people from both inside and outside of San Jose come to sharpen their skills and connect with other artists like them. The Coterie Den is a creative gym growing a new generation of artists.
We have to be able to do something musically that speaks to people that don’t speak the same language. –Jason Eckl
Every year, the San Jose Jazz Summer Fest pushes musical boundaries by booking diverse acts that break the mold of what listeners know as jazz music. The 2016 lineup is no exception. Soul, blues, and hip-hop artists add variety to a lengthy list of heavyweight jazz performers and rising stars. In spite of the seemingly vast genre gap between some of the artists, the San Francisco Bay Area’s own Dirty Cello is proof that all performers at the Summer Fest share a common respect for the jazz tradition.
Founding members Rebecca Roudman, cello, and Jason Eckl, guitar, have both established themselves as accomplished classical musicians in the Bay Area, playing and writing for the Santa Rosa and Oakland symphonies. As proficient as they are with classical music, the couple’s true passion lies in American folk and blues traditions. In 2011, they decided to channel their creative unrest into an experimental collaboration.
“We played around with all sorts of ideas,” Eckl recalls, “but now we’ve happened upon this whole mix of blues, jazz, a little bit of bluegrass—all featuring lead cello. Hence the name Dirty Cello.”
In addition to cello and guitar, Dirty Cello features Colin Williams on bass and Anthony Petrocchi on drums. The band, however, isn’t always limited to the quartet. Following the jazz and blues tradition, the couple believes in handpicking local players to supplement the quartet’s live shows. Whether these musical mercenaries consist of a few horn players or an entire orchestra, the couple makes sure they find people who “aren’t only great players, but nice people.”
Five years after Dirty Cello’s inception, the band has traveled as far as Europe and China. After experiencing a language barrier between the audience and the stage in other countries, Eckl learned, “We have to be able to do something musically that speaks to people that don’t speak the same language.” The band members’ expressive body language and the universality of the blues help them connect with both international and American audiences.
As Bay Area natives, the band has already graced multiple San Jose music hubs, including Café Stritch and the SoFA Festival. “We feel like we owe a lot to the Bay Area,” Eckl reflects. “There are still new horizons and new things to do.”
One way Dirty Cello gives back to their audience is their sensitive approach to their set list. At the drop of a dime, they can change their set based on audience response. “It’s not about us; it’s about sharing [the experience] with the audience,” says Roudman, who recognizes the need to adapt on the fly. This concept of a “flexible set list” will be put to the test during their August 14 performance at the Jade Leaf Lounge.
Their set promises to embrace the familiar sounds of blues and folk with an unfamiliar instrumentation. Listeners will leave saying, “I didn’t know a cello could do that!”
Ben Henderson has soared enough of the sparkling sky to pick out the stars of highest importance—mental health over stardom, family over fame, and art that is slow in the making.
If you have gone downtown for any of life’s simple delights—grabbed a coffee or pastry, sipped a beer while DJs spun vinyl, bought tickets to the jazz festival, joined a bike party, or booed a performer off the stage at the Go Go Gone Show—chances are you showed up because you saw Ben Henderson’s artwork.
A painter and designer by trade, Ben’s collective resume of posters, signs, and murals tell a unique history of the ways we gather in the South Bay. His custom designs welcome both first-timers and old-comers to the unique atmospheres of Park Station Hashery, Chromatic Coffee, O’Flaherty’s Irish Pub, and SoFA Market. From an elegant reproduction of Hotel De Anza’s famous Diving Diva on its windows, to the vintage lettering on Palo Alto Fine Wine & Spirits; from the hip facade of Good Karma Artisan Ales & Cafe, to the cherry-red exterior of Sweetdragon Baking Company, Ben’s handiwork identifies cherished local businesses and brightens the streets they occupy.
In 2017, Ben started Brush House, a catchall name for projects that he was increasingly sharing with other artists as they scaled in size and overlapped in timelines. As he continued to direct designs, he brought in team members who could also achieve that remarkably clean line, such as Andrew Sumner and J.Duh.
Ben was the type of boy who grew up drawing whatever, whenever he could. “I especially loved drawing logos of all my favorite heavy metal bands—just blowing through a stack of computer paper with the little dots in the edges.” He put full effort into displays for his class assignments and enjoyed afternoons drawing Simpsons characters alongside his older brothers.
From any angle, Brush House seems like a dream business for the kid who took his first “commissions” from admiring elementary school classmates. “I was actually getting made fun of quite a bit for my weight and other things,” he shares, “so being able to shine with art and get praise and acceptance from my fellow classmates and teachers—I’ve always been drawn to [art] for so many reasons.”
But by middle school, he found himself devoting hours to playing guitar or jamming on drums and bass. “I was always such a ham, and I wanted to perform for my friends, my family, my community,” he says.
In this way, music became the impetus of his artwork. “I was making a ton of graphics in the way of band merch and promotion for my band and my friends’ bands,” he recalls. Between playing with one of his first bands, Delta Activity, and working at Coffee Society, he took on his first gig as a graphic designer.
Funny enough, that commissioned art piece traveled the world before his music did. While touring with newer band Good Hustle, Ben spotted his “Make Coffee Not War” design, modeled after a wartime propaganda poster, on a T-shirt he didn’t recall printing. He asked the wearer how she’d gotten it. “She’s like, ‘I just ordered it from some guy in Australia.’ ” His poster had risen into paper virality, appearing in bastardized versions of itself on T-shirts, mugs, and wall decals sold globally.
And not soon after, his music followed. Ben’s first band, Delta Activity, toured with alternative metal band Dredg. His duo, Brother Grand, supported indie-folk band the Wild Reeds. In 2012, Ben quit a job designing graphics for the county to join a nationwide tour with indie rock band River City Extension as their bass player.
For 15 years, Ben’s music career was on constant rise, as he and his bands accepted invitations to play bigger shows, festivals, and tours. In his life’s nebula, performing was at the center—stardom was likely, but it meant having to endure the collapse in other parts of his life. And some of it couldn’t be earned back.
“I realized that being out on tour as much as I was, I was missing weddings, funerals, birthday parties, baby showers—all for people I really love and care about.” Additionally, the economic demands of performing had changed the experience for him. Whereas he once reveled in the endless possibilities of one line in one song, his mind was now more of a calculator. He habitually concerned himself with what the next concert would pay or how the band’s merch would sell.
And he wasn’t alone in the anxieties. From his vantage point, Ben noticed the struggles of even more established performers with record labels, booking agents, and sponsorships. “They were struggling to pay their bills, take care of their health, be happy, be satisfied, and grateful,” he says. “I realized, it’s going to take me a long time to get where they are. And they’re not even stoked.”
The joy of live performance dwindled. “People could come up to me after a show in tears and be like, ‘That was so amazing. Never stop what you’re doing. You touched so many people’s hearts tonight,’ and inside I would just feel like, ‘I wish you were right.’ ” It was a far cry from the way he played music through junior and high school, jamming for hours on guitar, every single day, hopping from drums, to bass, to the mic, all because it was fun and brought people together.
So Ben made a deal with himself. “I said, ‘For the next year, I’m going to focus on art only.’ ” The commitment was quiet—Ben told no one—but the change was clear: he simply stopped performing in public. He turned down shows and put all the touring and recording on hiatus.
Only a few weeks in, he realized it was the best decision. “For the first time in a while my bills were paid. I was not falling behind. I was getting so much done.” Ben soaked it all in: time with the people he loved, space to reflect on his relationships, and the inner peace that a younger version of himself lacked. “It took me identifying my values,” he explains. “Before, I didn’t have any of that. It was just like, whatever the next biggest thing is, that’s what I wanted.” Those closest to him—especially his wife, Erin—share his values of health, family, and friends. “We’re just remarkably mellow and happy together,” he says.
Freed from the need for his musicianship to generate money or sense of self-worth, Ben states, “I have reclaimed my music as my fine art.” It looks like coming right back to the beginning, when he composed without an agenda. “I will sit there and play with one song idea for months on end, overly obsessing about the minutiae of one song—because I’m allowed to, and because I allow myself to. And that’s exciting,” he says.
That’s fantastic news for anyone who’s heard Ben perform, whether 20 years ago or just last month on a stage somewhere downtown. He’s also planning to record this winter. We can look forward to definitive versions of beloved Ben Henderson classics, as well as newer experiments reflecting this phase of his life. “I’m going to be still performing whenever I want, whenever I can, and have fun with it,” he promises himself, “and be relentlessly creative and experimental with it because I can and because I should.”
Black and Brown is a vintage buy/sell clothing shop in San Jose that specializes in bringing together old styles and new visions. On March 8, it will be celebrating the nine-year anniversary of its opening with a shindig at Café Stritch. The event will be open to the public of all ages and feature sets by several DJs.
“It’s just a party, just to hang out and celebrate that we’ve made it this far,” says Monisha Murray, owner of Black and Brown.
Murray is one of the founders of Black and Brown. She started the clothing shop in 2005 with her good friend, Irene Kim. The shop opened nine years ago in a small, 1,000-square-foot venue on San Carlos, across the street from Mel Cotton’s. It was more of a hidden destination known through word of mouth. “It was one of those places that was easy to pass by if you weren’t looking for it,” says Murray.
After five years of hiding in its place on San Carlos, Murray found a new spot that was more on the forefront of foot traffic. Black and Brown is now on The Alameda and Sunol, where the baby store has stretched its legs and become one of the big dogs on the block.
The new shop is long and open. It has dark, oak wood shelves to hold shoes and boots above the racks. Diffused lights illuminate the parts of the store where the sun doesn’t reach. The clothes are separated by color and style. The army jackets are clumped together with the army green clothing. The leather jackets are all put under the same rack. The tan blouses intertwined with other blouses like uniforms on a playground. Random artifacts are scattered here and there, ranging from a vintage high school t-shirt to a denim jacket your dad had thought was cool 30 years ago.
The journey has been as educational for Murray as it has been hard. “I’ve learned a lot,” she says. “I’ve lost a lot.”
Murray and Kim split up when Kim left the business and went back to school. Murray’s business venture has made her a better, stronger person. The pressure of trying to keep a lease while trying to make others happy has made Murray more business-savvy and borderline cutthroat.
That’s what Black and Brown is all about. They are the aftermath of contemporary fashion’s collision with vintage style. The approach to their vibe and aesthetic is to put those two worlds under one roof. But it isn’t just about getting old stuff and reselling it. Murray trains her team on how to shop for original and desirable items and how to be gatekeepers of the Black and Brown racks. They don’t buy double-knit poly just because it’s 70s; they look for original, one-of-a-kind things that customers can be excited about finding. Murray strives to be more than just a store that sells 70s items because if she did that, she says, she’d only have business during Halloween.
There was a point three years into the business when Murray seriously thought about closing Black and Brown. But the passion to perpetuate her style and love of fashion kept her in the game. “For anybody doing a venture, make sure you love it. And make sure you have a passion for it,” she says.
Nine years later, Murray still has her head above water and proudly celebrates the anniversary of her store and her vision. “It’s crazy to think it’s been that long,” she says. “We’ve done so much with so little since that first stepping stone.”
BLACK and BROWN 751 W. San Carlos St San Jose, CA 95126 (408) 298-1970
Read about Black and Brown’s origin story in our Beta issue “Traffic” .5 from 2009
Jon Dryden is a pianist, composer, professor of Jazz Studies at SJSU, and one of the 2025 Jazz Aid Fund grantees, performing at the San Jose Jazz New Works Fest on March 7 in the SJZ Break Room. We had the chance to pick his artistic brain on topics from what inspires him, how he balances the demands of teaching with composing while still earning enough to live, and his hopes and dreams for the Bay Area jazz scene.
Producer Jesse Harris describes Dryden’s playing as “somewhere between Vince Guaraldi and Paul Bley.” Others have called it “melancholy with a touch of hope,” says Jon Dryden. We think it’s dreamy, emotional, and layered–like crying while sitting under a grand piano when you’re a kid but still feeling comforted by it.
Dryden says for the Break Room show, “I’m bringing in a few amazing musicians whom I love to work with from New York and Los Angeles. The performance will open with a new piece called “Circada” and will include the SJZ grant-commissioned piece, “That Would Be Telling,”
The ensemble features Dryden on piano, Ben Flocks on tenor saxophone, Scott Colberg on bass, and Benjamin Ring on drums.
Dryden says the title, ”That Would Be Telling,” is “from a key phrase in the British Classic Spy-Fi seriesThe Prisoner, a show I watched with my students. It’s one of the most amazing and influential TV shows ever made. The music in the show is excellent too.”
When describing his inspiration and process, he shares, “I love metaphors, especially when they are used in subtle ways that cross artistic and psychological disciplines. Concepts like these give me an unwritten emotional framework I can draw from musically.”
The television show presents an argument between the individual and the collective. “It asks, how much of each mode of thinking–collectivity and individuality– should exist in a society? Does a collective society lead to homogenization and surveillance states?”
Whether collective societies lead to homogenization remains to be seen. However, Dryden acknowledges that it’s nearly impossible to have a thriving jazz scene without one strong type of collective: community.
”I love what the SJZ Break Room isdoing, which is establishing a place to play, listen and mingle, he says.”
However, he admits that it can be tough to maintain the sense of community he experienced in New York, where most venues are located in a smaller geographic area.
“The Bay Area Jazz scene has many amazing musicians, but is so spread out that there’s no center where people can congregate.”
Community means so much, says Dryden, because “we need each other, and we need to be around people who are better musicians than us. What I would like to see much more of is more friendly competition–people kindly challenging one another to grow musically and to share ideas.” Without friendly competition, he says, creativity can falter.
A robust community not only provides a center of gravity where jazz-lovers and performers can congregate, commune, and compete, but it creates a place to network and radically imagine new possibilities. New possibilities inspire not only new works of art but also new music students, new venues, and new job opportunities–something sorely needed to sustain Bay Area musicians.
“The hyphenated life is a common career for most musicians,” says Dryden, referring to the multiple streams of income that he depends on in order to afford the cost of living in Aptos, to which he returned in 2010 to care for his dad after living and working for 19 years in New York City.
The way Dryden describes the New York City Jazz scene conjures up complex feelings, much like his compositions do. His words bring up feelings and images, like the melancholy yet intensely alive takes he gives to popular songs he covers, like Nirvana’s All Apologies. He mentions venues, all close to one another, in a relatively condensed space. Images of happy, dreamy couples and groups of people weaving their way into and out of vibrant jazz clubs all close together–“that’s hard to beat, even when you have small hubs like those in San Francisco and the East Bay,” Dryden explains.
Prior to returning to his native California, Dryden was “solely making a living as a performing musician/composer/arranger/producer. Since I moved back home to Aptos, I’ve added instructor and lecturer to those skills.”
Some working musicians, says Dryden, have their hands in a lot of pots because “many of us love a lot of different kinds of music.” No exception, he cites musical influences as diverse as Shostakovich, Scriabin, and Smith–Elliot Smith, that is. He also loves Prince. Dryden himself has collaborated with an impressive group of musicians–Michael Urbaniak, Patrice Rushen, and the Brecker Brothers, to name a few. He has recorded with several stratospheric megastars–Questlove, Norah Jones, David Byrne, Dave Chappelle, and John Mayer. And if those accomplishments weren’t remarkable enough, he has also composed for both Michael Moore and David Byrne–both heroes’ heroes.
He finds inspiration both in the incredible musicians he loves playing with and in his students. “They know a lot of things I don’t, and they have new music they’re listening to that I’m not aware of. I like to hear what they are into musically. Some of my students write pieces that aren’t anything like what I would come up with. I love to see that. Semi-consciously, I pick up their concepts and sometimes I work bits–no stealing, mind you. Just bits–into my compositions.“
While he wishes he could devote more time to composing, “teaching earns me more than half my income and consumes less time.” And still, he admits that he could not afford living in Santa Cruz County without his family house, where he lives. So, the multi-hyphenate grindlife continues, and while he doesn’t know the answer to the economic woes that drives musicians out of urban areas they can no longer afford, he does hope that “scenes will start to percolate in unexpected places.”
Dryden started piano lessons at five and began composing not long after. ”The compositions weren’t very good then, of course; but I have always associated performing and composing as one thing,” he says.
While he has strong ideas about composition and excellence, his view on interpreting music is more open-ended: “I like music to be whatever the listener wants it to be. One role a composer/songwriter can take on is making the personal universal.”
Check out the Jon Dryden Quartet at SJZ Break Room for New Works Fest, Friday, March 7 at 8p (Doors open at 7:30p). Tickets. Livestream.
Don Hardy is an award-winning filmmaker known for his powerful documentaries that shed light on diverse societal topics. As a director, producer, and cinematographer, Hardy has worked on impactful films such as Citizen Penn, Linda Perry: Let It Die Here, and most recently, Bar. His cinematography explores themes of resilience, social justice, and the human experience, earning him six regional Emmys and significant film festival awards from Cinequest, Woods Hole Film Festival, Seattle International Film Festival, and Sonoma International Film Festival. Hardy’s career has been defined by following dreams, taking risks, and making connections. His documentaries reflect a deep desire to understand human experiences and share complex, nuanced stories that might otherwise go untold.
Hardy Grew up in Upstate New York, in a household where the news was always on the television. He had an early interest in journalism, which led him to do radio in high school before getting his foot in the door at a local TV station, typing stories in a teleprompter. Hardy followed jobs in TV, from sports in South Florida to NBC in San Jose, California. The connections he made along the way and his acquired approach to elevating news storytelling through artful, character-driven narratives helped propel his career toward film. He found a like-minded storyteller in former NBC journalist Dana Nachman when they collaborated on their 2002 television documentary, Close to Home. The duo would go on to produce five more independent documentary feature films.
Hardy’s latest film, Bar, will premiere at the California Theater in Downtown San Jose on March 14 and 23 as part of the 2025 Cinequest Film Festival. Bar was filmed on-site during a five-day intensive bartending training program at the Culinary Institute of America in New York City. Graduates of this program have gone on to run top bars and spirits brands and lead the non-alcoholic beverage revolution. The film provides insight into the hospitality industry by focusing on five main characters in the high-pressure environment of learning complex skills.
In this conversation, award-winning filmmaker Don Hardy discusses his journey to following his dreams, his connections throughout his career, and the Cinequest world premiere of his newest film, Bar.
Join Don Hardy at the Cinequest Film Festival for the world premiere of Bar, and stick around after the showing for an in-person Q&A session.
The nonstop party that can accompany DJ life almost robbed Brotha Reese of everything. Twenty years in, with a new outlook, he’s as dedicated as ever to sharing joy through song selection.
The sounds of A Tribe Called Quest’s “Find A Way” escape from under a partially open garage door. The song is playing as part of Brotha Reese’s five o’clock Traffic Mix on Q102 FM. A garage door lifts to reveal a DJ wonderland: walls of 12-inch vinyl records, sorted by style and era, with 45 packed travel crates situated atop the shelving; two DJ set ups—one contemporary and one throwback, the latter featuring an old-school Rane mixer placed inside a wooden console with two turntables resting on top; and PCs and webcams to power Twitch livestreams. Murals by graffiti legend King157 adorn the two long walls. It’s Reese’s self-stylized oasis.
“I look at these [walls], I get that smile, and I put on a record. It takes me back to when I was a kid,” notes Reese. “Music is so powerful. It can take you to another place. I can even remember smells when I hear certain records.” The space is an accurate reflection of Reese—Mauricio Cuellar Jr.—endlessly passionate about music and mindful of the legacy of his craft, yet always open to absorbing the new sounds needed to rock the next crowd he encounters. He speaks with an overflowing reverence for the songs he loves, singing choruses and beatboxing drum patterns while he talks. Over 40 years, he’s played weddings, bar mitzvahs, quinceañeras, and debuts, rocked packed club dance floors, soundtracked intimate dinners, and mixed over the drive-time airwaves.
“It became so bad with the DJing that I would take the turntables with me everywhere I went. If I went to your house and you didn’t have decks, I would [set up in] a little corner and make tapes for everybody.”
Reese’s parents arrived in America from El Salvador, and first moved to California’s San Fernando Valley, where he was born, before eventually settling in San Jose. He credits his father, a multi-instrumentalist who played in bands since his teenage years, as a major influence on his own passion for music. “When you grow up in South San Jose, you grow up with everybody,” he explains, noting that the diversity of his community informed his musical taste. “You would hear guys cruising in lowriders, bumping Zapp & Roger. I could hear my next door neighbors playing gospel on Sundays. And then I had my cool white-boy friends that listened to punk music, so I got exposed to Black Flag, Metallica, and Pantera.” He earned the name “Brotha Reese” because of the hip-hop flavor he brought to his sets at Latin clubs.
At 13, he fell in love with DJing after touching a set of turntables owned by his cousin in Queens. After assembling his own setup from gear donated to him by friends, he practiced obsessively. “It became so bad with the DJing that I would take the turntables with me everywhere I went,” he adds. “If I went to your house and you didn’t have decks, I would [set up in] a little corner and make tapes for everybody.”
The ’80s mix show DJs Michael Erickson and Cameron Paul were major inspirations. Legendary Bay Area DJ Jazzy Jim served as a mentor. In the early 1990s, he joined the Hot 97.7 FM street team, DJing lunchtime gigs and dances at high schools. When the famous Dog House morning show shifted to Wild 107.7, he became the show’s DJ. His first club gig, in 1992, was at Cactus Club. In later years, he ran a modern rock night with his friend DJ Deluxe at Zoe. But as his opportunities piled up, his constant role as the life of the party took its toll, leading Reese to abuse alcohol, marijuana, and crystal meth. “Because I was DJing six nights out of the week, it was a party every day. I’d go on benders,” he shares of this dark time. After having a tough conversation with his wife, he decided to seek help at an outpatient program offered by Kaiser. Now 20 years clean and sober, he’s grateful for how much he’s grown and the chance to return to a calling he once had to step away from.
“I don’t have to run to go use to hide those feelings [anymore],” he says. “If I can change, you can change.”
Currently, Reese holds residencies at Willard Hicks, Sushi Confidential, and Branham Lounge, and regularly streams The Soul Parlour Radio Show bi-weekly on Twitch alongside DJ Tay. Thanks to a longstanding friendship with radio legend Chuy Gomez, he’s been DJing for the San Jose Earthquakes and is back to regularly mixing on the radio.
At 53, he has no interest in stepping away from the decks. While his lifestyle around the party may look much different than it once did, he’s still locked into the pursuit of spreading joy across any dance floor he presides over. “DJing saved my life,” he shares. “If God will bless me with many more years, and I can still hear and see, I’m still gonna play records, even if it’s just for me and my grandkids.”
The Cultivator of Content Magazine, Daniel Garcia, and The Developer, David Valdespino Jr., reflect on 2024 and the curation of issues 16.1 through 16.4.
Entering the thirteenth year of printing Content Magazine, The Cultivator, Daniel Garcia reflects on early goals set for the magazine. One goal, he recalls, was to “try to do a second issue and the third issue and the fourth issue. The early days were like, ‘Are we gonna be able to do another one?” Today, as Content Magazine approaches the release of its 70th issue, The Content team, which includes its publisher, SVCreates, editors, photographers, writers, graphic designers, and interns, has continued reaching the magazine’s goal of featuring local creatives in print.
In this conversation, David and Daniel discuss the production of issues 16.1 through 16.4, highlights from 2024, and David Valdespino Jr.’s 2nd anniversary as the Developer of Content Magazine.
Join Content Magazine on Friday, March 14, 2025, for The South Bay Artist Summit: Empowering creatives at the intersection of art and entrepreneurship, produced in partnership with the City of San Jose Office of Cultural Affairs, and Pick-Up Party 17.2, “Connect” at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda. The South Bay Artist Summit will feature an artist career panel, presentations on career development, a cultural exchange presentation, and an artist resource fair. Learn More.
A local OG graffiti king innovates by keeping it old school.
The history of graffiti art in the public consciousness owes its duplicity to the fact that the medium of choice is borrowed canvases from liminal spaces of urban geometry. After more than 60 years of urban graffiti, the art form still exists in a precarious space between acceptance and distaste. As the art form progressed over the years—from its origins with artists like NYC’s TAKI 183 tagging subways in the 1960s and 70s—graffiti innovators and legends were born. Almost anyone, regardless of their interest in art, will be familiar with the names Picasso, Monet, or Dalí. Graffiti artists, however, don’t hold the same place in society’s consciousness, despite the fact that pivotal figures from around the world—like Futura 2000, Cap, Skeme, and Cornbread—are essential to the evolution and development of graffiti as a true art form. One of our own homegrown legends goes by the name King157 and has been putting up his heart and soul on walls and trains for 40 years now.
Decoto, a small town that was eventually absorbed by Union City and Fremont, was predominantly populated by Mexican Americans during World War II. By the 1970s, at the height of the Chicano Movement and as gentrification gripped Decoto neighborhoods, racial tensions gave way to riots. The community expressed their stance during this struggle through graffiti. At this moment in time and place, King was two years old, living with his family in the heart of the fray.
“I represent the old school, using the gift I was given to produce high quality professional graffiti art…and yes, that name will always be associated with the word ‘outlaw.’ ”
King moved to San Jose before he was nine but often visited his family in Decoto on the weekends. One of his earliest memories of picking up a spray can was painting a Schwinn Lowrider bike when he was seven years old. He was constantly surrounded by letters, fonts, and the beauty of creating. He remembers the Old English cholo lettering tattooed on his tíos and his mom, Sally, drawing and writing beautiful poems. Sally and his Tía Sandra take credit for teaching him how to color, blend, and stay inside the lines. As King drove back and forth between Decoto and San Jose, the “cholo gangster letters” seen on highways 680 and 101 started to make an impression on him.
By the 1980s, King157 was putting up his own pieces and burners. He is known for his clean, thin, and complex lines in his lettering, his use of vibrant colors, and his b-boy and b-girl characters that harken back to 1970s comic characters Puck and Cheech Wizard. King was inspired by everything from Teen Angels magazine, comic books, Saturday morning cartoons, and even the Yellow Pages. “Back then you didn’t have the internet,” he explains. “I rode my trusty Mongoose BMX all over Northside and Eastside San Jo, then took the bus to Bart to Oakland and San Francisco. I said to myself, ‘There have to be other crazy guys that love this shit as much as I do.’ So I would explore and document the art form called graffiti art with my 110 Kodak camera (thanks, ma!). This new graffiti movement was made up by kids…remember that part,” King says. He drew further inspiration from local artists, such as Mix 182, T.G.K. Crew, Nexus, and T.D.K. Crew.
King has been fine-tuning his style ever since then, while staying true to the origins of his style. “I tried all styles, experimented in the 1980s and all of the ’90s, but in the great year of Y2K 2000, I had to ask myself, ‘Why did I start writing in the first place?’ Simple answer: It was all about letters, and it will always be about letters. So I broke down my style to no connections, no loop-de-loops, no doodads, or arrows…just the funk, the essence of the letter.”
Though he has witnessed the evolution of graffiti over the past 40 years, King still believes it hasn’t found its proper respect as an art form among the general public. Muralists have benefited from the many attempts by communities to provide a space for the art form, but for King, graffiti is not graffiti if it’s officially sanctioned. That is the beauty of it—the disapproval of graffiti became part of the fabric of its history and identity. King relates, “I represent the old school, using the gift I was given to produce high-quality professional graffiti art…and yes, that name will always be associated with the word ‘outlaw.’ ”
Graffiti work keeps you on the move, and King is no exception. He is still rocking his 1980s flavors, most recently at the famed 44th annual Graffiti Hall of Fame in Harlem, where he shared his work with top graffiti artists around the world. “You can say I’m living in a dream, another revolution in the circle of life. Rock on King157, the last of the Mohicans.”
Check out King’s new mural in Downtown San Jose at South First Street and San Salvador, on the south side of The Studio Climbing.
Celebrating the vibrancy and impact of early-career artists across disciplines.
SVCreates is excited to announce the 2024 Content Emerging Artist Award recipients, celebrating the vibrancy and impact of early-career artists working in all disciplines across visual, performing, and literary arts. This award, a testament to SVCreates’ commitment to building the capacity and amplifying the voices of artists in our community, has been granted to two artists who have made a significant impact. These artists, who work with diverse communities and across mediums, have shown remarkable courage in taking risks and embracing challenges. Their unwavering commitment to their practice, intentional sharing of their vision, and rigorous approach to creation and production are commendable. We are privileged to have them as part of our community in Santa Clara County, where they have contributed significantly to the richness and vibrancy of our region. This year’s recipients are Esther Young and Elba Rachel.
Esther Young
When Esther Young sits down to write music, she processes the outside world by looking inward—a fragment of a memory, a dusting of spirituality, the electrochemical processor that analyzes those inputs. The intuitive nature of her work is reflected in lyrics and stories that sometimes even she can only decode once she steps away from the source. The product is what she calls “ethereal indie folk.” Her music videos portray things like going for a drive, playing guitar in the woods, or doing laundry, but they contain a tilt of celestial normalcy that begs viewers to review the lyrics in the description. In many ways, Esther is laying bare her process of self-discovery for listeners and asking them to join her. In many ways, that process of self-discovery has been a process of redefining community.
Esther Young grew up as a shy kid in the East Bay, raised by a Chinese immigrant family devoted to their Chinese Christian faith. Esther was enrolled in classical piano lessons, sang in church, and generally listened to the music her parents showed her. She recalls, “I grew up around a mix of crazy music. My dad likes Chinese pop music, and I wasn’t allowed to listen to a lot of secular music.” At that time, her relationship with music was structured with a focus on worship. Early on, the roots of her songwriting stemmed from the prayers she would journal. That practice was a haven for her intimate musings.
“To write a heartfelt song, you must live with an open heart so that the ache is tangible.”
-Esther Young
Esther’s teenage years proved transitional in her approach to life, music, and spirituality. She disenrolled from classical piano classes, picked up the guitar, and began listening to secular music. These developments drew Esther closer to her voice as an artist but were also forms of assimilating into an idyllic American lifestyle. She admits, “I wanted to blend in with American culture for much of my life. I tried hard to avoid the parts of me that are Chinese.” Esther later attended Santa Clara State University, where she majored in both English and music. She became invested in finding her voice through the communities she engaged with. That experience culminated in her disaffiliation with religion. She explains, “I don’t identify as Christian anymore. I thought so many people should be saved, but according to the rules I had learned, they wouldn’t be. It was the existence of all my beautiful gay and queer friends that made those rules not make sense. I just wanted to live my most authentic life, and I started to feel more like myself—less conflicted.”
Esther credits the open mics she attended in college as a critical moment in her trajectory as a singer-songwriter. She says, “Mighty Mike McGee’s storytelling open mics were the first I went to. It wasn’t even music open mics, but I knew that was the space I wanted to be in. As a writer, what’s valuable to us is what’s being said and why it’s being said.” That emphasis on storytelling is manifested in Esther’s lyrically driven compositions. Much of her writing is distilled from her own lived experiences, but she hopes to imbue her work with universal themes and community voices. Esther’s work as a journalist and non-profit cultural worker has helped shape that perspective and worldview. She says, “As writers and artists, to be effective, we must explore our blind spots; to know ourselves, we must know our history. My pet peeve is when songwriters put together lines that have no purpose other than to rhyme—what a wasted opportunity. To write a heartfelt song, you must live with an open heart so that the ache is tangible.”
Esther’s journey of self-discovery through song is ongoing, but she is constantly refining her process. As a recipient of the 2024 Content Emerging Artist Award, Esther hopes to spend more time in the studio recording unreleased music and begin work on new music videos. In addition, she has recently been collaborating with local contemporaries. “Playing with other musicians that I look up to, who have strengths that I don’t have, has been exciting to me,” she says. Esther’s emphasis on community parallels her reflections on the importance of art. She explains, “If the art community has a foundational belief, the way that church does, it would be ‘what you do matters,’ period. I feel like that’s what holds our communities together. Everyone has a chance to tell their truth. There’s that sense of acceptance. I think that’s the thing about art that is so healthy for people.”
Reflecting on her past, Esther says, “I’m grateful to the younger versions of me that spent time alone writing. I’m proud of her.” When asked why folks should care about Esther Young, she replies, “I’m always trying. When I see the worth in something, I will put some effort behind it. I’m always sincere.”
Celebrating the vibrancy and impact of early-career artists across disciplines.
SVCreates is excited to announce the 2024 Content Emerging Artist Award recipients, celebrating the vibrancy and impact of early-career artists working in all disciplines across visual, performing, and literary arts. This award, a testament to SVCreates’ commitment to building the capacity and amplifying the voices of artists in our community, has been granted to two artists who have made a significant impact. These artists, who work with diverse communities and across mediums, have shown remarkable courage in taking risks and embracing challenges. Their unwavering commitment to their practice, intentional sharing of their vision, and rigorous approach to creation and production are commendable. We are privileged to have them as part of our community in Santa Clara County, where they have contributed significantly to the richness and vibrancy of our region. This year’s recipients are Esther Young and Elba Rachel.
Elba Raquel
A young girl stares off into space while sitting at the dinner table, surrounded by family. “Elba!” the girl’s father says, snapping his fingers for a reaction. “Elba, where are you?” the man echoes. Elba replies as if a fog had begun to lift: “I am right here.” “No, we lost you,” her father replies.
Growing up, Elba Raquel was a daydreamer. When asked what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would reply with professions such as detective, writer, or world traveler. She shares, “I have a restless mind and a zest for life. My parents were protective of us growing up, but I always wanted to live a more exciting life.” As far back as she can remember, she loved drawing. When preparing for college, she knew “it was either going to be writing or art. I chose art because it was the only thing that fulfilled me 100 percent.” Through art, she could investigate the subjects she painted, travel to a world of her own creation, and tell stories through her imagery.
While steadfast in her passion to pursue art, Elba remembers her family’s skepticism. “They wanted to convince me to switch majors. They would say things like, ‘¿Dónde vas a comer? You’re not going to make any money as an artist.’ They thought I was wasting my potential.” She went on to earn an AS in two-dimensional design, a BFA in illustration from the Academy of Art University, and an MFA in art education from Santa Clara University. That self-determination to forge her own path has been a constant theme in her journey.
Elba discovered Mexican painter Frida Kahlo while in high school. Researching her work stirred Elba’s identity as an artist. Like Kahlo, Elba painted her reality, which included the pain of lost love, states of depression, and familial turmoil. Painting was a conduit for peace, a way to work through those emotions. She explains, “Art has been my savior. I also feel bad for my art because I place my burdens on it. Many of my paintings are about my torments, but I am working to make art about happiness and joy.”
Elba’s technical ability to produce masterful realism on canvas contrasts the time it has taken to discover her unique style and voice. That discovery process spanned a decade, including having children and becoming an art teacher. She truly fleshed out her approach only during the COVID-19 pandemic. Elba recalls, “I had completed enough Instagram challenges that asked artists to create characters in their own style, and I began to notice my own style. I was doing two-dimensional lead pencil realism with highlighter backgrounds. I started trying that style on a large scale and fell in love with it. I completed a piece called Mexicanas Unidas. That was my first ‘Elba’ piece.” Mexicanas Unidas is a 4-foot by 6-foot self-portrait in grayscale with a crimson-red background. The subject is adorned with colorful tattoos and is strangling a fang-baring snake.
“Art has been my savior. I also feel bad for my art because I place my burdens on it.”
-Elba Raquel
Mexicanas Unidas was a turning point in Elba’s career. Along with finding her style, she discovered her voice. Elba began painting murals at events like the Bizare Art Festival and with the San Jose–based artist collective Together We Create. She noticed the lack of women participating in live painting events and made empowering women part of her mission. “That’s my little bit of change. I know it has to start with me. The more successful I am as a female artist, the more others give themselves permission to do what I am doing.” As part of that mission, Elba has participated in the Art Builds Community’s Womanhood project that recognizes influential Santa Clara County women. She actively seeks women to assist her with projects, has created a portfolio of female muralists, and actively engages with feminist themes in her studio practice.
Elba describes her work as a muralist: “Muralism is my heart and soul because it gets me away from myself and takes me into a different role that serves the community. I love Frida Kahlo for her ability to put herself out there and be 100 percent vulnerable. But I admired Diego Rivera for his audacity in creating pieces that were larger than himself. Murals are my gift to the community. It’s their voice and vision through my style and symbolism.”
As a recipient of the 2024 Content Emerging Artist Award, Elba plans to create more from a place of joy, manifesting the reality she wants to live. “We think we have to create from pain. But we can also paint from light. We don’t always have to paint alone, either. Paintings don’t talk back to you. They don’t give you a life. People do.” She is currently working on a new body of work under the moniker “Bo$$ Bïtçh” that she plans to share with the community through social media by exploring performance art. Elba is determined to forge her own path and be a light for those who follow it.
Join Tara for the opening of her solo exhibition, “Mining the Plastocene,” at Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz on Friday, November 1, as part of First Friday Santa Cruz.
Tara de la Garza’s art finds beauty and meaning in discarded materials. As a sculptor and artist in residence at the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto, she approaches themes of environmental justice through visual storytelling. Tara began collecting plastics while pursuing a sustainable lifestyle and later found artistic potential in the often vibrant or semi-transparent commercial byproducts. Her work centers on both reuse and upcycling while inviting viewers to consider a future increasingly defined by the saturation of synthetic plastics. In de la Garza’s upcoming solo exhibition entitled “Mining the Plastocene,” opening on November 1, 2024, at Felix Kulpa Gallery in Santa Cruz, she continues to explore the inclusion of plastic within the sedimentary and archaeological record through the eyes of history. As part of this solo exhibition she will also host upcycling workshops and release a book showcasing the evolution of her work from collage to sculpture.
Tara’s artistic journey began at a magnet theater arts high school in Australia. She nurtured a passion for performance by studying film and television in college. The filmmaking process led to her love for computers, and she later spent a decade as a graphic designer, thriving on client projects but eventually yearning for a deeper artistic expression. She grappled with her message and intentions as she transitioned to fine art. She would experiment with various mediums, ultimately focusing on large-scale collages that explored humanity’s connection to the environment. A pivotal moment came when she encountered a haunting image of a dead albatross, its stomach full of plastic, which sparked a visceral response and prompted her to investigate the profound impacts of pollution.
Tara’s work resonates with sustainability and environmental advocacy. She credits the Australian sensibilities she grew up with for her belief that even one person can make a significant impact. In her youth, Tara saw people in her community of Fremantle, Western Australia working towards sustainability; composting, thrifting, and making do with what they had. Consciously or subconsciously, those experiences have inspired her current body of work.
In tandem with her solo artistic endeavors, Tara seeks to make tangible impacts through her nonprofit, Inventurous based in Palo Alto. Inventurous focuses on recycling plastic in innovative and community-oriented ways. The nonprofit aims to educate communities by taking in locally sourced plastic waste for creative reuse. A recent public art project facilitated by Inventurous used 3D printers to create papel picado from upcycled plastics in honor of Dia de los Muertos. These art-based community engagement initiatives open up conversations about where our waste goes and demonstrate circular economies and the potential for plastic waste.
In this conversation, Tara discusses finding her voice as an artist, the duality of plastic–its danger and potential, and the opportunity for one person to spark meaningful change.
You may not know it, but the guy serving you drinks from behind the counter at The Fountainhead Bar can also serve up slices of fascinating musical history. David Ma runs The Fountainhead Bar by night and works by day as a freelance journalist with a long background in music, writing for such publications as The Guardian, Pitchfork, Rolling Stone, and SPIN. Whether he’s spinning records at Cafe Stritch or hunting down the likes of Chuck D for an interview, Ma is always absorbed in music. His newest project is developing a record label—in conjunction with San Jose vinyl records and albums shop Needle to the Groove—to emphasize emerging, overlooked, and local artists.
“Out of high school, my friend started a magazine. I started writing for it and it really grabbed my interest. It coincided with me getting heavily into music during the rise of the indie rap movement, at a time when you could just hit up big names in the industry and they would get back to you. I started writing for free, over time got my name out there, and have been lucky enough to work with writers and editors that I really look up to. It’s a passion project and always has been.”
Tessie Barrera-Scharaga is an artist who makes connections: connections between language and culture, art and communities, the past and the present, and, most importantly, between people. Walking into her studio space, curious viewers quickly realize that this is one artist who is not limited to the canvas. Her work tables hold glass plates, ink, clay, brushes, and an assortment of paper, while books line the shelves and carefully placed pieces hang from the walls.
Tessie is primarily an installation artist, incorporating poetry, found objects, clay, prints, and rescued clothing into a cohesive statement. Her home, she mentions, is going through a long-awaited expansion. “I have never had the luxury of living with my art, like other artists do,” she muses, “because my work is very large and it is always in storage” – a common sacrifice of the large-scale installation artist. With the expansion of her Willow Glen home almost complete, Tessie is eager to realize her dream after more than fifteen years of boxes and storage spaces.
Walking through Tessie’s space, it is easy to forget you are in a home at all. The crisp lighting hits her piece titled “Lifeline,” casting shadows of the socks and dresses of a young girl encased in raw clay. Further into the room, her installation, “Coffee: The Malady of the Third World Dreaming,” looms – a metal framed bed with a pierced sack of coffee beans for a mattress, the beans spilling over the hardwood floors.
For a large portion of her career, Tessie worked as a graphic designer and returned to school to complete her BFA in Spatial Arts locally at San Jose State. She then continued on, receiving her MFA from Mills College. It was during and after this time that she not only honed her skills in ceramics and installation but also discovered a passion for teaching. After working with children at the San Jose Museum of Art, Tessie was dismayed to discover that her daughter was not receiving any art instruction in kindergarten. “Teaching was just a matter of a necessity for me,” she observes. “Your children force you to do things; you want them to have art and music, and that was a motivator for me. And through that, I affected other children and other families. To me, it is important to take care of the community that your children grow up in.”
Inspired to get involved, Tessie began volunteering in her daughter’s classroom. “During that time all the parents started noticing that this little classroom was getting art, but not the whole school, so they got together and talked to the principal – and the principal offered me a job as the art instructor,” she laughs. What began as one mother volunteering soon grew into a teaching role she enjoyed for the next fifteen years. “It started with a couple of grades, and through the years, we added more. To the point that when I left there, we had art throughout the entire school.”
“Art provides a space where you can dig into yourself, to bring out or to let go of your fear and to try different things. I see that happening with children here and in El Salvador. Art is also a place of joy, because children really enjoy being given attention and doing something with an adult. That’s really what’s most important and enjoyable for them. It validates their experience.”
Beyond her experience in her daughter’s school, Tessie has also created community art projects with several San Jose area schools and volunteered with underprivileged children in her family’s home in El Salvador. Some of this work has focused on helping to foster the children’s connections with their home language and their culture. “A lot of the students go to a school, and they learn a second language, but they don’t really know very much about the culture or the background.” Tessie’s work often incorporates and introduces literary figures from the Spanish-speaking world that children may have no other opportunities to experience – figures like Gabriel García Márquez, José Martínez Ruiz, and, her personal favorite, Pablo Neruda.
Tessie has also spent time in El Salvador volunteering alongside her mother in a local Catholic orphanage. “At first, when you give a class and you show them how to use the materials, they are very curious and can’t wait to try them. They want to smell it, touch it, they want to feel it – what is this thing? They get it in their fingers and want to put it on their face,” she says. These children have never seen a crayon or an oil pastel. “For the children in El Salvador in the orphanage, they have absolutely nothing else except what volunteers come and do with them. When I go, I bring all the materials, but…” Tessie adds, “You don’t have to go far to find children with nothing.”
Similarities and meanings present themselves to Tessie in the children’s art, both here and abroad. “Art provides a space where you can dig into yourself, to bring out or to let go of your fear and to try different things. I see that happening with children here and in El Salvador. Art is also a place of joy, because children really enjoy being given attention and doing something with an adult. That’s really what’s most important and enjoyable for them. It validates their experience.”
Working with these children and helping them to discover and develop these skills, Tessie is also able to bring in much of her own perspective as an artist. Her work explores sometimes difficult social and cultural issues and the important role of art in life. “At River Glen, we used to do a project with the fifth graders that was a peace mural, and it started right after 9-11. It involved designing an image that symbolized peace for them.” The children were invited to explore symbols of peace from the past, such as the olive branch and the peace sign, and come up with their own. “It was about creating peace in your classroom and in the playground, and thinking intently about it because it starts there. I tell my students – countries who don’t get along go to war, and if you can be the person that can create harmony, later on, you don’t know who you can become. You can be the President of the United States, and it all starts here in the classroom.”
It’s not all war and peace though, Tessie explains children here and abroad are very much the same and often ask her to teach them to draw a variety of things. “I have found that elementary and middle school students are very interested in nature. Animals and plants provide points of departure for many of our projects. Students learn to draw them, paint them, sculpt them in clay, transform them into mythological creatures, and even use visual language to show their concern regarding endangered species.” As the children grow, they also express interest in drawing figures – especially people in their families and communities.
So, what is next for this local artist? “I have been teaching at The Community School for Music and Art for the last year. Through them, I am still teaching children from underrepresented communities,” Tessie explains. She also currently has a piece titled “Twenty-Five: Chronicle of a Journey” featured in the Honoring Women’s Rights: Echoing Visual Voices Together show at The National Steinbeck Center in Salinas. Many San Jose residents will recognize the piece, which was previously shown in an empty storefront on 4th Street by Phantom Galleries in downtown San Jose.
https://www.tessbscharaga.com/
San Jose native, an award-winning Chilean-American Film Director based in New York, debuted his first solo art exhibition at @empire7studios.
My name is Danilo para. This is my first solo exhibition. It’s being held at Empire Seven galleries, and the show is called in limbo. I’m originally from San Jose. I went to Lincoln High School. I grew up here skateboarding with all the skateboard community, and eventually left to pursue a film career in New York, I dropped out of art school from San Francisco Academy of Art University, and then felt like, what am I going to do now?
So I had a friend that was already living in New York, and he had a job working at VICE doing documentaries. So I flew to New York and started working on documentaries, filming them, eventually executive producing some of them, and just traveled the world doing, you know, pursuing my career and pursuing filmmaking in New York.
New York is really a place where documentaries kind of like more of the film work. I guess I was looking for. I didn’t want to go to L.A.. L.A. felt like to, I don’t know if I was ready for Hollywood Life or reality TV life, because I feel like that’s what’s there. But New York offered kind of more of a run-and-gun style filmmaking that I liked, you know, because I grew up skateboarding, filming skate videos, and doing music videos for my brother and things like that. So it’s, I just liked being in charge of almost all the different aspects of it.
One of my earliest memories in childhood was a painting that my mom and my dad had on our wall in the living room. I always think about that painting because it showed kind of their love story, which obviously created me, created my brother. It’s beautiful to see your parents having creative outlets. And I guess the difference of a parent that’s just trying to raise a child stressfully and not pursuing their creative talents. I’m fortunate, I didn’t really have too much of that. Like, I feel like my mom was, she’s a Latin jazz singer, so she’s always pursuing her her career and what she really wanted to do.
I mean, my parents set me up on a, you know, performing arts schools. So in performing arts, you’re acting a little bit, you’re going, I’m in school plays, but there’s also art schools and art classes and painting, so I think I really just got in on and loving that. Because my mom would put my art on the fridge and put my art, you know, and then I started putting my art on the fridge, and then all over my room. And then I, when I finally had a car, I, you know, I stenciled my whole car. My whole car was graffitied and stenciled on like, I just couldn’t stop.
I don’t even think I knew anything. I just, I just, I had the passion to just constantly create, you know, I was addicted. At first, I thought I was addicted to the spray paint smell, but then I think I just liked making something and then making it for a friend and making my friend happy, you know, or making a skateboard for my friend, for my brother, for my brother’s CDs and my brother’s music.
So, yeah, I think I just it hit me hard. So I just wanted to keep pursuing visual arts, you know, and which kind of fell into visual storytelling, you know. And visual storytelling was more of what I wanted to do with my film career. And so when I finally kind of started taking paintings more seriously, I wanted to communicate visual stories like, what is the kind of world building, and what is the scene and the setting, and then what characters should be in that scene and setting, and what should they be doing, and create stories that kind of mean something deeper to me, which I feel like come from, you know, a filmmaking kind of storytelling brain, you know, because I do music videos, and sometimes you hear, you have a song come to you from an artist, and you have to think, what are the visuals and what’s the story, and how is, how you’re going to keep An audience to watch your whole music video, because some music videos are really boring. So I wanted, I want to tell a beginning, middle and end story that allows you to follow all the way to the end. I want people to make it to the end of the video. So I think I brought that into the paintings and kind of create a story that brings you in and keeps you there for a little bit, and makes you look around the painting and see like, you know what, what you might find, and you know you can have your own conclusions what the story will be, because it’s, it’s a painting. It’s not really there’s no audio. There’s no no one’s guiding you through it. You have to kind of guide yourself through the story.
Every painting is going to have a different contrast with colors. And I really, I’ve gravitated to vibrant colors. I used to film in the Museum of Modern Art, like profiles on some big artists like Joan Miró, and I remember going through one of the galleries, and he had one painting that was just so vibrant, and it stood out amongst all the other paintings, and it caught my attention. So I started to think. You know, sometimes you have to look around the world and the arts that you see and find what you like, you know, and that helps you understand what you want. So when I started taking painting more seriously, I kind of wanted to create these colors and this vibrancy that maybe would even relate to a film piece that I’m working on. What are the color schemes and and also finding ways to simplify the colors. Because I know when colors are everywhere and too much of them, it just starts to look like vomit. But when colors are simplified, they I think you’re able to be brought into the story easier. You know, you’re able to kind of latch on to what the story is about and yeah, simplify what people see.
Every painting is different. I don’t really have I don’t like painters that paint the same style of painting over and over again. I want every single painting to be something new that people would be excited and see the visual variety as something that they want to know what’s the next one going to be like, because that’s how I feel about it. I don’t know what the next one’s going to be like. And I want to be excited about every single one, and not treat these paintings like a factory that’s making what you want to see. I want to surprise you what you didn’t expect to see.
My first paintings were acrylic. They were also spray painting, spray painted, painting stencils. But I started to, well, my wife was somebody that said, “Why don’t you start oil painting?” And she got me a whole set of oil paints for Christmas, and it was one of the best gifts I’ve ever got. So I found really quickly that I love the way oils kind of create almost a simpler shading, you know, like that things smear together and become more smooth, and I feel like you could round out something that feels more three dimensional, with bringing the highlights to the shadows.
I just really liked how oils kind of felt like they came together better, you know. But I think I brought the acrylic kind of colors and vibrancy, because with oil, you have to layer and layer and layer to get that same vibrancy, because once you see the oils dry, it starts to desaturate a bit. So then I have to come back and how could I bring those colors back to maybe similar to what a acrylic, you know, paint would be.
I have a painting in this show. The show’s called “In Limbo,” and then my favorite painting in the show is called “A Limo in Limbo.” It’s a scene where a limo driver is driving all these businessmen in suits, and you could tell that something kind of shady is happening in the car, and you could see that there’s class differences between the people Inside the car and what’s happening outside the car. I painted that painting during the pandemic while living in New York, and a lot of the wealthy people left New York, and so what was left on the street were mostly homeless people looking for dollars in cash, and trashes were on fire. And all types of post-apocalyptic visuals are what I would see when I’d ride my bike around New York during that time because the city was empty. So I was trying to think, you know, what kind of class juxtaposition I could find in one painting and create a perspective where you could see everything happening all at the same time.
Danilo Parra’s first solo painting show, “In Limbo,” is on display from September 7, 2024, through October 5, 2024 at Empire Seven Studios. @danilorparra. 525 N 7th St. Suite 10. San Jose, CA 95112
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.
At the center of Needle to the Groove Records lie four friends whose bonds have been strengthened in the pursuit of amplifying art. “Don’t put any of our jokes on the record,” cautions Allen Johnson.
“Unless they land,” chimes David Ma. The witty banter among Johnson, Ma, Michael Boado, and Jeff Brummett reveals the camaraderie on which the Needle to the Groove (NTTG) label has been built.
“That’s what our vision was from the jump: Let’s find [music] we like. Let’s get it out there. Let’s not be too stressed on [asking] ‘Did it sell out?’ ” explains Johnson. Their business dealings remain casual, as they’re far more likely to talk shop over a bottle of Jameson than to call for a formal meeting. Grounded in a shared desire to not let the business of records ruin their friendships, they’ve developed a broad musical catalog that stands as a testament to the great musical diversity found throughout the Bay Area.
“You can’t pigeonhole us, that’s for sure,” explains Boado, “and we want to keep that going.”
Collectively, the label partners carry deep connections in numerous music scenes. Johnson and Boado run NTTG’s downtown San Jose record shop (Dan Bernal, owner of NTTG’s Fremont location, is a silent label partner). Boado, a fixture in the local club scene known as DJ Basura, is a partner at The Ritz in downtown San Jose. Ma is a renowned music journalist who recently began teaching a hip-hop history course at San Jose State University. Brummett has been a musical mainstay, contributing to numerous local bands over the years.
“It’s a crazy feeling when someone that I don’t recognize walks in and asks for something specifically on the label. I’m just blown away.”
Allen Johnson
Soon after opening NTTG’s downtown San Jose location, Johnson and Boado wanted to branch out. “There was an appeal to do something that had a higher ceiling and could correspond with the shop,” recalls Johnson. In the early 2000s, he ran Birthwrite Records out of his apartment while living in Chicago, and he remembers the struggle of selling releases without a true place of business. After reading about the history of Stax Records, which started when the now legendary label opened a recording studio in the back of a record shop, he saw how their storefront could double as label headquarters, offering visibility for their efforts.
Since 2016, NTTG has released nearly 40 titles of varying formats and styles. There are the overlooked gems: cassette-only releases like Kiri’s ambient Practice Bird Heads and the Apatheater EP, a collaboration between DJ Platurn and rapper Edgewize. There’s the unexpected home run: Prince Paul and Don Newkirk’s By Every Means Necessary, Vol. 1, the soundtrack to a Netflix documentary on Malcolm X. There’s the rising creative voices of Modesto Latin rockers Valley Wolf, and Bay Area-based beatmakers Mild Monk and mint.beats. Diamond Ortiz, the most-released artist on the label, is a g-funk diehard and master of the talk box.
“Our eclectic tastes are represented in the artists [we support],” notes Brummett. “I think we’re kind of celebrating our differences.” The imprint’s musical variance has become their hallmark. Ma states their hope is for the label to be trusted by listeners, no matter the release. “Hopefully [the label logo] becomes like a seal of excellence,” he says.
“I think we want to be there for the deviations,” adds Brummett, highlighting how much the label believes in letting artists be themselves. “Strange Things” by producer and songwriter B. Lewis is arguably the most mellow track in his discography, while “Jaan e Jaan” by Aki Kumar adds a dash of dusty Bollywood funk to Kumar’s otherwise blues-centric persona.
While all four stress that the label is a labor of love, they also view their work as a distinct privilege that lets them shed light on the efforts of unsung creators. It’s a point that hits home for Brummett, since numerous friends and fellow musicians have found an outlet in NTTG and its offshoot label, Slow Thrive, which releases projects from DIY bedroom artists and under-the-radar bands.
“Those are the guys that mean the most to me because they obviously care. If you are not getting any attention or money, and you’ve been doing it for 15 years, this must mean a lot to you,” he shares. “We get to curate that to the world.”
Next year, the label plans to roll out Valley Wolf’s long-awaited full-length debut, which features sessions produced by Chicano Batman’s Eduardo Arenas. It will also be time for Johnson to step back into the limelight as a creator. He’s set to release Starduster, an EP from legendary rapper Casual, featuring beats from Johnson under his alias, Albert Jenkins.
The label may still have plenty of work on the horizon, but that doesn’t prevent Johnson from stepping back and feeling a great sense of pride every time they sell one of their titles at the shop. “It’s a crazy feeling when someone who I don’t recognize walks in and asks for something specifically on the label,” he shares. “I’m just blown away.”
*The article originally appeared in issue 5.1, “Sight and Sound,” 2013
From his 90s exploits at Ajax to the more recent Naglee Park Garage, Chris Esparza’s impact on downtown San Jose has come in many phases. He looks to take his next step with Blackbird Tavern.
Long-time downtown ambassador Chris Esparza remains one of the most connected people in San Jose. He’s built his Rolodex organically after having a hand in several local ventures past and present, among them Ajax, Naglee Park Garage, Giant Creative, Fuel, and soon-to-open Blackbird Tavern.
Though a local, Esparza was never able to call one particular neighborhood home growing up. Attending five different schools over seven years, including a two-year stint up in Auburn, California, the frequent moves never allowed him to settle in. “It was five years of never knowing where my class was, of being new and uncomfortable,” Esparza recalls. “In a lot of ways, that probably led me to producing events and hosting people.”
After graduating from Gunderson High in 1985, Esparza spent time at both West Valley and De Anza College, though he admits he had no direction at the time. A year later, he got a job working at Santa Clara club One Step Beyond. It proved to be the job that changed his life.
“It was my first exposure to the young twenty- and thirtysomething alternative life—the goths, the skinheads, the mods, the punk rockers, the death rockers, and everything in between,” he remembers. He saw the club present everything from metal to English soul and rockabilly, witnessing sets from The Red Hot Chili Peppers, the Ramones, Megadeth, and Fishbone. The work inspired him to move to San Francisco, where he worked for two years.
However, when his mother passed away, he felt a need to get away. “I took the opportunity to be somewhere else at Christmas time,” he says. Buying a one-way ticket to Europe, he traveled through Spain, Belgium, and Scotland, picking up work wherever he could. Upon his return, he decided he wanted his own club.
In 1991, Esparza and business partner Chris Elliman opened Ajax. During its mythical four-year run, the venue hosted the likes of The Fugees, The Roots, and Ben Harper, establishing itself as a destination for forward-thinking cool. It attracted all pockets of the downtown scene during San Jose’s “Four Corners,” 90s nightlife heyday. Esparza admits he was the social creature of the group. “In a way, I was a natural doorman,” he says. “I liked greeting people, getting them excited about what we were doing, and telling them when to come back.”
Looking back, Esparza sees his Ajax period as a time when he and Elliman could seemingly do no wrong. Arriving at a time when the area was just starting to become Silicon Valley, the low cost of living fostered plenty of nightlife. Ajax was championed by local creatives. “I think they trusted us to curate night after night,” he says. “We said, ‘Look, I know you’ve never heard of Ben Harper, and no one else has either, but we heard this guy’s cassette tape, and I’m telling you, don’t miss this.’ And they would show up.”
Sadly, the club’s four-year run came to a close after negotiations with the space’s owners fell through. Esparza was effectively locked out, with the space maintained by the owners. In nine months, the space was vacant.
Two years after the demise of Ajax, Esparza and a similar cast of partners returned with Fuel, an international café in the current Blank Club space. It showcased a similar vibe, though it wasn’t exclusively a club. “It was for an adult that wanted a beautiful space that wasn’t as easily defined as a café or nightclub or restaurant,” Esparza says. “It was literally all of those things.” Boasting a painted globe on the ceiling, it was conceived from the ground up and seemed primed to tap into the same crowd that made Ajax such a success. Yet, where Ajax could do no wrong, Fuel’s four-year run was mired in constant, needless self-reflection. The message was the same, but somehow, the crowds had dried up.
After coming back to the fold with much more business savvy than he had at Ajax, Esparza struggled to understand why Fuel was failing. “It was a business learning experience,” he says. “You can be good, and you can be the smartest guy on the block, but if you don’t have a little bit of luck and timing on your side, it doesn’t matter who you are.”
“YOU CAN BE GOOD AND YOU CAN BE THE SMARTEST GUY ON THE BLOCK, BUT IF YOU DON’T HAVE A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK AND TIMING ON YOUR SIDE, IT DOESN’T MATTER WHO YOU ARE.”
-Chirs Esparza
In retrospect, Esparza ties in the trouble with the economy. In conjunction with the tech boom, rent skyrocketed, stealing spending money from the venue’s target audience of local creatives. At the same time, the steady rise of illegal downloading significantly changed how artists toured. Suddenly, a $300 show became a $3,000 show, and Fuel couldn’t keep up with the discrepancies. It closed its doors in 2001, an unsung gem that was never able to find its niche like Ajax so easily had.
During his days at Fuel, Esparza began to be approached by organizations to serve as a creative consultant, leading to the creation of Giant Creative. Going twelve years strong, Giant is now responsible for KraftBrew, Winter Wonderland, and the Great Glass Pumpkin Patch in Palo Alto. The outlet became a necessity when Fuel was struggling. It’s since become his main gig, allowing him to help anyone from small businesses to the city of San Jose.
In the restaurant realm, Naglee Park Garage has been Esparza’s latest success. He lovingly calls the 30-seat bistro “the tiniest restaurant on the face of the Earth.” Despite its limitations, he, business partner Brendan Rawson, and head chef Louis Silva have made it a signature downtown eatery.
After the space, a former service station, suffered a series of failed business ventures, its owners decided to wait until the right offer came around. They were envisioning an Americana-themed restaurant with a great selection of beer and wine. As luck would have it, that was exactly what Esparza, Rawson, and Silva were looking to pitch. Luck returned years later when Guy Fieri’s Food Network show “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” called. Their segment led to national exposure, and repeat showings now result in a spike of emails requesting the location’s fabled ketchup recipe.
Still, Esparza sometimes has trouble making sense of their subsequent success. The show didn’t change their formula; it only got the word out. As he maintains, “We were great before ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives.’ Why does it take national television to tell you to go eat there when you live in this town, and there aren’t many choices?”
Yet even with his string of successes, his best conception may have yet to officially begin. Esparza and Rawson are ready to bring their savvy to downtown’s epicenter with Blackbird Tavern, a restaurant and café located along Paseo de San Antonio that looks to appeal to out-of-town business folk and locals alike. Much like Ajax and Fuel, he wants the venue to offer great food, music, and conversation for patrons.
Patio seating is set to spill out onto the Paseo. Plans are in place to serve wine from vineyards in the Santa Cruz mountains, and their bar will offer a well-curated selection of craft brews and California spirits. Esparza even hopes to pair food with music. For him, the value in the idea goes both ways—patrons get an all-encompassing dining experience and those behind the scenes remain on their creative toes.
Some speak of the Blackbird space as cursed, the speculation stemming from a string of franchise failures over the past decade. To counter the talk, Esparza offers a history lesson, noting that a taqueria lasted in the space for twenty years, making it through massive downtown light rail development before those three failed. He attributes the failures to bad business strategies. “I know why they closed and I know what they did wrong,” he says. “I won’t make those mistakes.”
A lot has changed since his first days working at One Step Beyond in the mid-80s, when he discovered a wealth of alternative culture. He’s learned plenty in the process, but what rings loudest for him remains the people he’s helped bring together. As a teen who constantly struggled to find his place, Esparza finds comfort in the fact that he’s been able to create spaces where others can find theirs.
The article originally appeared in issue 5.1, “Sight and Sound,” 2013
*We post this with a heavy heart at the passing of my friend, mentor, and fellow progenitor of culture, Chris Esparza. Content Magazine and I personally have received so much from the friendships and connections that Chris created. I will miss him. We will miss him. But the world, and especially Downtown San Jose, is better because of his life and work. We respect and thank him, say goodbye, and rest in peace, my dear friend.
Experience J.Duh’s first solo gallery exhibition, ‘Starting Fires,’ from August 10 to September 7 at Empire Seven Studios in San Jose, Japan Town. The opening reception is on Saturday, August 10, from 6 to 9 p.m., featuring music from Flipside Lovers and DJ nic0tine.
Navigating Art and Advertising: A Conversation with Jorge ‘J.DUH’ Camacho.
J.Duh’s journey through art and advertising is a tale of creative evolution. Having made significant strides in both fields, he reflects on his experiences as a student of the Academy at GS&P in San Francisco. This program, created by the renowned advertising agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners, helped shape his artistic and professional outlook. J.Duh recounts how he discovered the program through his connections in art and the application process, which included answering thought-provoking questions such as explaining social media platforms to grandparents.
This experience was about learning the technical aspects of advertising and refining his storytelling and design skills. J.Duh credits the program with sharpening his ability to think critically about his work and enhancing his problem-solving skills, which he has carried into his art practice. He discusses the challenges of balancing creative vision with commercial demands and the blurred lines between fine art and commercial art, emphasizing the importance of maintaining creative freedom while navigating the commercial aspects of his work.
J.Duh’s approach to art creation emphasizes the value of following initial ideas and the importance of technique and craftsmanship. The influences behind his work stem from an interest in DIY South Bay street culture that involves skateboarding, punk rock shows, and graffiti, which inspired interest in lettering, sign painting, murals, and brand design. J.Duh’s recent projects have included jersey designs for the Sharks Foundation and numerous murals and signs throughout the region.
When thinking back on his Journey, J.Duh touches upon the emotional and practical aspects of their creative endeavors, including the challenges and rewards of pursuing an art career. He highlights the significance of networking and relationship-building within the art community, which can be crucial for career advancement and personal growth. J. Duh describes South Bay as vibrant and community-driven, slept-on, but with massive potential for growth that requires support for local artists and the fostering of a dynamic creative environment.
J.Duh talks about the commercial projects that have offered artistic opportunities and how personal projects, such as his solo exhibition “Starting Fires,” allow for deeper creative exploration. The exhibition, featuring interactive matchbook artworks inspired by fictitious businesses and musicians, exemplifies how art can engage audiences in multifaceted ways.
In this conversation, J.Duh shares the inspiration for his upcoming solo exhibition ‘Starting Fires,’ his views on the intersection of art and advertising, and how those two worlds have come in contact throughout his career to shape his views of the broader creative landscape of the South Bay.
Follow Jorge ‘J.Duh’ Camacho on Instagram @j.duh and visit their website at jduhdesigns.com.
Francisco Graciano has been creating art in San José for as long as he can remember. His multi-disciplinary practices include sculpture, painting, music, and tattoos. His work centers on themes of evolution and human experience that follow a ‘continuous line’ and the many factors encountered through life that develop who a person may become. The ‘continuous line’ used to describe his wire sculptures is literally manifested in the unbroken materials he used to create three-dimensional impressions of the natural world, life, and society.
In May 2024, Francisco was commissioned by Montalvo Arts Center to design and fabricate a ten-foot-tall hummingbird as part of their 2024 Marcus Exhibition. The exhibition, “A Path Forward: Honoring Ohlone Land & Spirit,” is a collaborative project led by our lead artist, Charlene Eigen-Vasquez, in partnership with the Confederation of Ohlone People and Santa Clara County Parks, dedicated to acknowledging and celebrating Ohlone Territories. Featuring a permanent pathway enhanced with augmented reality (AR) elements created by Jesus Rodriguez and Graciano’s hummingbird sculpture, the project will open on July 19th at the Montalvo Arts Center as part of “Future Dreaming,” an exploration of themes related to indigeneity. “Future Dreaming” will have its opening exhibition alongside “A Path Forward” and will also showcase works by Beatriz Cortez, including “Ilopango, The Volcano That Left” and “Cosmic Mirror,” Rayos Magos’s “Te Veo, Te Escucho, Te Honro,” and newly commissioned pieces by Ana Teresa Fernandez, such as “Circuitry” and “Pulse.”
Join Graciano and Montalvo Arts Center on Friday, July 19, 6–10 pm for their 2024 Marcus Festival, which celebrates the opening of their new outdoor art exhibition, Future Dreaming…A Path Forward.
Mariachi music has existed for decades in its current form, and it is an important part of Mexican culture and folklore. Their signature charro costumes and sombreros are iconic, and the traditional songs serve as a type of Mexican oral history. Learning to be a mariachi is a skill often passed down from one generation to another with great pride and reverence.
It is common to hire a mariachi group to celebrate family events, religious holidays, and other important occasions. While there are many mariachi groups all over Northern California to choose from, many people consider Mariachi Azteca to be the area’s finest.
The San Jose-based Mariachi Azteca was formed in 1981. Besides performing at private and public functions, Mariachi Azteca members also teach music lessons
to students of the San Jose School of Arts and Culture at the Mexican Heritage Plaza. The group, led by musician Juan Diaz, is made up of six members, though sometimes they perform with additional musicians.
There’s no need to wait around for the San Jose Mariachi Festival to catch a Mariachi Azteca performance, where they are the host mariachi group. Just head over to Tacos al Carbon on Story Road every Saturday and Sunday night at around 7:30 for dinner, and you’ll also be treated to a mariachi performance.
It’s not surprising that Keith Hames named his performance ensemble Akoma Arts. The Akan people of Ghana call the human heart “akoma.” This word represents not only love, but patience, tolerance, faithfulness, goodwill, and unity. These are his values and the ethos of his West African ancestors.
Since childhood, Hames has sung gospel and soul. At 12, he began playing the drums and forming bands, and while he may have come to San Jose for college, he stayed for the music. While raising a family with his wife, Melody, Hames worked as an art director for tech companies and performed with reggae, blues, and gospel groups. In the late 1970s, Hames became a devotee of the drum. He got hooked when he saw a group playing traditional West African music at San Jose City College, and in the 1990s, he joined Jaliya, a West African music troupe. In 2011, he and eleven others started Akoma Arts because they wanted to perform more and teach drum and dance classes.
Since 2011, Akoma Arts has used hundreds of performances, classes, and workshops to entertain and promote African music and culture. Twice a week, Hames holds drum and dance classes at the Alma Community Center in San Jose. The ensemble performs at community celebrations, civic events, weddings, museums, and at Santa Clara County Juvenile Hall. The East Side Union High School District brings Akoma Arts to their schools for assemblies and workshops.
The ensemble’s musicians play the ancestral music of West Africa on Ghanaian hand drums, bells, and rattles, accompanied by the group’s dancers. The heart of this music’s percussion is the djembe—a large, goblet-shaped, goatskin drum. The djembe’s name comes from the Mande phrase “anke djé anke bé,” which means “everyone gathers together in peace.”
In 2016, the School of Arts and Culture at Mexican Heritage Plaza gave a fiscal sponsorship to Akoma Arts, providing its 501(c)(3) nonprofit status to the group. Tamara Alvarado, executive director of the School of Arts and Culture, says this decision was a “no-brainer.” Alvarado is also a member of Calpulli Tonalehqueh, an Aztec dance and cultural diffusion group that holds classes and ceremonies at Mexican Heritage Plaza. “Keith’s a healer, he’s our trusted elder, and he is crystal clear,” says Alvarado, “that ceremony, culture, identity, resistance, and solidarity must be key in our lives if we want to make this world better.” Alvarado adds, “We are all ceremonial people. You’ve got your emails, your laptops, cell phones, and all those things, but if you don’t connect with some form of ceremony, you lose your humanity.”
Alvarado and Hames agree that Akoma Arts and Calpulli Tonalehqueh share a calling—the revival of their ancestors’ indigenous spiritual and cultural traditions. They were largely lost in the 15th through 19th centuries, when Europeans conquered Latin America and began a transatlantic slave trade.
Akoma Arts’ mission is to bring people together and create community through drum, dance, and song. “We engage our audiences and get them up to dance,” says Lisa Gains, Akoma Arts’ dance director. “They realize that we’re sharing our culture, and that breaks down barriers between us.” Akoma Arts engages young audiences by showing them how to dance and play the drums. This often introduc-es African American students to their African heritage for the first time. “Many of them don’t feel seen,” says Gains. “We have impact—we plant a seed and give them something they can hold on to, something to be proud of.”
Hames believes that traditional West African music can help people. He says that experiencing it promotes mental balance and can unify a group of strangers. When he sings and plays his djembe, he connects spiritually with his ancestors, and that’s a conduit to worship and well-being. This connection is available to everyone, which is why he’s so passionate about sharing it. “We’re stewards of African music, culture, and connection,” says Hames. “We’re sharing these songs, and we’re sharing an experience that opens your heart.”
The article originally appeared in issue 10.2, “Sight and Sound,” 2018.
Tiye Garrett began dancing professionally with the West African dance group Akoma Arts, founded by Keith Hames. When Akoma eventually closed its doors, Garrett tried to fill the void by dancing alone. She quickly realized she needed to share her expression, and the community felt the same way. She founded Kuumba LLC in 2022, emphasizing West African Dance and rhythms, community, and providing spaces for creativity to thrive.
‘Kuumba’ means creativity in the African Language of Swahili and is the sixth principle of the annual celebration of Kwanzaa. That sixth principle guides followers ‘to always do as much as we can, in the way we can, to leave our community more beautiful than when we inherited it.’ That meaning exemplifies Kuumba’s purpose in promoting self-care, fitness, educational growth, and overall wellness through body movement. Kuumba works to create spaces where all are welcome, where there is a sense of belonging, connection, health, and serving others.
Join Kuumba at Creekside Socials on Friday, July 12, 6-7 pm for an educational West African dance session with live drumming. This welcoming space nurtures connection and belonging, fostering community health. Dance with them and celebrate diversity as they embark on a fun, educational fitness journey. RSVP Here.
Kimberly Snyder developed a love for creative artmaking from a young age and was inspired by sewing and crocheting with her grandmother. Her passion for art history began with classes at the University of Santa Cruz (UCSC), where she explored the narratives, historical contexts, and rebellious nature of some artworks. These combined interests eventually led her to a career in art museums.
Snyder began her journey at NUMU as a curatorial intern in 2014. She has held various positions before, most recently becoming the executive director. Through her work at the museum, she discovered a love for building connections with volunteers, members, and staff while spotting their potential contributions to the organization. Over the past ten years, Snyder has seen the growth of programs such as NUMU’s Annual Juried High School ArtNow Exhibition. This educational program provides student artists real-world experience by participating in a juried museum exhibition.
As executive director, Snyder aims to bolster NUMU’s community presence and elevate its Bay Area profile through strategic programming. She envisions the museum as an interactive hub that continues to engage with Los Gatos’s history. She hopes to enhance existing programs, such as establishing a council of teachers and producing an ArtNow retrospective exhibition celebrating the program’s impact on students.
In our conversation, we discuss Snyder’s journey to becoming NUMU’s executive director, her experience as a mother, her hobbies, which include cooking and bringing folks together, and the words she tries to live by: “It’s not about waiting for the storm to pass; it’s about learning to dance in the rain.”
Join New Museum Los Gatos for its upcoming “Boundaries: the 4th Annual Experimental Exhibition,” produced in partnership with genARTS Silicon Valley and opening on July 19.
OPEN HOURS Apr-Oct THU – SUN 10 AM-4 PM Sep-Mar FRI – SUN 10 AM-4 PM
A (Still) Life of Avocados, Lemons, Oranges, and Strawberries.
The morning before an art event, you might find James Mertke unloading the Tetris puzzle of art pieces and display shelves from his car. It’s been a little over a year since James started participating in art markets, and although he’s still learning the ropes, he’s grown a lot since his first event. He’s created an eye-catching display with hand-painted signage and a variety of shelves.
James can’t remember a time he wasn’t painting. He loves pushing color vibrancy and emphasizing shadows. “I’ve landed on acrylic paints because I enjoy the vibrancy that can be achieved and the fast drying times that encourage me to work quickly and deliberately.”
Talk with James for a few minutes, and you’ll find there’s a story behind each brightly colored still life—sliced fruit, donuts, Botan Rice Candy, strawberry “grandma” candies—simple and happy childhood memories captured on canvas. “That’s one of my favorite things about the things I paint. Just on the surface, it’s a lemon to someone. But when I tell them the story about the lemon tree, maybe they’ll share something about how their grandparents had a lemon tree that they remember.”
During high school, academics became the priority while art took the back burner. James discovered a love of mechanical engineering in 2018 at Santa Clara University. Practicing art became something reserved for weekends at home. But when many doors closed during the pandemic, a door opened for James to pursue art. Commuting time could instead be dedicated to painting.
Looking for new ways to practice his craft, James noticed a 100-day painting challenge on Instagram. Over the summer, he painted a new piece every day for 100 days in a row. With a time constraint, he spent less time adjusting the same painting and simply applied different techniques to his next piece. The subject of his paintings also shifted. “Before the pandemic, I was mostly painting ocean scenes…I would take reference photos when I went to Santa Cruz or Monterey…When the pandemic happened, I started transitioning to the still lifes because I was looking for things around my house to paint.”
A prevalent subject in James’s art is lemon slices. He finds eye-catching glassware from the thrift store, arranging and rearranging lemon slices around them to get the right reference shot. James details the strong shadows and vibrant yellows in his art, but the connection behind the lemons is personal and sweeter. The lemons come from the tree in his grandpa’s backyard. “I always say it’s a giant lemon tree, but it’s a dwarf one—I’m taller than it—but it’s the most prolific thing,” he says. His grandpa remains one of James’s biggest supporters and is always thrilled to offer him lemons. After an art market, James will call him to share how it went. “He likes hearing when I make a sale…he’ll be so excited and smiling all the time.”
After the 100-day challenge, James improved his skills—and his inventory. “I had boxes and boxes of paintings.” He made it a project to get himself into events and shows to sell his work. Since James didn’t study art or take any art classes, he didn’t naturally find himself surrounded by an art community. He’s worked to find community by joining his school’s art club, frequenting art events, and exchanging art pieces with new friends. The art community he’s found is extremely supportive. “Art is about abundance. There’s not limited space for all the artists,” he explains. “The more art people create, the more opportunities people create for people to appreciate art, and the more people appreciate art, the more people will want to support artists.”
Early this year, James was invited to show his work at the Elliott Fouts Gallery in Sacramento. His pieces have been curated into an exhibit titled, The Still Life. James also connects with the local community for opportunities to display art at businesses like Voyager Craft Coffee and Fox Tale Fermentation Project.
Recently, James introduced mechanical engineering pieces into his work by snapping reference photos in the machine shop for mechanical engineering–themed paintings. He submitted a series featuring LED lights, electrical resistors, and 3D-printed items to an art show sponsored by the School of Engineering at SCSU to celebrate the art of engineers. The paintings were acquired by the Department of Mechanical Engineering and now hang in the office.
Mechanical engineering and painting used to be two unrelated interests, but James has found they go hand in hand. “I’m an artist and engineer. I feel like when people think of engineering, it’s all math and logic…but I also like expressing my creative side,” he says. “Engineering is creative too, in a different way. I think engineering and art coexist and create some really cool combinations.”
The current San José Museum of Art Exhibition, Seeing through Stone, is on view through Sunday, January 5, 2025.
The stories told by museums hold profound implications for how society understands history and power dynamics. San José Museum of Art Chief Curator Lauren Schell Dickens has partnered with The Institute of the Arts and Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Santa Cruz Barrios Unidos to curate the museum’s current exhibition, “Seeing through Stone,” part of their ongoing Visualizing Abolition series. At the heart of this project lies a critical examination of the agency wielded by artists, activists, and institutions in imagining a world without prisons.
Seeing Through Stone challenges dominant narratives surrounding incarceration and stands as a testament to the power of art in confronting societal injustices. Featuring the works of 80 artists, It delves into themes of prison abolition, offering a platform for marginalized voices and a vision for creating a world beyond prison walls. Through poignant imagery and evocative installations, artists provoke viewers to confront the harsh realities of the prison-industrial complex while envisioning a world free from the constraints of incarceration. By centering the experiences of system-impacted individuals and their allies, the exhibition aims to spark dialogue and catalyze action toward dismantling oppressive systems.
Visualizing Abolition extends beyond the confines of the museum walls by fostering networks between abolition activists and artists. Through public programs and engagements, they seek to deepen community involvement and amplify the voices of those affected by incarceration.
Lauren Schell Dickens, most recently featured in Content Magazine Issue 15.4, “Profiles,” was born in the South Bay and raised in Sonoma County. She received a BA in American Studies from Yale University and an MA in Modern Art History, Critical Studies from Columbia University in New York. Her original interest in lighting design for theater arts set the stage for her interest in the work required when sharing an artist’s work. As a curator, Lauren weaves together the voices of artists, creating narratives that hopefully have a transformational effect on viewers.
In this conversation, we discuss Lauren’s Journey to becoming a curator, the transformative potential of art in fostering collective imagination and social change, the importance of artists in challenging normative representations of prisons, and specific installations that guests should look out for.
Join The San José Museum of Art on Friday, June 21, for live musical performances that will activate the artworks in SJMA’s exhibition “Seeing Through Stone” in collaboration with the City of San José’s Make Music Day Celebrations. Acclaimed composer and theorist James Gordon Williams, assistant professor of music at UC Santa Cruz, will perform an improvisational piece using a sculpture by interdisciplinary artist Maria Gaspar made of iron bars from the Cook County Department of Corrections, the largest single-site jail in the US. Experimental composer and visual artist Guillermo Galindo will perform a piece on his artwork, Llantambores, an instrument made of materials found at the US-Mexico border.
Born in Lexington, Kentucky, and raised in San Jose, California, internet sensation DaQuane Fox, better known as Flammy Marciano, tends to be ahead of the curve when it comes to gaming, streaming, and even music. He began his music career in the late 2000s under the name Young Marvel before releasing viral songs such as ‘Jerry Rice’ and ‘Mood Right Now’ in the early 2010s under his current moniker, Flammy Marciano. Along with blending humor into his raps, Marciano has pioneered gaming and streaming into his musical career, building a large fanbase on platforms like Twitch and YouTube.
Marciano credits his love for music to his late uncle, Sultan Banks, widely known as Traxamillion. This love for music and relationship with his uncle led to Marciano’s passion for entertainment outlets that resemble television and cinema. Marciano gets deep when discussing how fatherhood has molded his life and impacted his career. Despite gaining recognition in a modern world that rewards being ahead of trends, Marciano never strays from his affinity for television shows of the 1970s and anime of the 1990s. His current success as a public figure has made his potential to become an internationally recognized influencer a real possibility.
In addition to being a father, rapper, and streamer, Marciano founded his record label, 88 Entertainment, and continues to release music that displays his evolution in sound. His upcoming project, currently referred to as ‘Yourself’ (final title pending), will be released in late Spring 2024. However, Marciano has released several exclusive early-cut tracks on Patreon before the final release.
In this conversation, we discuss Flammy Marciano’s journey as a rapper, streamer, and father, the inspiration behind his work, and the evolution of his career. You can find Flammy Marciano on all major music streaming platforms, Twitch and YouTube @flamgawdfaming, and Instagram @flammymarciano.
Host Troy Ewers is a journalist and personality from Southside San Jose, CA, with a background in music, film, and sports. Hey aims to highlight art and culture through music, fashion, film, and sports. Check out Troy Ewers on the Content Magazine Podcast, Instagram @trizzyebaby, and YouTube @topkatfilms.
Since its founding in 2018, Chopsticks Alley Art has been a platform that elevates the perspectives and cultures of Southeast Asian Americans through a blend of cultural events, traditional art forms education, and carefully curated gallery exhibitions. The programming at Chopsticks Alley Art has provided a voice for young artists and empowered them to create positive changes within their communities.
Trami Nguyen Cron, author and visionary behind Chopsticks Alley Art, has a personal connection to the organization’s mission. Growing up amidst a tapestry of diverse world cultures, she experienced the struggles of Vietnamese immigrants fleeing post-war Vietnam. Her journey as a Vietnamese American, chronicled in her work, is a testament to her commitment to empowering her community and reclaiming their narrative. Trami’s inspiring story has been featured in episode #31 of the Content Magazine Podcast and Issue 12.2, “Sight & Sound.”
Bree Karpavage and Ann Hazels are breathing new life into the Santa Cruz art scene.
First Friday Santa Cruz is celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2024. As part of the celebration, First Friday Santa Cruz and Radius Gallery, also celebrating their 10th anniversary this year, have teamed up to host an exhibition entitled “Changing Spaces,” opening on the First Friday in June. “Changing Spaces” features the work of 39 artists and is an homage to this monthly event that presents both emerging and established artists showing in small businesses, galleries, and art spaces across the county.
Radius Gallery was founded in 2014 by Ann Hazels to create a space for contemporary art with an edge. As a commercial gallery, Radius partners with other regional arts organizations while maintaining its vision for curation and creating a platform for local artists. A practicing artist herself, Hazels believes in the power of art to change the world and works hard to create shows at Radius that resonate with visitors, knowing artists are working just as hard to make the same things happen.
Bree Karpavage, the new face of First Friday Santa Cruz since 2020, has injected fresh energy into the organization. Her focus has been on uplifting venues and artists, all while fostering a sense of community. Karpavage’s vision for First Friday Santa Cruz extends beyond downtown or traditional art galleries. She envisions it as a platform that showcases the artistic talent of the entire region. First Friday Santa Cruz is a bridge that connects the community to art and small businesses, firmly believing in the transformative potential of art experiences.
In this conversation, Ann and Bree discuss the business of art, their own art practices, advice for emerging artists, and what they hope audiences take away from their work.
Be sure to attend First Friday Santa Cruz on June 7 and check out the opening of “Changing Spaces” at Radius Gallery. This exhibition celebrates 20 years of First Friday and features the work of 39 artists. It is an homage to this monthly event, which presents both emerging and established artists showing in small businesses, galleries, and art spaces across the county.
Kathryn Dunlevie has always possessed a magical perception of the world around her, even before she became an artist. Growing up all over the United States, Dunlevie developed a deep appreciation of what gives a particular area a sense of place. Nowadays, her artworks a connecting thread, bringing disparate places and ideas together in what she describes as “hazy vignettes are woven together.” She photographs the locales of her travels and sits on the pictures until she begins the process of collaging. Then, in construction, she finds a method of arranging her photos that poignantly displaces the observer’s sense of time and place. Being an artist located in Silicon Valley, Dunlevie is often inspired by San Jose’s diversity—not only in viewpoint but in its sense of locality. Given the difference in age and style that many San Jose neighborhoods possess, she believes that you can walk down the street and enter into a new world entirely. Alongside the San Jose art community, she happily stands with, Dunlevie’s work captures the ever-changing world we find ourselves wandering in.
“I have a fascination with history. I’ve always been riveted by old places, as if I can feel them. I’m always collecting images and trying new ways to combine them. My assignment to myself is to experiment with new approaches and see what ideas take shape. When something catches my eye, I grab it, often without any idea of where it will fit in. As for the themes of my projects, that inspiration finds me.”
At first glance, the Space Palette might appear to be an alien device. It consists of a large, oval frame filled with a series of holes (4 large and 12 small). If only observed, its function will remain a mystery. However, once you physically interact with the object, its purpose is revealed. By passing your hands through the smaller holes, different musical sounds are selected, while passing your hands through the larger holes allows the instrument to be played. Multicolored, abstract graphics on a nearby screen visually reflect your choices. Though the origins of the Space Palette may seem extraterrestrial, it is actually one of Tim Thompson’s many interactive installation pieces.
How would you describe your artwork?
Before 2002, I was a musician who developed nerdy software for algorithmic composition [the creation of music through the use of algorithms] and real-time musical performance [music performed through immediate computer responses]. This software was a platform for my creativity.
Since 2002, the first year I went to Burning Man, I’ve been developing interactive installations and instruments as platforms so others can be creative. Burning Man provides powerful inspiration, virtually unlimited and uncurated opportunities, and a large appreciative audience for interactive artwork. While music is still a key aspect, my artwork has expanded to include graphics, video, and physical structures.
Three-dimensional input devices are particularly interesting to me. Using a 3D input device can be as transformative as using a paintbrush instead of a pencil. The potential for 3D input in uniquely expressive instruments is exciting and only beginning to be realized.
You often combine art, technology, and music. What are some of the challenges of working with these mediums?
Dealing with complexity is a primary challenge. My installations are often intended to be “casual instruments” that can be enjoyed immediately, analogous to “casual games,” like Angry Birds. A simple interface is key to this, but simplicity shouldn’t limit an instrument’s creative use or depth of expression. I often make a comparison to finger painting—one of the simplest creative interfaces around. No one needs to be taught how to finger paint. A child doesn’t even need to be able to hold a paintbrush. Yet [finger painting] allows a depth of expression that can satisfy any artist. One of my most successful pieces is the Space Palette—its interface can essentially be described as finger painting in mid-air, where the “paint” is both visual and musical.
“Using a 3D input device can be as transformative as using a paintbrush instead of a pencil.”
Tim Thompson
In technology-based artwork, a simple interface usually corresponds with a great deal of underlying complexity. I have a lifetime of programming experience, so I’m well-prepared to deal with that complexity. I sometimes use a complex interface to contrast and complement a simple interface, incorporating both in the same artwork. The more challenging aspect for me is selecting the type of technology to use. New sensors and displays are being invented at a dizzying rate. It’s easy to find yourself always investigating the latest technology and never finishing anything. Deadlines work well to combat this tendency, and events like Burning Man make excellent deadlines.
What does being creative mean to you?
Being creative means creating something that didn’t exist previously, which applies both to me and the people using my installations. Up until recently, most of my efforts involved creating music and software out of “thin air.” With the help of TechShop San Jose, being creative with physical things is becoming easier and easier.
What are your plans for the future? Where do you think your work is going next?
I have been using and exploring three-dimensional input devices for over a decade. I will continue to explore their potential for the foreseeable future, in both casual and performing instruments as well as installations. I’m particularly looking forward to using the Sensel Morph, a new pressure-sensitive pad being developed in Mountain View.
What response are you hoping for when someone interacts with your art?
I want people to realize that they are in control and are creating their own art and experience, especially if they haven’t previously considered themselves a musician or otherwise creative. Most instruments require a long learning curve and finger dexterity, which are barriers to entry for creativity. My casual instruments attempt to break down these barriers without sacrificing the potential for expressiveness or creativity. The response to the Space Palette has been particularly gratifying. The most common things I’ve heard as people walk away from it, smiling, are: “I want one in my living room” and “I could stay here all night.”
Born in Mexico City and currently based in Silicon Valley, Taryn Curiel’s passion for art has been with her since early childhood and has culminated in a body of work filled with sensation and enigmatic energy.
Techniques involving texture, lines, and a muted color palette help her in her signature use of the figure with abstract elements. Her medium is watercolor, but in her own way. With continued experimentation, she is always learning and exploring but remains true to her overall mission: to intrigue the viewer.
Silicon Valley Open Studios 2024 takes place the first three weekends of May and showcases the studios of over 200 Silicon Valley Artists. Weekend three, May 18-19, will be hosted in the South Bay. Thirty-three artists at The Alameda Artworks in San José, including abstract watercolor painter Taryn Curiel, will open their studios to guests on May 18 and 19.
K nown simply as “Manik” to most, Dalton got his nickname while digging through his mother’s record collection as a kid. Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 album Are You Experienced caught his eye, and the song “Manic Depression” altered his name forever. Born and raised in San Jose, Dalton describes his love for downtown: “Skaters, indie bands, hip-hop, punks—it was a very colorful underground scene. You could have one conversation with someone, and your ideas could spark exponentially.”
That kind of exponential spark has inspired Dalton’s most recent work. He explains, “During the pandemic, everything slowed down. That was my opportunity. I give it up to Francisco Ramirez, a friend and fellow artist. I would always start pieces and never finish them. It was great to see the process, but Francisco nudged me [with], ‘You should do a show. You should do more,’ got me to start painting backgrounds and framing pieces.”
As his nickname would suggest, Manik’s creative pursuits span multiple genres and disciplines. By day, Dalton is a craftsman, woodworking for his family business, Heritage Mill Work. He approaches his day job much like his art: “Definitely creative, but sometimes I am limited to what the client wants. I function as a manager, laborer, designer, quoter, sales, all of it.” Most of his art installations are framed in exotic wood, which he stains himself, explaining, “I am a builder, so I mixed the stains, and the frames are handmade with alder and poplar. If you don’t frame pieces with something nice, they lose some of their impact.”
Dalton’s artistic philosophy blends cultures of sight, sound, and spirituality. In his most recent work, he attempts to harness “something spontaneous, perfect, but perfect because it is organic. I came up with a concept called OCTMO, organic creations through mechanical operations. The perfect circle, a ray of light, waves, you see all of these things in nature.” Using his trade skills, he creates massive mechanical spinning turntables to spin his canvas. Once the mechanical processes are fabricated, he relies on meditative intentions, themes, and intuition to guide his painting. He explains, “I play really loud music, and most of the time, I start from the center. I like going with a theme when picking colors, but I also love seeing one color after the next pop, contrast, and move against the others. It never gets old. I try not to think about it too much. Just do.”
Meditation fuels the work Dalton calls “Circle Metaphysical”—his methodical practice of painting one circle after the next allows him the opportunity to zone in on the present. He explains, “Yeah, it’s hundreds of colors, but one hundred colors are nothing when you meditate.” Dalton hopes his introspective process is communicated to those who view his work, but he understands that each person will react differently, explaining, “It’s a vibe, a feeling. The colors are vibrations. Is it sucking you in, or is it blowing you out? I prefer to lightly focus on a piece and feel the pulse. If I am in a bad mental state, I might feel differently about all these colors.”
When Dalton is not painting in his warehouse or working his day job, you can find him in the studio creating ambient new-wave music, producing reggae, or hosting a Sunday morning radio show on KKUP. Dalton is currently recording his own ambient music: “I have been working on a huge arsenal of sound for years. I want to do large, colorful installations of interactive art and music. Step on the ground, and it makes a noise. Sit on a rock, and it twinkles.” Dalton’s upcoming plans are to explore color theory, collaborate with small businesses, and paint murals. “I can’t spin a wall, so I will have to work backward in my process. There are a few different ways I have worked out. I think the bigger the circles, the bigger the impact.”
Matt Kelsey, Printers’ Guild Member & Jim Gard, Chairman of the Printers’ Guild
For twenty-two years, volunteers at the San Jose Printers’ Guild have kept the art of printing alive.
In a world where books can be downloaded in digital format and sending messages is as easy as tapping on a phone screen, Jim Gard, chairman of the Printers’ Guild, and guild member Matt Kelsey, shed light on how the printing press serves as a reminder of the days when communication required a concentrated effort and skilled craftsmanship.
Jim, you have been with the Printers’ Guild since the beginning. Could you share a little history on how the Printers’ Guild came about?
Jim: The Print Shop exhibit opened in the ’70s, and although the San Jose Historical Museum had some volunteers, they worked independently and lacked organization. In 1992, the museum staff, as well as some of the printers, met and formed the Printers’ Guild to provide consistent printing demonstrations to the visiting public. From then on, the group has met monthly, maintaining a shop volunteer schedule, creating, printing exhibits, and repairing and acquiring equipment.
What types of equipment are used in the Print Shop?
Jim: Letterpress. We have small, table-top Kelsey presses, a Chandler & Price Pilot press, and some cylinder proof presses. But our main attraction is the F.M. Weiler Liberty press, circa 1884. This heavy floor model press gives visitors a close-up look at the workings of a treadle-powered “jobber.”
What are demonstrations at the Print Shop like?
Matt: Members of the San Jose Printers’ Guild continue to practice the skills mastered by printers of old, using some 200 cases of metal and wood type, including many rare and antique designs. The best experience, though, is when we put the Pilot press right up to the railing and let visitors operate it themselves.
Matt, you are the lead organizer for this year’s Bay Area Printers’ Fair, an event that celebrates letterpress printing and related arts. Does this event bring us back to the roots of graphic design?
Matt: Yes, the Printers’ Fair takes us back to the time when the printer was the graphic designer. The printer knew what sizes and styles of type were available in the shop and knew how to combine them to create the right look for the customer. A lot of graphic designers today really enjoy getting away from the computer and getting back to the roots of handling handset type and impressing ink into paper instead of manipulating pixels on a screen.
For visitors and Guild members alike, I am sure there is a bit of nostalgia that one feels when observing and participating in the printing process. What do Guild members and visitors take away from this shared historical experience?
Jim: The Guild brings together these enthusiasts with a purpose, which they can share with each other and the public.
Matt: Guild members enjoy keeping alive the “black art” using the same basic technology pioneered by Gutenberg over 500 years ago. I have taught a number of workshops at the Print Shop, and I am always energized by the enthusiasm and creativity of the students. In one day, they learn to handset type and arrange a short poem or quotation into an attractive layout. Everyone goes home with a feeling of creativity and accomplishment.
With technology constantly advancing, what does the art of printing serve as a reminder of?
Matt: The museum Print Shop replicates a typical print shop of the early 1900s, where local businesses would go when they needed flyers, stationery, business cards, labels, and myriad other forms of ink on paper. Now we think of a “printer” as a machine connected to the computer, that quickly produces copies on command; a hundred years ago, a “printer” was a skilled craftsman who consulted with the customer about their printing needs, found the right sizes and styles of type to design and compose the text from handset metal type, printed a proof for the customer’s approval, and then carefully prepared the job for press.
Jim: The art of printing serves as a reminder of the labor that was once involved in communication. With all this handset type, there used to be a lot more people involved: specialists in typesetting, press operation, proofreading.
Matt: It is a reminder that, back then, printing was an act of freedom. In the words of journalist A. J. Liebling, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”
Every year, 12,000 people travel from all across America to hear music by over 1,400 performers during a four-day period. With more than 80 venues from which to choose, listeners have the opportunity to see a host of new faces and acts. The event is heralded by musicians and fans alike. It began as the dream of Austin’s music lovers, a dream that eventually became “South By Southwest.” It took years to become what it is today, but with patience and dedication, South By Southwest became one of the country’s biggest music festivals. The dream lives on, but this time it does not reside with southerners in a town that was virtually unknown by the music industry just 20 years ago. The dream is occurring right here in San Jose.
Last June, more than 5,000 people made the pilgrimage to downtown San Jose to attend a five-day event known as “Left Coast Live.” The festival’s theme was “The Sound Of Things To Come.” Monday through Thursday featured discussion panels on the future of the music industry, an outdoor cinema, and free concerts. Left Coast Live culminated on Friday night with performances from nearly 100 bands at 35 different venues in downtown San Jose. The festival was well received by music lovers and festival-goers alike. Founder Chris Esparza felt the pressure of managing such a huge endeavor for the first time. “About a month out, I kept having nightmares,” said Esparza. “We have this five-day event. There are over 500 band members involved. Forty businesses were personally invested. The city was invested. I kept wondering if anyone was gonna show up. If I let them down, I might as well move.” Esparza did not disappoint. The festival was a huge success. Esparza is no stranger to the music scene. After spending some time in San Francisco and traveling the world in the late 80’s, Esparza decided to return home to San Jose. It was here that he opened the Ajax Lounge in 1991. Ajax Lounge hosted some of the greatest acts of our day — the Fugees, Ben Harper, Cake, The Roots — well before they were internationally known. Anyone who attended one of these shows in the early 90s can attest to the energy, creativity, and well-attended concerts during that time.
It was also a time when San Jose’s music scene flourished. “If you were in your twenties, you lived in an apartment for $300 a month,” said Esparza. “You rode your bike everywhere downtown. There were no cliques at these shows. You would see the business guy next to the hairdresser next to the punk rocker. They all hung out together.”
But all of this changed during the economic boom in the late 90’s. Rents shot up, but many incomes remained stagnant. The affordability of the live music scene during the weekends began to decline for the twenty-something set. “The cost of living is tough on a 25-year-old,” said Esparza. “It’s tough to buy a beer and see live music. Big houses and crazy busy lives don’t make for cramped apartments and time for art anymore.” The Lounge Bar closed, and Esparza opened up Fuel. But instead of bringing the energy that Ajax encompassed in the early 90s, Fuel operated more for private parties and corporate business functions. “There was a desert of an interesting creative crowd that dried up,” said Esparza, who later sold Fuel (now occupied by the Blank Club) in 2001.
Then Esparza opened Neglee Park Garage in 2006. He also began Giant Creative Services, which puts on events like “Winter Wonderland” and “Big Band And BBQ.” It was at this time that a local music organization called South Bay Live approached him. “They wanted to address the dying ecosystem of live music in San Jose,” said Esparza. “We agreed that we wanted to create a festival unlike anything that’s been in town before.” The goal was to initiate a musical renaissance. But the only way the festival could work was if people supported the vision of community and economic development through arts and cultural events. After two years of communications and 15 volunteers on board, “Left Coast Live” was born. The festival was a huge success. Planning has already begun for this year’s event. “We’re going to make it a six-day event this year,” said Esparza. The festival will retain the theme of “The Shape Of Things to Come,” offering panels and free concerts throughout the week. Instead of one huge night of music, the festival will stretch into Saturday. “We are asking the question of how do we blow people away but have a lot of fun while doing it,” said Esparza. With creative components like a beer garden and the main stage residing in the Ramada Inn Hotel parking lot, this year’s festival is rising to a whole new level. “It’s going to be a big spectacle,” said Esparza. “We’ve got a lot of interactive pieces.”
The future of Chris Esparza and Left Coast Live looks promising. But Esparza knows San Jose needs more venues. “There is a definite need for a venue that holds 500 to 800 people,” said Esparza. Currently, the Civic Center holds 2,800 people, and the California holds 1,000. “I would love to see five more venues open,” Esparza noted passionately. “I want it where on Tuesday, you can have four choices on where to see live music, and on Saturday, you have seven.” We can only hope for such a dream to come to fruition. In the meantime, we can take what is given to us: a great music festival this summer that promises to hold many surprises. Left Coast Live will take place from June 21-26 in downtown San Jose.
Wisper’s life resembles an uncanny stack of page-turners. Conversations with him dredge up metaphors, tuned specifically to the relationship between identity and outcome. Subjective as art and truth may be, the sublime coincidences within his experiences hint at more.
As teenagers, Wisper and his best friends—Sno, Poe, Shen Shen, and Bizr—formed the intersection of two arts groups: Together We Create, a collective of muralists (est. 1985), and LORDS Crew (Legends of Rare Designs, est. 1986), a graffiti crew whose members grew out of San Jose and drew international attention. For this tight group of young, talented artists, the potential for fame was palpable. But certain threads split the chapters of their lives into unraveled dichotomies. For Wisper, a path of criminality handed him a prison sentence of 26 to life—ultimately, an unknowable length of time for truth, beauty, justice, and their rivals to battle through his mind like restless gods.
He vividly remembers the first time he caught injustice red-handed. As the middle sibling in his mother’s home at the time, it baffled him that after his father’s death, social security payments owed to his mother—$300 per child—couldn’t bring the family clothes, food, or rent installments. He and his brothers were eating rice every day that summer. Then one night, as he performed his usual chore of cleaning his stepfather’s car, he found Burger King wrappers. Claims didn’t match the evidence.
“If you can learn how to operate from a place of peace while creating art, you can learn how to operate from a place of peace in all aspects of your life.” _Wisper
There was little he could do about it, other than rebel. As a creative kid with a knack for detail, Wisper looked for his identity in spaces where originality shined. In the world of hip-hop, among b-boys, DJs, and rappers, Wisper was hooked by the wave of graffiti that made its way over from the East Coast, bringing with it a culture that admired innovation. As the LORDS Crew formed and grew its membership, some of his friends and fellow founding members went to vocational school to pursue graphic design.
But for Wisper, gang membership stood out as the most attractive option. “Everything I was seeking—unconditional love, loyalty, recognition, notoriety, reputation, education—they were giving it.” His gift for teaching was cultivated by their discipline. He could come up with illustrations and analogies to help someone else learn and memorize the codes of membership, without having to write a single word.
The last year Wisper did graffiti was 1988. The following year he was arrested. Once inside prison, faced with a life sentence, he found no reason to change. To survive, he leveraged his street education and climbed the ranks until he was running the yard. The attention and his gang affiliation eventually sent him to solitary confinement in 1994, with other men in solitary confinement “deemed incorrigible.”
In the monotony, Wisper contemplated the value of his life. His path into crime had been a gradual progression of “becoming more and more empty.” As he explains today, “People who commit crimes don’t understand value. If I steal from you, if I vandalize your house…I don’t value you as a person. If my life doesn’t mean something, no one else’s does either.” Even a cup, he reasoned, had worth. It was created for a purpose. Yet like a cup left on the shelf, here he was, a human being locked away in sensory deprivation. If his life had purpose, it couldn’t come from this environment, not from his upbringing, his heritage, or ideologies—which he had been willing to die for. And which he was still affiliated with.
He knew he wanted to change, but change only began when he mustered the courage to revoke his prison gang status, fully aware of the punishment to follow.
Wisper credits supernatural intervention in the events that actually occurred once he lost his status. By the code, he should have died in prison—killed by his own cellmate to protect the rest of the gang. But his life was spared. By the law, he should have been rejected for parole. Involvement with prison gangs was deemed a greater offense than the crime that sentenced him in the first place. But the inmates who would have reported him had been removed from the yard weeks before his arrival.
By the time Wisper came home in 2013, nearly 24 years had passed. His former collaborator, Bizr, had written “FREE WISPER TOUR” on every art piece until Bizr’s passing in 2013, eight months before Wisper’s release. Of the friends who had kept in touch with him, Mesngr was the only one still in San Jose, doing art shows. As he slowly readjusted to life back in society, Wisper decided his goal was to “get my art out, make some money, provide for myself and my family.”
Wisper began looking for opportunities, at times initiating them by reaching out to connections and bringing plywood for the artists to live paint on. As he formed the groundwork to revitalize Together We Create, he also accepted opportunities to speak at high schools and colleges. There were youth who wanted to learn graffiti, and Wisper saw the chance to share about his mistakes so they could make better decisions.
“That’s where I developed a curriculum of teaching peace,” he explains. Acting from a place of courage is revered, but in that state, fear is still present—“you’re acting in spite of fear.” He teaches his mentees to accept responsibility for where they’re at and to apply a faith-based practice until they can believe in themselves. “If you don’t know who you are, you can’t create unique art.”
There are still threads to unravel. To this day, he fights to control the blaze of anger that slices through at injustice. Just like in his youth, he feels the pressure to stay on guard, to secure himself and his safety. “After 24 years of living like that, you don’t just come home and start expressing emotions.” But he knows himself, and he values his life. That deep sense of peace is unshakeable. Hanging around Wisper, friends might not notice how calm and collected he is until he laughs—then, they’re caught by the irreversible, unforgettable belly laugh flying out of him.
This year marks nine years since his release—nine years of using his freedom to help youth secure their self-identity. Often called on to speak and share his story, he is in the final stages of publishing three books that he hopes will aid their discernment. Wisper believes that all people hold a sense of justice, beauty, and truth—but an absence of self-identity spawns a perilous emptiness. “If you’re empty your whole life,” he says, “you don’t know what full is.”
His mission now is to inspire others to create art from a secure sense of identity, free of the pressure to fit a label or hide under a mask. “If you can learn how to operate from a place of peace while creating art,” he promises, “you can learn how to operate from a place of peace in all aspects of your life.”
As is the case with many a music fanatic, Kia Fay’s intimate relationship with sound stretches past the point of tangible memory. She remembers learning rhythm (and math) from beating on pieces of cardboard as a child, of singing practically her whole life, and the music of Michael Jackson, Duran Duran, and Beastie Boys being her first musical totems.
Coincidentally, it was her love for the immortal MJ that first got her on stage with Ash Maynor and Ghost & the City (GATC). They needed a singer for a Halloween show, and with “Thriller” on the set list, Fay jumped at the chance to sing her idol’s music. “I was like, ‘I get to wear a costume, I get to sing MJ. This is all golden,’ ” she fondly recalls. “I didn’t realize that was an audition of sorts.” That guest spot was the first collaboration in what’s now been a six-year journey with the group, whose sound features a brooding musical stew of soulful, jazzy, and electronic components.
The Time EP—which earned the band accolades from Afropunk and Bust magazines and slots opening for Hiatus Kaiyote and the Internet, has brought the brightest attention yet to GATC, whose latest album is the result of, in Fay’s words, an “executive decision to do only what we wanted in its pure form.” It’s their first work to feature Fay’s full creative input and the most direct outgrowth of her “mind-fi” with Maynor, the term for their near-telepathic musical connection. “I don’t fit specifically into one box or another in a lot of respects, so it’s cool to finally be able to make music where I don’t need to try to anymore,” notes Fay with a laugh.
Accepting authenticity rather than fighting it is a huge theme in Fay’s story. Despite years in choirs, she noticed that she never got to solo until she was at UC Berkeley singing with the female a cappella group the California Golden Overtones. It was a refreshing change for her voice—full-bodied, emotive, and powerful—to take the spotlight. Her voice feels like GATC’s secret ingredient, with the music seemingly shaped around her distinct delivery.
Yet music hasn’t been her only outlet for authenticity. Since relocating to San Jose, she’s also established herself as the Curl Consultant, advocating for clients to celebrate their hair in its natural state rather than modifying it to conform to societal standards. “I joke that it’s driven by stubbornness, but it seemed unacceptable to me that in a space as diverse as San Jose, with as many different permutations and beautiful combinations of humans that we have, there weren’t more folks dedicated to encouraging people to exist in their natural state as it relates to their hair,” says Fay.
“I don’t fit specifically into one box or another in a lot of respects, so it’s cool to finally be able to make music where I don’t need to try to anymore.”
She first started working with hair out of necessity. Fay spent time doing theater, where she became the de facto stylist because no one could properly style her hair. However, she never saw the trade as a viable career option until her move to San Jose propelled her to be the change and to establish a space the city desperately needed. “The bulk of the feedback I’ve received has been that the work I do is liberating,” admits Fay. “That’s the best-case scenario for me: freeing anybody from a restriction they thought they had that was only an artificial restriction. Hopefully I can plant that seed for other folks, and they in turn will stand as beacons wherever they are.”
As a person of mixed descent who struggled over the years with where she fit in, Fay’s now using her two creative pursuits to help others recognize and celebrate their own unique tastes and identities through communion and connection. “We have to stop being so wedded to [the idea that] ‘This is what beauty looks like. This is what music looks like,’ and just accept beauty when we see it and hopefully foster what comes naturally to people and stop encouraging them to resist their more authentic selves, in any capacity,” she says.
Tracing Roots: Trinh Mai Finds the Beauty in Life through Honoring Cultural Heritage
Heart first, Trinh Mai aims to bring people together through art. Finding comfort in color and peace in faith, her multidisciplinary works honor her Vietnamese cultural heritage and shine a light on larger stories of shared humanity.
“We have to draw strength from our community work, the people we love, art, and hope. We are drawing from a transcendent source. All beauty comes from that process of discovery.”
-Trinh Mai
Trinh Mai’s love of art is deep, rooted in family history, connecting past and present. As Trinh describes, she thinks in branches—uncovering stories—in search of healing, hope, and community. Her art is a prayer, a process of discovery, honoring her cultural heritage and family.
Shaped by her family’s experience escaping Vietnam during the War in 1975, Trinh uses art as a language to connect hearts to the stories of loved ones. Having passed through many countries, including the Philippines and Guam, on their journey to the United States, Trinh’s family arrived in Pennsylvania at one of four refugee camps in the US at the time. Born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Trinh moved to Southern California at a young age and lived with extended family while her parents moved to Silicon Valley during the ’80s tech boom to find work. Trinh attributes her creative energy to her parents, who were both very meticulous, creative, and clever. Her dad nurtured a green thumb and loved cultivating bonsai trees. Trinh’s love of nature and desire to connect to the land threads through her work in symbolism and materiality. Trinh co-creates her art with history, informed by the heirlooms and stories of her family and the deep feeling of responsibility to honor her culture and share that love with the wider community.
“One of the things that the elders and people in general fear is being forgotten. And not just that they are forgotten, but their history is forgotten, the history of [their] people, the ways that [they] arrived here, traditions, food, family lineages, and the sacrifices they made. What a shame it would be to forget about the sacrifices that were made for us to be here. My fear is that their fear will be realized. It’s both a blessing and a burden to carry this responsibility to share. But one of the things that has encouraged the elders through my art is not just that they see themselves and I’m honoring their lives, but also knowing that the younger generation cares and wants to carry on the history. When families see heritage being passed down and honored, it takes that fear away. And it’s not just descendants that are inheriting that culture, it’s also the wider community that we are sharing it with.”
Trinh’s favorite mediums are oil paint and charcoal, but oil on canvas is her first true love and how she found her voice. Trinh’s love of oil painting began at San Jose State University (SJSU), creating abstract paintings. Painting on large canvases felt like creating an all-encompassing environment that she could step into. During her studies at SJSU, Trinh encountered a Mark Rothko painting at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Initially skeptical of his work, seeing it in person was a very pivotal and transformational experience for her. It opened her eyes to how art could convey spiritual essence through color and form. Finding herself standing in front of the Rothko painting, Trinh was “consumed by the cadmium red.” Describing the experience as deeply real, it opened her heart to what she wanted her work to accomplish.
“I wanted to make paintings like that, so true to what they are that they speak for themselves. I would like for whatever spirit is living inside the painting to speak. I don’t need to be a part of that conversation, but I think maybe my role is to have an intimate relationship with the work, and then the work has its own relationship with the viewer.”
Trinh describes her relationship to art as “salvation to the fullest,” born out of a desperate need to find comfort through life’s hardships. Through abstract art, Trinh found her footing and fell in love with the comfort, light, and life that art brought about.
“As I started maturing in the art and really taking it seriously, I realized it’s teaching me to see, the art of observation. I realized that was the main lesson, and once I embraced that, I saw how free I could feel painting boxes and spheres.”
As a multidisciplinary artist, Trinh describes her use of various mediums as a beautiful and fulfilling symbiotic relationship, with each medium teaching her unique lessons. She appreciates the labor and lessons that each provides, allowing her to excavate ideas by digging deeply through experimentation. For example, stitching teaches her to slow down, be careful, and have patience. From painting portraits to writing poetry, Trinh creates her work from a place of deep intentionality. Art has opened doors for Trinh to speak to universal truths of unified humanity. “I started discovering things about my family history that are shared by so many other people, not just Vietnamese refugees, but people all over the world.” Motivated by a desire to serve the community, Trinh finds purpose in discovering the beauty of life that can arise despite tragedy. “I feel that my responsibility is to offer life to stories to give comfort to other people.” Art gives life back to objects and stories and sows seeds for future generations. Sharing these stories cultivates a shared cultural heritage.
Driven to discover what it means to have an intimate relationship with God, Trinh is deeply thankful for her faith and the peace and purpose that it brings her in daily life. For Trinh, it all comes back to an essential question: “In the midst of life’s trials, where do we turn for strength? We have to draw strength from our community work, the people we love, art, and hope. We are drawing from a transcendent source. All beauty comes from that process of discovery.”
Brandon “BQ” Quintanilla is a San Jose-born entrepreneur of Nicaraguan descent who founded media company EMLN (Early Morning Late Nights) to produce projects such as Any Given Bars YouTube Channel, San José’s Culture Night Market, and FeastMode. BQ has created a business and brand around his vision for San José.
In this conversation, BQ and introducing Content guest host Troy Ewers, @trizzyebaby, discuss BQ’s rise as an entrepreneur, the development of EMLN, organizing events, and personal growth. Listeners gain insight into what it takes to start and scale a business, difficulties with organizing events, and how to hustle through adversity.
Follow BQ, @bqallin, and EMLN, @emlnexclusive , on Instagram to keep up to date with what he has cooking for Silicon Valley.
“Five, four, three, two…” Standing in his living room, where bright teal couches and dark walnut cabinets complement cerulean walls, Paul counts down to his own interview: “Are you ready for launch? Let’s go!”
In the world of artist and designer Paul J. Gonzalez, possibility is as limitless as outer space. No conversation is ordinary, and no day is without surprise. So, one should always dress for—and anticipate—the possibility of splendor. Even to buy groceries, he’ll sport a one-off steel bracelet or flat top sunglasses or a metallic jacket.
But if a blur of futuristic inventions and astrological predictions is what you’re envisioning of his world, you might be surprised to learn that all his clothing and accessories come out of a color-coordinated, space-optimizing closet. In fact, he may be one of the most organized and self-analytical creatives you’ll meet.
Inside his home office, a small but well-lit room boasting groovy shelves he built himself and wide dual monitors—one of which he places sideways like a long scroll—he regularly takes stock of his life: body, mind, and soul are assessed as though they are pillars of a business (and arguably so for a full-time artist).
Here, Paul files away his receipts, categorizes his spending, and tracks personal data. The daily work certainly serves financial accountability, but he aims to cultivate improvement. “There are three Pauls: past, present, and future,” he declares. “All Pauls have to relate to each other.” Present Paul tallies interpersonal interactions and inventory alike: “Maybe, I got a little too drunk at the Cure concert,” he ruminates. “But it was Robert Smith!” he weighs. “But still,” he concludes, “I’ve got to check myself. I spent a little too much on alcohol, and I can put this money towards a new tablet.” Then the emotional check-in: “Did I have any breakdowns? Did I have any arguments? Why did I have arguments?”
Few may manage their daily lives so closely, but these routines feed his artistry. Health fuels work and rest, feeding not only into great ideas and the execution of them but, ultimately, more time for his family.
“By handling different mediums, you’re able to overlap the multiple skills and sometimes create something new that you never thought would happen.”
-Paul J. Gonzales
“Appreciating what you have,” he stresses, “is key.” Rather than crediting knack or discipline, he pinpoints gratitude as the primary engine of his self-managed, independent lifestyle. He recalls one low period of his life when he had just lost his job: “All I’d been doing was working and coming home with no time to create. I was depressed for years.” But inertia struck while watching a PBS documentary about a survivor. “I’m watching the show in my room, depressed, probably drinking a beer,” he recalls. “This guy climbed mountains and had to hunt his own food. I was sitting at home thinking, ‘I have nothing to complain about.’ It’s all in my mind.”
So, he began to move. He ran and rode his bike. He packed himself lunch. He went to work, and repainted vandalized buildings with San Jose’s Graffiti Removal program. He did push-ups in between lifting cans of paint. “I started figuring out ways to work out my time,” he recounts. “So then I had time to draw.”
As a kid, he knew he wanted to become an artist. For that very reason he fought to get into art school and then didn’t complete the degree. His program was setting him up to become a teacher or professor even though he signed up with the expectation of being an artist, completing projects, and learning from each piece along the way. So he sought education elsewhere.
“I needed to learn about business, marketing, finances, and management.” He found mentors and picked the brains of those he calls his “elders.” “If you want to really learn more about yourself,” he recommends, “talk to these elders who are already done with their work—anyone who’s willing to share the honest truth, because they’ve lived it.”
About to turn fifty next year, he’s ready to offer the same—such as how writing down experiences to look forward to can alchemize stale energy. “I’m looking forward to my mom, the calls, her visits. I’m always looking forward to adventures with my wife: Burning Man, Machu Picchu in the fall,” Paul shares. “I’m looking forward to cleaning my house and the yard. I’m looking forward to building the fence.”
Before the list is exhausted, he’s on his feet. There are many projects, murals, and presentations that he’s in the midst of at this very moment—but the process of each one, ironically, keeps him from succumbing to overwhelm. They will all be completed “so that I can either move on with it or critique it,” he says.
It sounds far-fetched, but it’s working. Over two hundred murals deep, he’s still excited for what he hasn’t yet done. “By handling different mediums, you’re able to overlap the multiple skills and sometimes create something new that you never thought would happen,” Paul remarks. From designing costumes to creating games for events, from woodworking to ceramics, he finds joy in both the start and the finish.
Whether someone wants to purchase a piece or he has to move out of his home, he sees it all as a chance to “start all over.” He can leave behind the custom fence, the teal walls, and the toolshed floor he laid down brick by brick in exchange for a whole new experience. After all, who’s to say that any part of his past didn’t have his future in mind? His life today is the dream of a shy kid who hardly spoke up but could definitely dress up.
As a child, Paul remembers being picked on for his soft-spoken nature. But in fifth grade, he discovered the Cure, and in sixth grade, he heard the Sex Pistols, and by middle school, he had found his voice through the sounds and fashions of punk rock. Standing out with bleached hair and leather jacket in the ’80s, “I was picked on even more then,” he recalls. “They’d call me gay, this and that. But the LGBTQ kids would hang out with me, and we’d have a blast.” Paul followed his crew to the gay bars and clubs, where all hues and textures of hair and fabric flourished, and he did too.
He is the only son of a young mother who raised him along with his grandmother and aunt. Her handy resourcefulness crafted a home that was eclectic and wondrous, with sculptures like King Tut’s head and his uncle’s live piranhas in the living room. “It was a small house on 25th Street near San Jose High,” he shares. “We were a low-income family, but I didn’t feel like I was without. She was always designing from a thrift store perspective and fixing things. So she would also help me with my costumes, too.”
He mentions breezily, “We’ve been winning costume [contests] in my family since the ’50s.”
These days, he likes to have his mother climb on the scaffold and paint with him. “She’s on her fifth mural,” he says proudly. As for his vast collection of art in every medium, “I don’t want to be a master,” he says, “but I definitely want to have a good time playing.”
The benefit of loving your hometown is that if you close your eyes, you can see it in any season. It imprints itself onto you. Artist Rubén Darío Villa can see his hometown of Gilroy clear as day. Through his art he speaks of his culture, his home, and the history he lives with. His art tells the story of growing up in the Bay Area as a first-generation Chicano.
Like a lot of designers, Villa reached the pinnacle of success early in his career. His first major job out of Santa Clara University was as a designer at Apple. Years later, he transitioned to a similar position at Google. After a decade-plus tenure in tech, Villa was let go during the pandemic. As a husband and father of two, Villa recounted, “It had, for me, a beautiful awakening of what I called my year of cleanse and curate. Let go of things. You begin to be very particular about what you bring back into your life. It started with the four of us, my family. What else could make this better? The beauty of the yin and yang of the pandemic.”
During his time at Google, Villa took on the volunteer role of global brand lead for Google’s Latinx employee resource group, HOLA. Inspired by his experience there, Villa curated the event Sin Miedo (fearless), Google’s first all-Latinx art exhibit. Villa scheduled the event to coincide with Hispanic Heritage Month, with the intent of highlighting the ocean of Latinx talent tucked away in the Googleplex.
This was in 2017, at the dawn of Trump’s presidency, when his harsh rhetoric towards Mexico was at its zenith. Talking heads across the media landscape were occupied with fact checking and proselytizing the then-president’s accusations that Mexico was sending criminals, rapists, and drugs into the country. Sin Miedo would let the Latinx community voice their truth and experience. To further the concept, Villa constructed an outdoor gallery of fences, explaining, “There’s a good neighbor fence and a bad neighbor fence. And the bad neighbor fence is the one where the other neighbor doesn’t want to pitch in to build a new fence between your properties. The one that pays for the fence puts the wood planks on their side so it’s beautiful. You don’t see the post and then you leave the other side completely open. That’s the bad neighbor fence. If you help pay for it together, both sides look nice. We’re being a bad neighbor to Mexico right now.”
The exhibit also acted as the unveiling of Villa’s personal art piece, Frida 4587. The unveiling of the portrait—crafted from 4,587 pieces of candy-covered Chiclet gum—coincided with Frida Kahlo’s 110th birthday. The piece made the rounds across social media and was lauded by major outlets like HuffPost, Pop Sugar, and Yahoo! News.
Villa was a ceaseless voice for the Latinx community while ensconced in the tech world—but that is an industry he has no plans on returning to. “I learned all the lessons God needed me to learn,” Villa goes on to explain, “The culture at Apple had me thinking that there was something wrong with me. I thought that the way Apple did things was the norm. It was my first big job after college. I just thought, ‘This is how it has to be.’ What I realize now is that I’m a big picture person, and I just didn’t fit the secretive, need-to-know work environment. And although I found a better home at Google years later, I don’t think I would ever go back to tech.” Once free of the constraints inherent in multinational conglomerates, Villa went on to fully represent that community that means so much to him in his art and his line of Mexican-themed air fresheners, Fúchila Fresheners.
Fúchila, slang for “smelly” in Spanish, takes the novelty car air freshener and instills it with a collective history, the nostalgia found in the Latinx community. Villa opened shop on Fúchila Fresheners in 2015 with six original designs: Frida Kahlo, Pancho Villa, Blue Demon, Cantinflas, Selena Quintanilla, and a sugar skull. Over the years, there have been over 100 different designs, with Villa dipping further into the iconography and nostalgia of his youth. Villa named this pool of inspiration “Chicanostalgia,” the experience of Western pop culture as lived by the Chicano community.
In the background of all this, Villa was also a board member at youth services organization Digital NEST, an advisor on the San Jose Public Arts Advisory Council, and was recently elected commissioner on Gilroy’s Arts and Culture Commission. These roles are as vital as the design and branding work. In March of 2023, Villa opened the doors on his latest venture, Fúchilandia. Based out of the non-profit 6th Street Studios and Art Center in downtown Gilroy, Fúchilandia will not only be Villa’s home base for design work but will act as the final resting place of Fúchila Fresheners, which is slowly being phased out. “Fúchila Fresheners was never really about air fresheners. It was about feeling seen in even the smallest of products, about honing my craft, about inviting other artists to join me, and about activating the community in ways that amplify our humanity. The fact that the air freshener production has slowed is only an indicator of my cleanse and curate ethos,” he says.
As the final stock of Fúchila Fresheners runs out, Fúchilandia is just getting started. Joining Villa on his new project hangs Frida 4587 , his visual signpost looking to the future from the past.
In the world of graffiti, elements of typography give way to the movement of calligraphy, which are elaborated on within the lettering of a simple tag or the abstract styling that adorns large mural pieces. The fundamental rules of typography and calligraphy may be adhered to in graffiti, but they are also broken, creating a more intimate expression of experience and existence. Author Robert Bringhurst says, at the heart of typography is the “dance, on a tiny stage, of the living, speaking hand.” While Bringhurst was in no way referring to graffiti, he inadvertently summed up the ethos of graffiti with the phrase “speaking hand.” Tracy 168, pioneer of wildstyle graffiti, bridges this connection between typography and lettering in graffiti when he succinctly, yet enigmatically, states, “You don’t want to lose the basis of the letter, but you want to lose the letter.” The very fabric of graffiti is a dichotomy between established form, practice,
and rebellion.
This is where we find Mesngr, who, as an adolescent, began spraying the names of punk bands behind an Alpha Beta grocery store in San Jose. He viewed the city as a living canvas: seeing art in cars, buildings, signs, and the people within the community. Like so many at that age, Mesngr’s rebellion consisted of the need to be seen, and he made art and graffiti his vehicles of choice. “When I discovered graffiti, I could say, ‘fuck you,’ or I could say, ‘Look at me—I exist!’ ”
A San Jose native, Mesngr is a self-taught illustrator, street artist, mentor, and teacher. The rebellious start to his journey blossomed into his work becoming part of the visual landscape of San Jose. Large mural works in Japantown, a high school mascot mural for the Yerba Buena Warriors, and his large bus and character piece in the Alameda Artworks parking lot are just a few works bearing the Mesgnr handle. In addition to seeing his many murals, characters, and tags, typical San Jose residents going about their day may not realize how many times they observe Mesngr’s work. The Ike’s Sandwiches logo or the Diamond Cleaning Services billboard are examples of Mesngr’s love of letters and design in a commercial setting. The quality of the crisp, clean lines apparent in all his work, something he has always strived for since watching his father use a fountain pen to pull perfect lines for his lettering and calligraphy, makes it hard to believe he pulls lines with spray paint. The range of Mesngr’s influences can be seen in his graffiti work, especially in his lettering where the Bay Area ‘funk’ style mixes with the wildstyle of New York and is highlighted by the playfulness of bubble-style lettering, seen most often on throw-ups (a style of quick graffiti lettering). In his pieces, he integrates the cartoon stylings of his early influences, Don Martin and R. Crumb, the free-form movement of Mode2, and the controlled pop art lines of Patrick Nagel. The result is his own vibrant style depicting the personalities that make up San Jose and creations from his own mind. Mesngr gravitates toward the female form to adorn his pieces, it being “simple [yet] beautiful and unique, expressing all my feelings [of] peace, love, darkness, pain, good and evil, mystery, sex, life, hope, and passion.” While at the heart of graffiti is an independent and personal intent to establish a presence among many, the concept of community plays a major role as all those personal voices, or “speaking hands” come together to paint a visual representation of a city’s soul. “Graffiti is an art form that is needed in our community, just like murals, because when you have a high-paid out-of-towner or even an established local artist painting a mural, it reminds us there’s a voice, a talent and passion in the people from these streets.”
Mesngr is very humble and would rather throw the spotlight on those that continually inspire him, like fellow artists Sean Griffin and John Dozier of the art collective TWC (Together We Create), which he is a member of. Even in the capacity of educator and mentor, he gathers more inspiration from the at-risk youth he teaches. “I hope and believe that art teaches them patience, the ability to see things through, and to stay creative. Those things apply to all parts of life and a young person’s future.” Mesgnr has surely shown he exists to help bring out the soul of San Jose and care for its future.
Article originally appeared in Issue 13.2 “Sight and Sound”
This past summer the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles displayed a quilted red, white, and grey American flag stitched from carpenter’s pants, suits, collared shirts, and scraps of red ties. The delightfully unexpected choice of materials is common throughout Ryan Carrington’s work. “I use this idea of medium as message,” the San Jose artist explains. “What something is made out of affects the way that people perceive it and the concepts behind it.” This particular piece—an amalgamation of blue-collar and white-collar uniforms—reflects two recurring themes in Carrington’s body of work: the pay discrepancy between executives and laborers and the often-unachievable American dream.
“It used to be that you could just pull up your bootstraps…but it’s become this false narrative that’s been spun,” Carrington shares. “[Yet] people just sort of put their heads down and keep working.” He hopes to spark a dialogue about economics and distribution of wealth, as well as our society’s way of devaluing labor.
When Carrington creates, he poses the question: What can I do with different mediums to make something cool, but also have it be thoughtful?” This mantra has stayed with him ever since he participated in an artist-in-residence program at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Colorado (not long after earning his bachelor’s at the University of Wisconsin). At the beginning of his residency, Carrington recalls feeling like his sculptures didn’t measure up to the work of the other makers, despite his strong technical skills. “Finally, I realized it was because their pots had content behind them—whether it was the way their pots interacted with the tabletop or paralleled the Kansas plane or had to do with man versus nature…and that was kind of this ‘ah ha’ moment.”
Carrington’s work today is equal parts humor and impact. Take for instance, his colossal apple pie, a plywood shell stuffed with a filling of business ties. Or an oven mitt fashioned from brick and mortar. Or a pitchfork planted in a sizeable pile of ties titled “Middle Management.”
There’s also his performance piece, “Build Them Up; Take Them Down.” To appreciate the peculiarity of it, imagine Carrington, wearing a hardhat, a Christian Dior suit, Prada shoes, and a crimson necktie, wheelbarrowing past you in the gallery with a load of cinderblocks. As he continues to ferry loads of concrete masonry, building a wall mid-gallery, he starts to sweat through his nice suit. Upon completion, he immediately begins deconstructing the wall. This futile act of labor “brings into question the discrepancy of laborers and executives, as well as the shift in perspective of the American dream,” the artist explains. “It was a really slow burning joke…I think a really good way to communicate with people is through humor.”
Another project, this one exploring the intersection between fashion and labor, consists of plaid patterns he made with colored nails (aptly named “Screw Relief”). The idea came from one of his frequent trips to Home Depot. “I have to go alone, my wife won’t go with me. She’s like, ‘You’re just going to stand there and stare at materials,’ ” he laughs. “[But] she’s very supportive! She’s like, ‘You can have your alone time with that. I’m going to go take care of some business.’ ”
While wandering the aisles, Carrington came across bins of screws and realized they were the exact colors of a plaid Burberry design. “This is hilarious, I must make Burberry,” Carrington recalls thinking to himself. “A lot of luxury companies have sort of appropriated plaid,” he goes on to explain. “Plaid is something that’s gone lowbrow (like grunge rock) all the way up through high-end Burberry, like Ralph Lauren.” It took him a good handful of weeks to develop the right design, a practice he fondly refers to as “failing through the process.” Then he began the arduous task of fixing hundreds of screws into place.
“When people find out I’m an artist, they imagine me up on some bluff with some oils, you know? And it’s like, ‘No, I’m just, like, firing screws or staples into a board,’ and just trying over and over and over and over to make something remotely good-looking,” he laughs.
This sort of labor-intensive detail can be found throughout Carrington’s work. His quilted flags take him 40 to 50 hours to complete. And that’s after all the quilting classes at Eddie’s Quilting Bee alongside a group of venerable ladies (who got quite the kick out of this young man’s interest in their craft). “I make work about work. So, it should take work,” Carrington says, pointing out the parallel between his process and the way laborers perform the same task over and over again.
When Carrington isn’t creating, he’s teaching. “In sixth grade, I joined Future Teachers Club. You know, I just knew that was my calling.” He admits that for the longest time he intended to teach biology but had a change of heart after his college ceramics class. “I was enjoying the studio more than the lab,” he recalls. “I fell in love with artmaking through the potter’s wheel…the repetition and the craftsmanship and homing in on the technical skills.”
Today, he teaches at Santa Clara University, instructing students on the topics of sculpture, 3D design, site-specific land art, and professional practice. “So I got into this game as an educator and developed an art habit, I suppose,” he chuckles.
Carrington’s exhibit at the San Jose Museum of Quilts & Textiles has wrapped up, but keep an eye out for his upcoming projects. As he continues to educate others on the blue-and-white-collar divide, the integration of craftsmanship, humor, and depth in his future artwork is sure to be seamless.
Mattie Scariot became Director of PJIFF in 2018 and grew the festival to an 8-day regional festival including Morgan Hill, San Martin, Gilroy, Hollister, and San Juan Bautista.
In our conversation, Mattie explains her vision for the festival, focusing on diverse, inclusive, and women-empowering films and seven educational programs. We talk about her journey to be the director and some of the highlights of this year’s festival, which returns to in-person events and screenings.
Find out more about PJIFF programs, events, and purchase tickets at PJIFF.org
This year’s festival begins on April 6th and runs through April 13th.
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This episode’s music is “408” by Jack Pavlina. Read more about Jack in Issue 14.1 Winter 2022 — release date: Dec. 9, 2021: https://bit.ly/Discover141
Follow Jack at @jackpavlinamusic
Spotify: https://bit.ly/jackpavlina
The 10th Anniversary of Content Magazine issue 14.2 Pick-Up Party was an exciting evening of culture and community that celebrated many talented artists and passionate art lovers. Live music, laughter, and happy chatter filled the air of San Pedro Square Market and brought the night alive as new and familiar faces came to celebrate together.
BAUNFIRE’s photo-booth and Content specialty drinks specially prepared by the San Pedro Square Market Bar for the event both left behind fond memories to be treasured for years to come. To date, our largest Pick-Up Party featured artists from around the South Bay Area with hundreds of guests, including California State Representative Ash Kalra, who presented Content Magazine with a Resolution the ten years accomplishment of highlighting local creatives.
Daniel Garcia, Founder and Cultivator of Content Magazine, and Juan Sanchez, Founder and Creative Director of BAUNFIRE, toasted the success of Content Magazine and looked to the future with raised glasses from smiling guests of the South Bay’s key creatives.
We at Content Magazine are grateful to all the artists, partners, members, and community for your support in this project to give visibility to the artist of Santa Clara County.
Thank you all for ten years! Here’s to (at least) ten more.
Event Musicians: @bennettjazzkeys, @lidiapeacelovesax, @the408collectivemusic. Featured Artists: @caiakoopman, @alexknowbody, @farrantabrizi, @ezramara1, @nicolastela, @j.duh, @teejay5992, @benjamin_dobbin_art, @mrharada, and @gmrartstudio. Event Partners: @baunfire, ABIERTO, @spsmarket, @stuarteventrentals, @voyagercraftcoffee, @soskiphotobooth, and @sanjosejazz
In 1996, a week before his studio space was set for demolition as part of a Redevelopment Agency project, Ken Matsumoto saw it—a “for rent” sign on the old North-Side Walnut processing plant in the heart of Japantown. It was fate and a journey that would eventually lead to the start of Art Object Gallery.
To afford the increase in his rent and the supplies to make the warehouse structurally sound, Matsumoto began renting space to three fellow artists. Soon, the idea of combining mailing lists and holding a show to expose their patrons to each other’s art grew. Matsumoto began erecting gallery walls in the expansive space remaining, and, in 2000, Art Object Gallery was born.
His first shows included friends and colleagues, “I would do a little group show” he recalls, “and I would know most of the artists personally. We were friends and I liked their work.” One of his first shows was titled “Depth of Field” and consisted of work from Santa Clara art professors.
Over the years, Matsumoto grew the shows and artists through word of mouth and recommendations. “I knew some people, and those people would tell me about other people, or I would be visiting a studio and see someone else’s work, or somebody would recommend somebody, and they’d come by with some of their stuff. If it looked cool to me, we just did it.” Some of Art Object Gallery’s largest shows would feature 20 artists at a time.
When asked what his favorite part of curating is, Matsumoto emphatically knows the answer: “Hanging the show,” he says. Installing the pieces and making them work in the space comes easily for him, which is not surprising since he knows every inch of the gallery—he built the walls. I know the space so well, and I guess I have a talent for doing it,” he says.
His least favorite part of curating? “The marketing of the shows is a little brutal.” He laughs, “The part of that I like the most is probably the announcements, the design of the cards, but that’s as far as it goes.” He used to consider himself an introvert, but not anymore. Matsumoto grins, “I guess it took owning a gallery to realize that.”
He also enjoys coming up with the concepts and titling the show, “I think that’s where I rationalize still having the gallery, that there is this creative aspect to it. There’s this constant struggle between doing something for the gallery and doing my own work, especially when the gallery doesn’t always give you a return on your investment.”
The article was originally published in issue 4.4, “Education.”
If you’ve ever participated in the First Friday Art Walk, or seen the Phantom Galleries while strolling downtown, or been in to Kaleid Gallery, you’ve probably heard about Anno Domini, operated by Brian Eder and Cherri Lakey, two very passionate individuals who have set out to cultivate the fledgling art scene in San Jose.
How did Anno Domini come to fruition and what are you guys all about?
CHERRI: In 2000, graffiti actually became a felony instead of a misdemeanor, so that was jail time. We really loved the street art that was happening in San Francisco in 98-99, the time when you’d see something really beautiful every day, and then 3,4, or 5 months later it was just gone, and it was just heartbreaking. So we really took an interest in the artists. There were maybe 2 galleries at the time showing street art. We really wanted to be involved in that and Brian had somewhat of an art background already, so we just had to find our place. We knew we wanted to start our own graphic design company. And then it was a matter of, do we go to San Francisco where we already feel like it’s a scene and has support, or do we go to a place like San Jose where it’s zero tolerance, it’s much harder, and there is less of a scene? Don’t they need it more? And couldn’t we build something of our own? We chose San Jose.
BRIAN: I lived here before, and I think the campaign back in the mid-eighties was “San Jose is growing up.” And I remember “San Jose is throwing up” would always go through my mind because there was nothing happening. It was so devoid of life in a lot of ways, at least it seemed like it at the time. And the things that would start up, the cool kinds of places, they would disappear so quickly. Where was the culture? Only New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles? We wanted a place kind of like where Warhol and his friends would have hung out back in the 70’s, where people talked about everything from politics and religion to street art. And that’s the whole reason we started the gallery. In the beginning it was just wanting to get together with other like-minded people.
CHERRI: It was during the dotcom boom. There was a vibe down here; startups all the time, crazy creative people with two guys sleeping under a desk. We really thrived off that.
How do you think the scene here in San Jose differs from that of LA and SF?
BRIAN: For someone here to get attention on any level they really have to work a lot harder and we think that just makes for stronger artists. But at the same time, what’s happening in San Jose, especially in the past, was that artists would get to a certain age and they would leave, they would move to another city. So right when you got artists to a place where they could start creating here, they were taking off because they didn’t see being able to survive in San Jose doing their art.
CHERRI: It becomes a portal. The city and the artist invests so much into going to school here or trying for awhile. San Francisco is 45 minutes away. You can live really cheap and there are hundreds of galleries to plug into right away in terms of an art scene. And LA is not that far either, so every city has to say, what are we doing to really support them so they can live and work here? When we started 10 years ago, nobody was talking about artists. It was all about the tech industry, biogenetics, all this crazy stuff, and we would stand up at the end of a meeting and just go, “what about artists?” And they would sort of look at us like they had no idea what we were talking about. It was a real battle and we tried to find a bridge where we could work with artists, but also be a city liaison too because if you know anything about the digital culture and what’s coming, these are the bright minds that are starting these companies or being hired, mainly because these companies need musicians, and artists and poets. They can teach anybody the rules of accounting, manufacturing rules, but who’s going to think of the next big thing? Who’s gonna say, well why can’t we do this? They start with a blank canvas and they create something no one has ever seen before. And that’s who the companies want. So there’s this thing going on where the MFA is the new MBA. We need to cultivate that if we want tech companies to stay here too. They need to have a creative pool to hire from. But we need artists that live and work and thrive being artists. Hopefully there is some harmony there and some opportunities.
Can you tell us about the Phantom galleries, what you’ve done with that, and how it’s a part of the San Jose Downtown project?
BRIAN: With the dotcom crash, we would be walking around downtown and the biggest thing that was standing out was people just walking the streets staring at the ground past empty businesses and dying restaurants. On the weekends, it was literally a ghost town. We put in the phantom galleries by arguing that the empty storefronts were public space. At first it wasn’t seen that way, but at the end we finally got the project in there and it’s one of only two projects since 2001 that is still running.
CHERRI: At our peak we had 15 spaces going. It was insane! Our contract was to do a dozen installations over the year and we ended up showing 150 artists the first year. And we went back with a binder and said, we have this many artists wanting to show. We’re in our 8th year now.
BRIAN: It was about artists being part of economic progress in a city. That entire area is rented out now.
Do you have any advice for upcoming artists that are trying to break through?
BRIAN: I’ll use David Choe as an example. He did a show in Los Angeles at an ice cream parlor and the next time we saw his work in San Jose, it was 18in a hair salon. He wasn’t afraid to do it and there was nothing really beneath him in the beginning. It was just about getting his work out there. And there are a lot of artists that start out where they’re already too good for places. It’s just about doing the work and being open to possibilities and not slamming the door on an opportunity because it could be a bigger deal than you imagined.
How about you, Cherri? Advice for the upcoming artist?
CHERRI: The most successful artists we’ve seen do their art every day because it’s who they are. There are artists, where it’s a hobby, it’s fun, it’s a relaxing thing for them, and that’s great. So put that into context too. But typically the artists who are like, there is no plan B, this is it, this is what keeps them sane and they do their work with or without anyone noticing.
BRIAN: Artists have to understand the gallery. If you’re a punk band, you don’t go to the opera house and ask for a gig.
CHERRI: And then be upset when you don’t get it.
What would you both like to see happen in San Jose in the future, specifically in the art scene?
CHERRI: Fifty more galleries, first of all.
BRIAN: More of an art buying culture. People would be really surprised about the kind of art that comes through San Jose. Besides having amazing local art, there is amazing international art being exhibited here. With all the wealth that’s in the Bay Area, it’s not romantic in their minds right now to buy their art in San Jose, so they think, I’ll just go to New York and buy this or that artist. There are artists being exhibited and blowing up in Europe and New York that have come through here.
CHERRI: More of an appreciation of the culture that thrives here. San Jose has a history of a more institutional and academic art scene. I think we are the only non nonprofit gallery downtown right now. But there are people doing amazing things in their basements and garages and down the street. San Jose has the same sort of habit of trying to bring artists in from fairs and stuff from outside, but I know a guy two blocks away who blows those artists away. So why are we not giving them more opportunities?
And it’s not San Jose’s fault; it’s a matter of people realizing it, being a part of the culture, and giving them opportunities. That’s sort of what we try to do with the street market and with Subzero. Let’s bring them out and bring them topside. We tend to gravitate to subculture and people under the radar. You know, a lot of them want to be there, they like flying under that radar.
BRIAN: It’s because mainstream doesn’t need anyone’s help. It’s already been embraced. And where’s the fun in that?
CHERRI: It’s fun for all of us in the underbelly to come up topside and get together and have one big party. It’s cool, because the mainstream comes and they feel safe. They are shocked a lot of times, especially when the artists are saying they’re from San Jose!
What is sacred for you about Anno Domini? What sets it apart?
CHERRI: Anno Domini is family. I grew up as an outcast, without friends, in a very small town in the Midwest and I never fit in. So when I found Brian, to find someone who is definitely my other half, that’s one huge life-changing thing. But then together, to create a place where we asked, where are the musicians and where are the poets, where are those people that we can debate with about all these amazing things? And then to suddenly have them in this box. Cause really that’s all Anno Domini is. It’s just a box. It’s just walls, a floor, and a roof. And to feel like you’ve found your people, your like-mindedness, you’ve found friends…the real definition of friends. People that step up every single time in the most amazing way. Consistently. That, for me, is the most sacred part of it. It’s interesting that you use the word “sacred” because we had a girl here and she was telling me how much she loved Anno Domini and I realized how much her eyes were starting to well up and starting to cry. She said Anno Domini was her church, where she gets her inspiration to keep doing that nine-to-five thing everyday, day after day. It’s amazing.
BRIAN: To us, it is a sacred space. It’s this place where ideas are born. We curate the artists, we don’t curate their work. A lot of places you go into, especially bigger institutions, they want to tell you why something is art and to us, the question is more important. If you come to it like you have all the answers, you’ll never get anything out of it. But we try to walk in here as if we don’t have the answers and keep looking at everything as if it were new.
How would you describe the artwork you feature?
BRIAN: We refer to it as urban contemporary, and that’s about as tight as we want to get. The idea is that it’s by someone who lives in a big city, who really lives in it. And that comes through their music or poetry, or the art that’s there.
CHERRI: Artists will sometimes say to us, I can be this or that. We just want you to be you. And whether or not it fits with us is fine, but that’s the only criteria. We give a lot of debut solos and it’s not smart business to give an artist their first solo show. But our thing is, we knew a long time ago that we were in this for moving the culture forward and for art history. We know that someday, somebody is going to look at our history and say, something happened here, something came out of here.
BRIAN: That’s more important than how much money is in our bank accounts.
CHERRI: We know there are still a lot of artists out there that don’t know about us and we don’t know about them, but we would love to! The biggest thing we always say about Anno Domini is the inspiration part. A lot of times, we bring art here because we want people to realize what’s going on in the world. If you come in and say, “I could do that,” great! Do it! The best thing we hear is when a kid says, “I’d love to stay, but I really want to go home and paint.” Cool, we have done our job for the night, you know? That’s it!
Francisco Ramirez has been into art for as long as he can remember. His first memory is of scribbling on his mom’s walls. As he grew up, art became a form of escapism from a turbulent home life. It was a hobby for a long time. Only recently has Ramirez begun taking it seriously, picking up mural work and other commissions to keep himself afloat. His work is comprised of bright, mysterious color, bringing focus to his anthropological and fantastical themes—dramatic, mundane, and everything in between. Ramirez works in acrylic, watercolor, and pastel, but he prefers acrylic, as it lends itself to the versatility of his art gigs. He likes to work fast—sometimes producing a full painting in a day—although the complexity and composition of his work belies that speed. As for the future, Ramirez sees himself doing murals, but beyond that, he doesn’t plan much and is happy to see where his art takes him.
“While I have my personal favorite artists like Van Gogh or Frida Kahlo that are big influences on my art, at the end of the day, the people I’m really inspired by are those that surround me. Other artists are my creative food. That goes for life itself, everything beautiful, wonderful, and terrible, all of it brings me inspiration. But quite honestly, without the influence of the artists around me, I wouldn’t have much.”
As a boy, Rodrigo García was told that performing arts made a good hobby, not a career. This assumption was flipped on its head, however, after he moved from Mexico City to the States and encountered Teatro Visión, a theater that inspires, empowers, and dignifies Latino voices while also exploring the social and psychological experiences of Latinos. As its current artistic director, García oversees the development of works performed by the theater, including original pieces developed with community feedback, and ensures that artistic excellence is brought to the stage. He is captivated by the directing process—of taking a plain paper script and raising the words off the page.
“Little by little, I start imagining the possibilities, the color, the forms, the movement,” he explains, using words like “magical” and “spiritual” to describe the end product.
García’s project—focusing on theater, possibly expanding into spoken word, music, and dance—is still in its developmental stage, but he knows it will allow LGBTQ artists of color the opportunity to share through performance. He doesn’t necessarily expect viewers to agree with voices different than their own, but he does hope it will result in deeper compassion for other points of view.
“We need to have spaces where we’re able to hear each other,” he observes, “where we’re able to share our stories to create mutual understanding.” Not only does this honor the ambassadorship, but it exemplifies Teatro Visión as a place seeking to replace passive contemplation with “sparkling conversations between people.”
The Bellarmine High and Santa Clara University grad returns home from New York to star on The Stage.
The acting profession is a rewarding and trying one. The joy of being an integral part of the storytelling process is peppered with the continual fear of having to audition for your next job. And how many of us feel the need to list Burp on Command, Double-Jointed Shoulder Blades, or Possessing a Driver’s License as skills on our LinkedIn profile? For actor Jeffrey Adams, such is life. Adams recently returned home to the Bay Area from The New School for Drama in New York to appear in the productions of Death of a Salesman and The Addams Family at The Stage.
How did you get into acting and performing?
It started out when I was eight years old, doing children’s theater at this summer camp, at Milpitas Rainbow Theater. My brother and I both sang. Growing up, we were in choirs and stuff like that. It was something we enjoyed doing. We thought, “All right. We’ll sign up for this.”
The first play we did was Music Man. It was something to do during the summer and to make friends. But it was really fun, and it developed into a passion. I kept going back every summer.
As I got older, I started to appreciate the technique of taking on different characters and the academic side of it as well. And once I got into high school, really studying plays and digging deeper into what it means…from there, it just took off.
You chose to pursue this path pretty early on.
I did. Definitely in high school, I really, really fell in love with it. Obviously, you’re in an academic setting where you’re constantly reading different plays and literature. That was a big focus for me in high school. In my senior year, I was taking four English electives. My passion was there.
Was there somewhat of a defining moment where you said, “Yeah, I’m going to pursue this along the way.”
There was, actually. I was a sophomore in high school in 2003. I was fifteen years old. I had the opportunity, at the Milpitas Rainbow Theater, to play Don Quixote in Man of La Mancha.
Which is really [a role] for a man of 50 to 60 years old, but being in a children’s theater, I was able to portray this guy. I think that was really it for me. I was able to not only transform into a 50-, 60-year-old man, but also [the character’s] story is one that is incredible.
Being able to transform into another person and take on these characteristics and be a man who’s full of hope and tragedy and sorrow, and has this whole mantra of dreaming the impossible dream, it was a metaphor for acting as well.
It was the first time I got lost in a character. Jeffrey was gone. I was able to fuse everything I knew as an actor into just totally being this other person, which for me was fascinating and really wonderful. To be able to share that with an audience is always just incredible. I think that was probably the moment.
So, when I applied to different colleges, I absolutely looked at the theater programs, that was important. I knew that was the path I was going to take. It’s a whole different process. You have to go on college auditions, as well as the application process and all that.
What is it you like about acting?
Two of my passions are acting and teaching. I taught for a year after Santa Clara. I think both of those professions are admirable and very important. I think that acting, at its finest, is also teaching. I think that’s part of why I enjoy it so much. I think there are so many important stories, about just the human experience, that are out there.
Being able to share that in a creative, artistic way is something I love. I think if it’s done well, audiences and people who see your performance will learn something from it, want to talk about it. It will either make them feel in some way or bring awareness to something that is important on a larger level. I really love that.
What have you learned from some of those characters you portrayed that has affected your personal life?
I think that’s also one of the reasons I love acting. I get to learn more about myself through the characters I play. Aldous Huxley has this great quotation that I use all the time. It’s “The more you know, the more you see.” The more I know about these characters, the more I see in myself and the world around me.
In order to play somebody else, you have to ask yourself, “What would you do in this situation?” or “If you were to be this person, how would you go through what they’re going through?”
Those are questions that not everybody gets to ask themselves a lot in their profession. I get to do that every day, which is great. I’m constantly searching myself and finding out who I am and what I would do in certain situations.
I think acting, at its finest, is self-discovery. It’s finding out who you are by being these other people. Every character does that on some level. You could be playing a clown, or you could be playing a murderer. I’m not going to be a clown. I’m not going to kill anybody. But you have to ask some pretty human questions, in terms of finding out how you would play those people.
It must be difficult, too, because in some ways, you can’t help being yourself. You need to bring that in order to inform the character, but at the same time, you’re not playing yourself. You never really can not bring yourself in some way.
I think that’s the beauty of it, too. I think that’s why people respond to certain actors. It’s because there always has to be a little bit of yourself. That’s what makes you unique. Stella Adler, this wonderful acting teacher, always said, “Your talent is in your choices.”
Any actor can take on a role, but what makes it unique is what you, yourself, the actor, bring to the table. That’s important.
You’re going to see tons of Happys if you watch Death of a Salesman over the course of however many years. Every Happy is going to be different, which is also exciting too.
I think the perfect fusion is a little bit of you, a little bit of the character, and always the story overriding all of that.
Long-term for you, what’s the vision? What’s the goal? What’s the North Star?
The political answer to that is working regularly. Buy a house, have a family, things like that.
In terms of my career, I would love to get involved in film and TV more, absolutely. I’m looking at, potentially, a move down to LA at some point and just pursuing that and auditioning for things out there.
If I got a regular TV show, it’d be great. That is probably the closest thing, on camera, to the theater experience, as opposed to film, because there is an audience component. It’s a play that’s being filmed.
You get to work on a character for an extended period of time. That would be a dream come true. It is more regular work for an industry that doesn’t really thrive on job stability. I would love to pursue that.
What’s it like then to go on a casting call, sit there with 50 other people who resemble you in many ways?
It’s miserable. It’s terrible. You sometimes drive for an hour, two hours to be seen for a two-minute period of time. You never know. You can go in and feel like you nailed the audition and never hear back. You can go in and feel like you did a terrible job and you get the part. You never know. The more you do it, obviously, the more it becomes part of the job.
I tell people all the time. It’s like I’m an actor, but I’m really a professional auditioner. You’re constantly lining up the next gig. You have to get over yourself and sweep your pride under the rug and just do your work. You have to go in and say, “Today, this is about this goal. I’m going to go in and accomplish that.”
You have to be going in for you and your work. You can’t be going in to get the job, if that makes sense. You can’t be going in for the people on the other side of the table. You have to be going in for you and say, “You know what? Regardless of the choice they make, I’m doing this today. I’m going to do my work, and then I’m going to leave the room.”
What you’re doing is, you’re bringing your professionalism, in that, whatever it is that you’re doing, even if it’s for the audition, you’re going to do it to the best of your ability, rather than “What can I do to make them want to hire me.”
Right, I think if you go in the room with that mentality of “I want to please you,” number one, they’re not going to see the best version of yourself. You’re probably not going to be doing the work you should be doing. Your intention should be the task at hand and not necessarily getting the job. Nine times out of ten, you’re not going to.
[laughs] Not good odds...
It’s not based on talent a lot of the times. A lot of the times, it’s just based on, you’re not tall enough or we want somebody blonde because we have… Or it’s already been cast and you’re just filling some space in the room.
If you were not to pursue acting, what do you think you would be doing?
I think I would be teaching, for sure. From elementary school to the collegiate level or beyond, I would absolutely love to go back to that at some point. There’s no question. At some point, I will go back to that.
Both my parents have been teachers. My dad actually taught at Santa Clara University. My mom taught me and my brother at St. John Vianney in San Jose as our music teacher and coach for years.
There’s a lot of history…
Lot of education in my family.
What subject do you think? Would it probably be literature or acting?
Yeah, it would probably be. If it wasn’t in the acting world, it would probably be in the English or literature side of things. I would love to do that.
I talked about being a doctor for a long time because I enjoyed that or thought I was going to go down that path. Pediatrician. I enjoyed working with kids and stuff like that. The math and science that it involves is just not…it’s not me.
Rather than be a real one, it’s better to just play one on TV.
Juan Miguel Saucedo, 25, sits comfortably in an office chair at the helm of his cozy recording setup, intermittently burning sage. Reference speakers, keyboards, and a mixing console consume table space, and a drum kit is tucked away in a back corner of a converted cellar. It’s a concrete-walled nest of creativity that birthed the persona Miguel Kultura, Saucedo’s latest creative incarnation.
In a way, the space has come full circle, and Saucedo himself has returned to his origins. It was in these same confines a decade ago when he first set up a USB mic to start rapping over instrumentals with two friends as Money Hungry Click. Inspired by the thriving southern rap scene at the time, they sold copies of their first mixtape while freshmen at Willow Glen High School.
“[We were] just being hoodlums and trying to chase money and hustle,” he says of his first foray into music. For Saucedo, music became an alternative to the gang life he saw friends and neighbors fall into growing up. “I like to think of myself like Kendrick [Lamar]. I was always around it and was this close to joining a gang but never had the commitment to do it,” he shares, noting that he didn’t know if that was the lifestyle he wanted to lead.
Thankfully, those childhood years listening to Tupac in his older brother’s red Camaro Z/28 hinted that something else was written in his story. Once Saucedo got his hands on the PSP game Traxxpad, he shifted his energy toward making beats, later doing so under the aliases Beats by Fly and Funkadelic Fly. (Both are variations of his inescapable neighborhood nickname, “Mosca.”) After years of honing his craft with other young creatives at various community centers around San Jose, he joined up with young multimedia collective BAMN (By Any Media Necessary).
Miguel Kultura was birthed out of a time of serious physical concern and deep spirituality. While still with BAMN, Saucedo began dealing with a mystery illness that had him believing he was slowly inching toward death. Through visions and meditation, he heard a call to establish a new musical identity, one where he returned to rapping.
“Trabajando,” or “Working,” was his first foray into that new sound and the first time he wrote lyrics in Spanglish. With a buzzing synth and skittering percussion, Saucedo raps about the Latino struggle for visibility and acceptance, with lines like, “My father said we came here to work / Latinos go hard every day in the dirt” and “The son of a farmer can’t be tamed.” He dives more fully into that voice on “Conformar,” similarly Spanglish but more Spanish-forward. The song tackles the notion of conformity. It also alludes to the idea of resilience in the aftermath of losing friends too soon to depression.
“This is what I’m supposed to be doing. It was already written in the stars.”
“As a Mexican-American growing up, you have these two identities,” he points out. “People from Mexico look at you like you’re not one of them, and people here don’t look at you like you’re American either, so it’s always a challenge to be a Mexican American. As I get older, I ask myself, ‘How can I merge these two identities?’ ” By leveraging his proficiency in both languages (he grew up bilingual), Saucedo hopes his work as Miguel Kultura fosters a bridge of connection and understanding across cultural and language barriers.
The journey has also helped him better acknowledge his musical roots outside hip-hop, allowing him to reconnect with the traditional Mexican songs his father taught him on piano as a child and the continued influence of local Norteño music legends Los Tigres del Norte.
A video for “Conformar” is forthcoming, accompanied by a minidocumentary series that shares stories of young local Latinx creatives pushing in their own way to not conform to societal and cultural expectations. In that sense, Saucedo is using his creative work to speak to a greater cultural struggle.
Sometimes, Saucedo speaks about Miguel Kultura in the third person. It seems to be a recognition that his work under this banner doesn’t stem from his creativity alone. Based on all that’s led to this creative moment, Saucedo believes something greater is at play. “It’s not so much about the accolades, the rewards, whatever. This is what I’m supposed to be doing,” he admits, pointing to the significance legacy plays in how he views his work. “It was already written in the stars.”
Martha Sakellariou is a 49-year-old artist who began her journey earning multiple degrees from the Athens School of Fine Arts in Greece. She went on to obtain her MA in printmaking from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2005 she worked as the Creative and Art Program director for a climate change awareness program for Friends of the Earth, London. In 2013, her family moved to the Bay Area where she now holds a studio space as an independent visual artist with the Cubberley Artist Studio Program in Palo Alto.
Sakellariou’s work has strongly focused on the concept of home and the tensions, realities, mythologies, and allegories of everyday life—the rituals and relationships which shape what we consider our shelter. The shelter-in-place order has certainly challenged the process by which she composes her art, as the dynamics with family and her own internal dialogue reshape what “home” means. The concepts that had previously brewed and steeped internally have now played out in a myriad of forms, manifesting with new meanings. The very act of quarantining at home brings an unprecedented emotional toll, especially in the face of ongoing uncertainty. While intense, the situation has led Sakellariou to moments of profound creativity and learning opportunities. In her mind, reality is “a dichotomy—dream and nightmare scenarios overlapping—so I understood the significance of that moment not just empathetically but tautologically.”
“Nobody should direct what art should be, where it should take place, when and how and by whom it should be done.”_Martha Sakellariou
At the beginning of the pandemic, Sakellariou was in survival mode, shifting her attention to recalibrating home life and observing the world in transition. During her daily walks, however, her artistic instincts called to her, creating a need to communicate something significant. She came upon a serene and beautiful home, envisioning the image of a woman blowing a balloon projected onto the house. After introducing herself to the homeowner, she created a photo mural on the house of the woman inflating a balloon. “The balloon represents a bubble—a place of safety, protection, and containment, but also implies life in an echo chamber, isolated, disconnected from reality.” This beautiful overlay of realities speaks powerfully to many in their current situation. Even in isolation, Sakellariou has found a way to engage an audience and the wider world. She has since created a total of six temporary photomurals on various houses in her Palo Alto neighborhood, which just goes to show that art can be created anywhere. “Nobody should direct what art should be, where it should take place, when and how and by whom it should be done.”
Like locking puzzle pieces, Scott and Shannon Guggenheim—or “Stannon” as they are fittingly known by their staff—are the producing entity and owners of 3Below, the new home of Guggenheim Entertainment since the closing of the Retro Dome, San Jose’s previous realm of movie and sing-along fun. At 3Below, expect top-quality surround sound as you view an indie film or enjoy a classic flick in the cozy Theater 2. Participate in a ComedySportz show or take an acting class in Theater 1. Sing along to The Rocky Horror Picture Show or see a play in Theater 3 for a family night out. No matter what you come for, your experience is curated by creators driven by the need to provide entertainment that promotes joy.
You used to be the Retro Dome in West San Jose. How is this downtown location treating you? SHANNON: The audience we’ve grown in Saratoga hasn’t really followed us down here. I don’t know if they just haven’t caught on that, there’s something family-friendly out here to do. Usually, we announce Sound of Music and sell out a thousand seats in a weekend. We’re really trying to explain that we have this lovely little bubble you can just pull into. It’s tricky being a movie theater. With other businesses—restaurants, salons—you see the hustle and bustle of activity through the front windows. When we’re busy, everybody’s in here. SCOTT: We’re a safe place, too. Here, we have validated parking. You can just park in our garage and walk downstairs; it’s lit, there’s security in the building, and afterward, you can walk right back out to your car.
How have you applied your artistic background to the challenges you face every day as a business? SHANNON: If there’s any testament to art’s importance in schools, it’s that when you learn anything relative to being a performer, you immediately have a skillset you can take with you your entire life. You can’t be in a show without multitasking: you need to be a good communicator, understand conflict resolution, and give-and-take. Being tenacious and not wanting to give up are the traits of a performer. Who but a performer will subject themselves to rejection after rejection?
One of our bread and butter concepts throughout the ‘90s was doing kids’ club programming for shopping centers. We had fashion shows with jeans that the kids in the audience decorated; we did Retail Star, a competition to see which storefront would be occupied by a new tenant.
That was all well and good, frankly, until 9/11 happened. As the climate changed in America relative to what your third place could be, people didn’t feel safe in those environments the way they did the day before. So marketing managers in shopping centers completely changed their focus. They weren’t hosting events or fun things for crowds anymore. All that money was reallocated to security. So we had to adapt really quickly.
SCOTT: For seven or eight years, we exclusively did the Christmas rollouts at Stanford and Bay Street in Emeryville, at Montgomery Village, and at Pier 39. So when you see elves or soldiers or bands performing or carolers out there, most of the time, it’s us doing that. SHANNON: There were definitely things you did because they paid the bills, and there were things you did for your artist’s soul. Very often our Christmas events were paying for the Hanukkah show we wrote. As that trend changed, we had to find other ways to survive. Our synagogue employed us to create a theatrical program for their school or synagogue. That lets us keep paying the bills while enjoying some aspect of our own selves.
Not everyone gets to start a theater company with their best friend and stay married for 30 years. Through all the co-writing and co-directing, marketing, and administrative work, how have you managed to keep the family together?SCOTT: We’ve been very lucky in that we found each other when we were young. Shannon and I met doing children’s theater in the late ’80s. We ran a children’s theater for nearly a decade, and our exit from that was producing Schoolhouse Rock Live. We have the same sensibility. We’re both really good event planners. That’s probably our biggest strength. SHANNON: For everything I’m not good at, Scott is. And vice versa. We’re very lucky in that way. And we know each other’s weaknesses, too. It’s possible that having Ally in our life was a big reason for that. SCOTT: Our second-born, Ally, has been in and out of a hospital her whole life. She’s 100 percent dependent on us. SHANNON: With Ally’s severe disabilities, what’s the alternative? We can’t just say never mind, I’m not going to be the adult today. The strong get stronger, and the weak get weaker. Whatever you have in your life that’s already strong it’s going to be crystallized as a result of having to get through it.
We’re here to create. It’s just some sort of knowledge that we’re here for a purpose. And if we have the opportunity in our lives to figure out what it is and go do it, well how lucky are we?
What do you want the South Bay to know about 3Below?SCOTT: If you want to come to experience a show and know the quality of entertainment will be a top bar, this is one thing I say because it’s true: both Shannon and I are directors and choreographers, and we find the best way to get the best performance out of our actors. My brother Stephen is able to find the means to get the best vocals from the performers as well. SHANNON: We love the idea of having creative control over everything, but we would love a couple of other people to share this with. People are moving away because they can’t afford to live here. It’s been hard to cast actors, fill slots behind cash registers, or find set builders. Every industry that supports what we’re creating seems to have ebbed off as far as an abundance of talent. We’re talking to other theaters, the opera, and symphony—and they agree; it’s just really lean out there. We’re all using the same wig mistress. Our designers are fantastic, but we’re afraid we’ll lose them.
If people don’t support the arts, they will go away. You can’t let the convenience of insular entertainment change you completely. No filmmaker ever said, “I can’t wait for you to see it on this little screen!” They want you to see it on a massive screen with great sound with other people. Technology makes what we do even better, but if you let it bleed you of any enjoyment found in other ways, those ways won’t exist.
Through all the turmoil we experience in our news, why are you rebuilding? When you’re done rebuilding, then what are you going to do? Just because we can get to the moon, what are we going to do when we get there?SCOTT: We create new programming to keep us going, but also to make sure we’re meeting our basic needs of building better people, creating a better world. We choose things that promote joy.
Although a visual artist now, Matthew Heimgartner was initially drawn to the creative world through storytelling. Writing stories throughout his childhood in San Jose and adding doodles in the margins, it wasn’t until 2017 that he made what he considers the official switch—that is, showing his artwork publicly. Thankfully so, as Heimgartner’s work is expressive, vibrant, and intimate—so intimate, in fact, it almost feels as if his art is only accidentally seen by the public eye. Working in a mixture of pen, pencil, and watercolor, Heimgartner’s surrealist influences are apparent but not overwhelming. By finding a careful balance between absurd and defined, his art exudes a raw emotion that is hard to ignore and even harder to forget.
“I want people to look at my art and feel like they have had a conversation with me. My art is very personal, because I have a hard time being personable. I feel like I have lived so many different lives in my 28 years, and I have a hard time jumping between those lives and reconnecting with the people that were once really close to me. I feel like I can talk about and express that in my art, and people will understand the feelings that I feel, but the viewer gets to add their own connotation of that feeling.”
Every show began with the same battle cry, followed by a vocal roar and a flash of the 408. Daniel Martinez—known around the globe as Dirtbag Dan—always made it a point to shout out his hometown at the start of every one of his rap battles. His stage presence, signature style of ruthless takedowns delivered with comedic wordplay, and precise timing allowed him to become one of niche scene’s more distinct characters. This combination of talents also prepared him for his second act in entertainment: stand-up comedy.
As a teen, Dan’s entry point to hip-hop came through the underground Bay Area sounds he heard on skate tapes. “Rapping, hip-hop music in general—everything came through skateboarding,” he explains. “That was my identity as a kid. I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I found a skateboard.”
Dan remembers hearing hip-hop on the radio, but the sounds of regional heroes Souls of Mischief and Hieroglyphics on those tapes inspired him to dive more fully into the culture. He began freestyling with friends, and in high school, he developed a reputation as a ruthless battle rapper. During his final year of high school, he faced 15 challengers and never lost.
Dan soon made his way to the West Coast’s freestyle battle scene and in the mid-2000s witnessed its shift from 8 Mile–style battles over beats to today’s favored a cappella format. In 2008, he participated in the West Coast’s first battle of this kind, and he continued to build his name as outlets like Grind Time and King of the Dot gained prominence and their battles on YouTube started clocking hundreds of thousands of views. Throughout his 75-battle career, he sparred with legends and upstarts alike, among them The Saurus, NoCanDo, the late Cadalack Ron, and DNA.
“I’d like to think that in those 75 battles, I did everything,” he notes. “I rapped my ass off. I was super funny. I did super ‘unrappy’ things and took risks in that regard. I also was mean when I needed to be. But I definitely was always more on the lighter side, which I think made me more watchable, and more likable, to a general audience.” At one point, he called himself the “most traveled battle rapper,” since his name helped him book appearances at battles in the Philippines, Sweden, Denmark, Australia, the UK, and various locations throughout Canada and the United States.
However, his style was divisive in battle rap circles, loved by some and hated by others. In a scene that could be defined by violent lyrics and no-holds-barred personal attacks, Dan used his stage presence to craft an approach that emphasized punchlines and comedic timing. Above all, he seemed to understand that despite the huge stakes and cage-match-like depictions, battling ultimately was entertainment. “As much as I’m proud of my ability to rap, I think my humor was the thing that made me an endearing character and helped me stick around for as long as I did,” he adds.
“As much as I’m proud of my ability to rap, I think my humor was the thing that made me an endearing character and helped me stick around for as long as I did.”
For years, friends had nudged him to try to develop comedic material, but he didn’t make time until he stepped away from battling in late 2015. He began writing immediately, but waited six months before finally taking the stage, making his first appearance at a Brainwash open mic in San Francisco. Dan was hooked immediately. He started finding more spaces to share his material, and now with nearly two years committed to this new form, he just secured a weekend spot at the Punchline in Sacramento.
Though he recognizes that his ascent feels accelerated at times, he also notes that his extensive experience with battle rap prepared him to take the stage. Developing material, being aware of an audience, and feeling comfortable in the moment are all elements he’s already explored while battling.
One might ask if there’s anything more daunting than standing in front of a room full of people equipped with nothing but a mic and some wit. Dan says yes and compares stand-up comedy to stepping into a high-profile rap battle. “You’ve got to go into a room, and someone has to die for the audience to be entertained. Some other dude’s going to make fun of you. You have no control over what he’s going to say. You have to memorize nine minutes of unique material that you only get to do one time, and if you mess up, it’s on camera, forever.” Bombing doesn’t faze Dan: he sees it as part of the comedic process. Not everything is going to work, and at least when a joke falls flat, it won’t be criticized in YouTube comments for years to come. Dan has retired from battling, but he’s still very active within the culture. He calls his weekly podcast The Dirtbag Dan Show, the “ESPN of battle rap.” He’s a fixture as a commentator for various pay-per-view battles. He’s also working to cultivate a path for others in the scene to cross over. “There’s a lot of people who can make the same transition I’m making,” he says. “There’s a connection there, and I’m trying to build that bridge so that when I go out and cover a battle event, I’m also doing a comedy event the night before. Most of the time, there’s another battler on that bill.” He’s also helped establish a battle league in San Jose in an effort to ensure the city’s name recognition in the battle rap scene.
His newfound passion for discovering jokes with universal appeal has shifted his creative focus from developing bars to developing bits. He has, however, decided to bring one major piece of his legacy with him. At every show and open mic he steps up to, he’s still being introduced as Dirtbag Dan. “It’s been a fun ride, and though I’m not in the ring anymore, I’m still in the world. I’ll never get all the way out,” he says. “No matter what I do in comedy, no matter what I do in rap and hip-hop and making music, I’ll always be in the world of battle rap in some way, shape, or form.”
This article originally appeared in Issue 9.3 “Future”
The sound of Chuy Gomez on the radio is synonymous with the Bay Area. Some Chuy fans might also know him from his hour of music on CMC, a cable TV show from 4 to 5pm on local channels. His ability to connect with his listeners and the community have made him a popular local celebrity, and when he was unceremoniously let go from his 20-year stint as a DJ with KMEL, his already faithful fans rallied around him even more. Now he’s back in his groove at HOT 105.7, doing what he does best.
Tell me about your background. I was born in Mexico and came here before kindergarten. I was raised in the Potrero Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. I grew up with the radio always on at the house. I would call into KBRG every day to request songs for my mom: Los Bukis, Los Caminantes, whatever was hip at the time. The DJ began to recognize me. He invited me, this little boy who called every day, to come down and check out the station.
When did you first try radio out? I was interested in it because of being around music. In high school, I started deejaying house parties. I never really wanted to do radio. I’d pretend to be Lee Perkins. People would tell me, “You sound like him.”
I’d MC events, and this led me to my reintroduction to radio. I had a buddy whose sister was having a quinceañera. I didn’t know he was a friend of Marcos Gutierrez from KSOL. He came to the quinceañera. He said, “Nobody does this but me here.” He was the bilingual guy on CBS. So then I became his intern. Before you know it, I’m hanging out for his show, and the show after. So then I start driving the vans, and that led to a weekend position eventually. It’s crazy because I was just a kid hanging out with Marcos Gutierrez. Then I became a DJ.
At what moment did you realize that you liked doing radio? I knew that I loved music coming out of my radio. Just being there, it morphed into something. I didn’t know I wanted to be on the radio. Dr. Demento, Wolfman Jack—I had my local celebrities, I liked. And then being able to be in a space where I saw these people was something else. I wasn’t starstruck, but I was this young guy hanging out with these vets. I learned a lot of game from Barry Pope. He and I spent a lot of time in the station vans doing community work.
Radio is not just about performing, it’s also about connecting… People have grown up with me in the past 20 years. I’m almost like the neighbor that you know. I’ve been to your schools, I’ve been to your dances. You’ve seen me in different situations. Now you see me walking through the fair. Some of these people don’t know I’m on the radio because people have been locked into three specific stations in the market. Unless you’re scanning through the radio, you don’t know it’s there.
Now it’s all about grassroots again. Shaking hands, kissing babies.
When did you feel like you could make a name for yourself? When did you say, “I’m going to be more public?” I was always the radio guy that was there playing music. Then they hired Mancow to do mornings, and I think by that time we had switched over to be WILD 107. He heard me and said, “You have a lot of energy, want to be part of the morning show?” I’d do the morning show Monday through Friday. I’d be the street team guy, the morning show ambassador. I’d do call-ins to the station. It got me out in front of the people. Chuy became almost a personality himself. That allowed me to grow.
My girlfriend at the time got pregnant; my son was born in 1992. I ended up asking for benefits. I couldn’t get a raise to get my own benefits. At the same time, someone called me from KMEL. They said “We’re thinking of doing something, want to meet?” So we had a conversation. I told them my girlfriend just got pregnant and I needed to start making money. They said, “Well let me put something on paper for you…”
How’d you feel in that moment? I’ve always taken life day by day. Then, I asked if I could get benefits. Oh, benefits come with the job. Okay, cool! So now I’m excited. But I didn’t want to leave WILD because I liked it there.
WILD couldn’t match KMEL’s offer, so I took the offer. They teamed me up with Rosary. We had the Chuy and Rosary show. It was growth. It was a godsend. I started doing nights for about 2 ½ years. Then it was a weird situation. They put us on the morning show. For whatever situation, that didn’t work out. So then I got the night show back. Then I went from nights to doing afternoons. Then Michael Martin, who was originally my music director at WILD, said he wanted to take what I was doing in the afternoons and do it in the mornings. I ended up doing mornings for over 10 years.
How did you find doing mornings in terms of the style? For me, it was awesome because I didn’t have to do the whole bells and whistles… I’ve never been a fan of prank calls. While you’re stuck in traffic, you have music. I threw in some entertainment reports. We did great for the amount of time that we had. Up until August of 2013, when they walked in and, after 20 years, said, “We decided to go in a new direction.”
There was no warning? I went on vacation. I came back and worked Monday through Thursday. I went into a meeting Thursday after I got off the air. “We decided to go into a different direction.” Oh, so no funky Friday tomorrow? That day was my last day.
In that moment, how was that news? In radio, you never know when your last day is. You’re only as good as your last show. I never expected it. I thought I’d graduate to KISS FM, to an older demographics station. It didn’t sink in. I cried more when I left WILD than when I left KMEL that day. It was a little surreal. I had Disney on Ice tickets that night with my daughters. I didn’t pay attention to my Instagram that day. People were going crazy, asking “What happened to Chuy?” That was empowering and reassuring and it felt good.
When did you get the call for HOT 105.7? They called and said they wanted to do afternoons. Awesome! I get to sleep in. They kicked off the station by playing Nelly’s “It’s Getting Hot in Here” nonstop for a few days. It felt like when you fall off your bike and you get back on, and you’re back in stride. You feel good.
Who are your big influencers? I’ve always been an Ice Cube fan. He and Scarface are my all-time favorites. I interviewed Ice Cube in ‘94 or ‘95. That’s probably been the only time I’ve been in groupie mode. You watch him and you see his videos and you see what kind of figure he is, and then, oh my God, I’m standing next to him.
I’ve talked to everyone from him to Snoop Dog to Rappin’ Forte. It was an incredible time in hip hop. The golden era. The ’90s were the best.
Chris Elliman moved to the US from England in his teens when his father landed an industrial design position at Apple in 1985. Through his creativity, talent, and persuasive persona, he finds himself thoroughly linked to the creative culture and history of the South Bay and Downtown San Jose.
Disregarding high school, Chris landed in the middle of San Jose’s skateboard scene and began hanging out with Corey O’Brien, Steve Caballero, and Ray Stevens II (Faction and Los Olvidados). The latter was one of the first people Chris met when he came to San Jose.
In the early 1990s, Chris found himself working as a decor designer at the now-defunct nightclub One Step Beyond, occasionally DJing with records he had acquired while a display artist at Tower Records on Bascom Avenue in Campbell.
Moving on to Metro Newspapers as a graphic designer, he met Chris Esparza (owner of Naglee Park Garage and Giant Creative). The two of them developed underground parties called the “King of Club,” which they used to co-found the club Ajax (pronounced “Ai-yax”) in 1991. Named after the Dutch football team, the now legendary South First Street club, formerly located above Cafe Stritch, closed in 1995.
Searching for what to do next, Chris nearly headed to Portland, Oregon, but was offered a warehouse space in the American Can building on South 5th and Virginia. He has both subleased it as an artist collective and used it as a studio himself for the last 30 years.
In his studio, lightly littered with a design and visual history of San Jose and framed by shelves of albums, Chris speaks about his paintings. (We’ll save his cycling and graphic work for another time…)
“Life cycle”
I think I have the courage to make many mistakes, which allows me to grow from those mistakes. What I paint is life—my surroundings, what I see, people. I like to think that, in every one of my paintings, I am communicating about culture…I think paintings should say something.
I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with aesthetically pleasing paintings. Aesthetics is a great thing. It’s got its place. I’m OK with that. Sometimes, I do things that are strictly aesthetic, but I like to think that most of what I do has a social or political charge to it, a psychological charge.
I’m looking at society and what is almost an illness or a psychological situation. I feel like I’m trying to paint a little bit of that into each piece, so there is definitely something behind every piece.
I like to say that most of these paintings—maybe all of these paintings—are like portals.
There’s a flat surface that you see, but what is really taking place is what is behind that surface. There’s a story.
With abstract painting, abstract art, you bring your story to it and it completes the paintings. I feel like everyone has a story and these paintings get completed with their stories.
It’s like truth. Everyone’s got their own truth. Truth’s ever-changing…
“Systematic Deconstruction”
This particular painting is not actually completed. My concept of finishing this painting is when someone purchases it, we’ll go to a target range and we’ll shoot. I’ll allow them the choice. They can shoot holes through it, which would be ideal. That way, they have now become a part of this piece. Or we’ll allow the instructor or whoever it is to do the shooting [laughs] if they don’t feel like doing it.
“America: Stars and Strikes”
The Mickey Mouse and the figures, which were a couple of friends who modeled for me, represent for me…what was behind this is “American Apparel.”
You’ve got two young models, fairly innocent in their attire, which is just underwear, yet provocatively posed.
In America, everyone’s trying to be a celebrity or successful, so there’s a fine line in Hollywood between starting out as an innocent Disney character star and then moving over into pop music or movies. Those who “make it” are the stars. Those who don’t are the strikes.
The innocence is in the Mickey and Minnie Mouse. It represents what is behind this American Apparel. There’s a fine line…that goes down the path of, “I didn’t make it in Hollywood but I became a porn star,” or “I became a sleazy magazine advertising model.”
For me, it’s just a hard hit on Hollywood and the media and what drives people.
“A Visual Discourse in Non-objective Cageian Randomness”
Right now, I have moved on to what is a “Cagean” philosophy, from John Cage, the composer, who was a Buddhist practitioner and who studied “randomness.”
I’ve been exploring John Cage and his thoughts about randomness in a few pieces. He composed music randomly because he felt that was more natural, and I felt like that’s what I was doing. I read this book on John Cage so I could understand him better. I felt like there was a great connection. I was actually doing what he was talking about through some of these pieces. Then I thought I’d explore it a little bit further.
Then the X’s. Yeah, I created the X’s, so they’re all the same size. I cut them out and threw them down, and allowed them to land randomly. There are 27 X’s because I’m very fond of the number three. Those X’s were thrown down randomly, and wherever they land, that is the serendipitous part, the randomness. They just land, and I’m not going to dictate that.
Those colors aren’t my favorite colors. However, I did have those colors. I had at some point chosen those colors. Since I have these pots of paint, I decide to randomly select this bunch of paints and looked at them and said, “OK, I’m going to use those.”
As a designer, I’m fighting it a little bit, thinking to myself, “Oh, I wish I hadn’t had that color.” [laughs] But I’m going to go along with the experiment, exploring, and I’m going to allow that color to stay because that’s what Cage was doing.
“Serendipitous Deconstruction no.2: Pussy Riot”
I had loosely called it “Serendipitous Deconstruction” because I was deconstructing what I was building. Serendipitously finding interesting things in the piece, and allowing what I thought was interesting to remain.
Each time I did something, I allowed the interesting portions to remain, so it was serendipitously deconstructed.
“The World is Flat But It’s an Un-level Playing Field”
This is geographical. It is all the countries of the “round of 16” of the World Cup, placed geographically. Russia, Japan, Korea, Australia, Argentina, Chile, the United States, and Mexico—all connected to the nations they played against. Each game is strung up together.
I changed the colors in the spaces, but all of these shapes were created because of the outcome of the games. I mean, anyone could have won the World Cup, right? Random.
That’s the eye of the artist—you recognize what could potentially become art.
Everything about Harumo Sato attains a critical mass of joy, color, and wonder. You can see it in her paintings and murals, where every character she draws could be your otherworldly spirit friend. You can see it in her wardrobe: glitter eyeshadow, sparkly leggings, and lime-green rosebud earrings, all at once. And you can see it in her animated body language, hands flinging wildly overhead and shoulders bouncing up and down. But most of all you can see this sense of magic in her life story—a fantastic journey of spiritual crisis, impossible healing, and happy discovery.
Girl with a Snake Arm
Harumo graduated college with a degree in international relations and jumped right into a job as a planner at an advertising agency. Creative fulfillment was a luxury she could not afford. Every move she made was a struggle for survival, for independence. So she stuffed down every artistic dream and told herself to embark on such ambitions maybe a decade later as a hobby.
But she still made drawings for fun once in a while, and one day, she doodled a girl with a snake arm—an omen for the inexplicable events ahead. Later that evening, she went to Chinatown for dim sum, and a friend suggested that they visit a fortune teller down the street. The psychic advised Harumo to change her job, or else her body would break. Then, on the way home, her right arm started tingling and stiffening, but she thought nothing of it. When she woke up the next day, the whole limb was dead and a deep shade of purple, swollen twice its usual size, with no mobility, sensation, temperature, or blood pressure.
She rushed to see doctors—at least 10 of them—but no one could explain her sudden paralysis. They said it was an unknown condition—perhaps the first of its kind—and nothing could be done. They advised Harumo to keep her job because no one else would hire her again. Then, they sent her home with a thick stack of bills because disability insurance programs refused to cover her mysterious disease.
Pencil Taped to Hand
After the initial waves of panic, Harumo remembered a childhood art teacher named Shusei, a stroke survivor who recovered fully from one-sided paralysis despite all medical opinions that he would never again move half his body. She reached out, and he agreed to coach her through rehabilitation with his unorthodox self-taught methods.
For their first class together, Shusei duct-taped a pencil to Harumo’s dead hand and told her to write with it. She stared back at him blankly. He said, “If your brain thinks that your body can’t work, you’ll never use it again. Convince yourself that your arm can move.”
So she did. She grabbed her swollen, purple limb with her working hand and dragged it around the page. Every inch was agony. But Shusei said, “Pain is not a big deal. It’s a necessary stage to endure, an illusion from your brain. Just don’t believe it!”
After a few torturous months of this training, Harumo started seeing results—woefully gradual results. Her paralyzed arm started gripping onto newsprint and holding down rulers so she could tear paper pieces and draw straight lines again. She built these skills slowly, eventually reaching a point where she could draw for hours every day.
It took a total of three excruciating years as Shusei’s disciple, but she managed to recuperate almost all of her mobility and strength. When she did, she immediately quit the advertising agency and attended art school instead.
New Arm, New Dream
Harumo decided to study art in the United States because of the time efficiency and creative freedom of American programs. In the States, she would only need three years to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, rather than the six years required merely to complete the portfolio application for Japanese schools. And she yearned for a place to explore her personal vision and purpose as an artist instead of a conveyor-belt education that would force her to conform to someone else’s aesthetic.
Soon, Harumo matriculated as a studio art major at the University of Buffalo, starting over as an undergraduate because her degree in international relations offered no transferable art credits. All by herself in a foreign country, living off meager funds borrowed from family, she took on her studies with a sense of haisui no jin—the grim determination of soldiers who must either win their battle or die in a ditch—or, in her case, graduate and support herself as an artist or forever face her parents with shame.
Even though she realized halfway through her first semester that she wouldn’t be able to afford much more tuition or living expenses, what she lacked in monetary resources, she made up in talent and drive. She won a school-wide grant competition with her work and invited the art department chair to attend the reception and view her piece. There, she managed to persuade her way into skipping several classes ahead—earning a bachelor’s degree in only one-and-a-half years.
New Land, New World
In 2016, Harumo moved to Mountain View in hopes of finding a vibrant Bay Area art community. She moved to California with only as much furniture as could fit into a Toyota Scion and only as much knowledge of the local art scene as she could find from Google searches. In her first few days on the West Coast, she made a list of 10 art galleries in San Francisco and took the Caltrain up to tour them. Out of the 10, six had closed from rising rent costs, and the other four only featured world-famous painters such as Chagall and Picasso. She sank into depression, wondering if her ambitions would only wilt from then on.
Luckily, a new friend soon brought her to a South First Fridays Art Walk in downtown San Jose, introducing her to a throng of local artists and creatives. Harumo was overwhelmed with relief and glee at finding like-minded thinkers and makers. There she met Cherri Lakey of Anno Domini, who invited Harumo to sell illustrations at future art events; Kevin Bigger of San Jose Made, who asked Harumo to design the poster for their annual holiday craft fair; Genevieve Santos of Le Petit Elefant, who showed Harumo how to print her own products and file her small-business taxes; Juan Carlos Araujo, who now acts as Harumo’s art agent and mural production director.
The past three years of California living have been a nonstop success story for Harumo. She gained local and national recognition by selling art at print fairs and street festivals. In 2018, she landed a series of group and solo shows through Art Attack San Francisco, and then painted the side of Dac Phuc restaurant as part of POW! WOW! San Jose. In 2019, she produced murals for both Facebook and Target. And coming up in 2020, she’ll show illustrations in a group show at Classic Cars West, and she’ll exhibit paintings in a solo show at Luggage Store Gallery—and a few other exciting projects that she can’t talk about just yet.
As for her ultimate goals and dreams, they have nothing to do with corporate clients or name-brand galleries. Harumo hopes to specialize in creating murals and installations for hospitals, rehabilitation clinics, and hospice centers—to cultivate joy for those who need it the most. “Art really changed my life. It saved me—really cured me. So I want to enhance the positivity and make people happy. I want to draw a peaceful world.”
Have you ever noticed how anything of worth—careers, relationships, books, antique vases—gains value not from the finish line, but from the journey? That attentive (sometimes painstaking) development provides rich meaning. It’s the reason why, when Chelsea Stewart paints, she’s much more fascinated with the process than the product.
“The paint isn’t secondary to whatever I’m trying to represent on the canvas. The paint itself is the actual focus point of the canvas and the piece as a whole,” Stewart explains. “It’s the little moments, the micro-moments, that interest me the most.” She wants viewers to see that voyage across the canvas in its entirety, “the wash all the way to the final touches and highlights that get put on last minute before a show.” By exposing these layers, she reveals “the process of the artist’s hand in the mark making.”
Stewart developed her style two years into her art studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo. Weary of creating paintings that didn’t feel true to her art process, she opted for a bold aesthetic her junior year. “I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to paint a hole and see what happens’…it ended up being one of my favorite pieces.” From then on, Stewart became absorbed with the texture, lines, and composition of geological forms. “I started going crazy with research and experimentation and taking reference photos anywhere I could.” She also signed up for a few geology courses and hiked a few of the volcanic peaks known as San Luis Obispo County’s Nine Sisters.
“With rocks and geological forms there are so many layers to nature and erosion of the pieces,” she describes. “It’s a complete juxtaposition of a painting which is built layer upon layer upon layer.” Fitting to her subject matter, Stewart also began experimenting with environmentally-friendly materials, making her own paper and canvases as well as dyes, inks, and paints.
“With rocks and geological forms there are so many layers to nature and erosion of the pieces. It’s a complete juxtaposition of a painting which is built layer upon layer upon layer.”
In her senior year, Stewart thrived in her campus’s shared studio. That close proximity with other artists, a space where ideas rub off as easily as fresh paint, made the ideal environment. “The way people approach the canvas is so interesting to me,” she notes.
But then, COVID-19 hit during her final semester. Graduation, often a rocky transition in itself, became all the more challenging. Stewart, forced to return to her Bay Area home earlier than expected, converted one of her rooms into a makeshift studio. “It messes with the mindset,” she admits of the transition to a much more isolated environment. She also needed to downsize from her preferred 6-foot-long canvases.
However, after rediscovering her stride, she is once again eager to seize any future opportunities that come her way. “I’m excited to see where my work goes,” Stewart asserts.
Askull, a pelvis, some vertebrae—warmly familiar ivory tones and archetypal shapes resonating deep in our memories. Looking closer, the shapes lack the sharp edges of bone. They are fibrous and irresistibly tangible. Stephanie Metz’s studio is filled with such contradictions. Can bone be soft and warm? Can folds of flesh be firm? Everything requires a second look. Each piece provokes.
Bay Area native Metz grew up in Sunnyvale. After studying sculpture at the University of Oregon, she settled back in San Jose with her high tech husband. “When I came back, I didn’t have any connection with anybody art-related around here,” says Metz. With a vague inclination toward animatronics, she put together her portfolio and ended up getting a job with a company in Hayward that did themed environments like the pyramid outside of Fry’s Electronics. She enjoyed the hands-on making part of the job the most, she says. “Just getting back there and doing huge things out of Styrofoam with a chainsaw.” Being told how to produce something was less enjoyable, and the job only lasted a year.
“It’s like alchemy—you take it from one form, and then you do something to it, and it’s another form.”
Metz next tried her hand at working in a frame store. “It was good and it was maddening,” she says. The job brought her into contact with WORKS San Jose, where she did everything from writing grants to becoming president of their all-volunteer board. “It was a good learning experience from the other side in knowing what it’s like to hang a show. I feel as artists we have to work twice as hard to show that we are responsible, thinking business people.”
At the frame shop, she first came across her medium of choice: wool. Someone gave her a Sunset Magazine article about making a little drink cozy out of felt. By simply wrapping a cup in wool and dunking it in hot soapy water, a solid thing could be created. “I was thinking it’s like alchemy—you take it from one form, and then you do something to it, and it’s another form. I went to a local yarn store and was immediately directed to a book on needle felting.”
The process proved fascinating and infinitely variable. By compacting the fibers together with a needle, the resulting felt can be shaped into any form Metz imagines. It can be built up or stripped down, compacted as densely as she desires. “For me, a lot of it is the dichotomy between hard and soft, and sharp and round,” says Metz.
To create the felt, Metz forces the fibers together with really sharp needles notched in one direction. The scales on the fibers interlock and hold tightly together. Although the concept is simple, it affords Metz almost infinite control. Even large forms don’t need much structure because the tightly-bound network of fibers creates its own armature.
Challenging the way humans have shaped their environment is part of what drives Metz. “It came together in a really nice way to use this organic, really alive-looking stuff to talk about how we shape the world around us.” Her “Teddy Bear Natural History” series explores the anatomy of a found teddy bear with distended snout, oversized eyes and sharp teeth normally hidden behind the fur. Metz explains that the teddy bears evolved out of her experiments with sheep skulls because she was “interested in looking at the hardest part of the animal and making it out of this soft material, but also giving them teeth and thinking about the fact that they’re based on this real creature that could eat any one of us.” The toys mirror the way our culture morphs unpalatable predators into more socially acceptable shapes.
But not everyone feels comfortable with the bears. “Just like with all my work, I find out who’s kind of a kindred spirit and who’s not. Some people see these [skulls] as signs of death, or the death of a childhood icon, and I don’t see them that way at all. For me, they’re specimens of life. Looking at bones talks about what happened in life. It’s not death and gore. It’s the evidence left behind.”
After two years at WORKS, Metz had her first child. Some of her peers made comments about choosing children over art as if the two choices were mutually exclusive. “That probably made me work harder,” says Metz. “I still have things that are galvanizing to me and I feel the need to make something tangible.”
One of Metz’s pieces was featured in the “Milestones: Textiles of Transition” exhibition at the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles (July 21, 2013). From the “Pelts” series, the work featured a baptismal gown fringed with hair. “When I had kids, suddenly I was so in touch with the fact that I am a mammal,” says Metz. “One way we differentiate ourselves from other mammals is we change our hair for aesthetics. Try to grow it in certain places and not in others. I was having the hair come through different clothing pieces as if it were trying to reassert itself—like ivy or moss.”
Having a home studio, Metz’s kids find it “totally normal for mom to be poking wool in the back room.” Her older son loves to draw and already identifies himself as an artist. Her children respect her space and, much as they want to try, she never lets them near the needles. “After ten years of doing it, I still poke myself and it is wickedly painful.”
Her work is becomingly increasingly abstract and large. She is exploring new ways for people to interact with her pieces. “From further away it looks kind of cool and minimalist, clean lines,” says Metz. “But when you get up closer, you see this texture and want to touch it—although you know you’re not supposed to. It makes you think about how physically present it is.”
There is no mystery about her process. Metz has painstakingly documented her work in time-lapse video. “Art is so alienating to people so that’s why I talk about how I do this. I want it to be an entry point, so people can interact with it and feel like art is a part of their lives.”
Metz’s work is certainly physical. It has weight and texture and tugs at something deep in the psyche. Much of it makes me smile. “That’s what I hope to affect in people—that they take a moment in their life and see something differently.”
The article originally appeared in Issue 5.2 “Invent” Print issue SOLD OUT
Kevin Youkilis, a former Major League Baseball all-star who won two World Series with the Boston Red Sox, has made a career out of being something of an underdog. A key figure in the bestselling book Moneyball by Michael Lewis, Youkilis was lightly regarded as coming out of college in 2001. His stock was low, mainly due to his physical appearance, but the league was transitioning to a new era of data-driven player values, and his were off the charts. Teams that were tuned in to the new approach gave him a chance to find success in the big leagues.
A decade in the majors, in turn, helped him find out about great beer.
“[Baseball] allowed me to travel around the country. I got to sample a lot of different styles of craft beer, go to breweries, just become more educated,” Youkilis recalls. “I always made it a point to try new craft beer wherever I went. Some guys on my teams would look at me like I’m weird because they were so into their domestic beers.”
As his baseball career wound down, Youkilis and his wife decided to settle in the Bay Area, where she had grown up. He and his brother Scott, already a successful restaurateur, began kicking around the idea of starting a brewpub together. Kevin reached out to his longtime friend and former college teammate Dan Reineke, who had been working in the food and beverage industry in New York, for advice on finding a restaurant manager.
“About 24 hours later, he emailed me saying he wanted to come out here and do it,” says Youkilis.
“It wasn’t hard to twist my arm to get out to California,” Reineke adds. “It’s beautiful.”
The brothers acquired the defunct Los Gatos Brewery, which had closed rather suddenly after having been open for about 20 years as a staple in the city’s small downtown. Youkilis wanted to freshen up the place by renovating the interior, overhauling the menu, and focusing a lot more on the beer. When the new Loma Brewing opened in August of 2016, some longtime customers resisted the changes.
“We want this place to be where everyone comes in and comes together.” —Kevin Youkilis
“Some people hated what we did with the place, some people really loved what we did,” he says. “Getting over that hurdle took a good six months to a year. Now people finally have come around and really enjoy it. Our focus is truly on trying to make really good craft beer—to be one of the best in the South Bay and try to compete around the Bay Area with really good recipes.”
In just two years, four of their beers have placed in the California State Fair’s Commercial Craft Beer competition, and while they have focused on a lot of traditional styles, more unique flavors are on the horizon as brewmaster Brogan Hunter is being let loose to experiment.
“She’s been amazing for us,” Youkilis says of Hunter. “Part of her DNA is to get better and better, so we’re excited to see her grow. The bottom line in this industry right now is if you don’t have new and creative stuff, you’re going to lose the demographic that you need to grow your business.”
Hunter is joined by Executive Chef Aubree Arndt for an all-female culinary leadership team. Arndt’s menu attempts to sew together traditional pub fare with a diversity of flavors that represent the Bay Area clientele: bratwurst, wings, and flatbreads are joined by Korean style pork belly and kimchi nachos and pan-seared octopus, to name just a couple. The result seems high-end for a brewpub, but perfectly suited for the upscale Los Gatos crowd.
“Aubree makes really great food,” Reineke says. “People coming here are surprised by how progressive the menu is, [not just] a bunch of stuff that’s dumped in the fryer. She keeps it creative. Our food is very Pinterest and Instagram friendly.”
In addition to great beer and food, the team recently added a coffee shop to a side room that had been previously reserved for private events but otherwise went unused for much of the day. A coffee snob in addition to being a craft beer connoisseur, Youkilis found a roaster in Portland and is confident that Loma Coffee can be a leader among local coffee roasters in terms of quality and taste.
Ultimately, the goal is to make Loma a family destination and a community hangout spot. “We want this place to be where everyone comes in and comes together. Start off on a good note by getting the caffeine in them…and then at night, when they’ve had a crazy day and need something to bail them out, have a nice craft beer. It’s pretty perfect.”
Tucked away on a Los Gatos side street, Youkilis and Loma Brewing Company may be regarded as an underdog yet again. But with beer, food, coffee, and a vibe that stands out, people are noticing. Much like in Moneyball, the best will rise to the top.
Breathing life into a picture takes vulnerability. It’s an act in which the photographer lends the viewer his eyes and says, “Really look at this. Here is something to be seen.” Through his use of camera angles, focus, color settings, and light exposure, we catch a glimpse of what the photographer values, what he or she believes. A good picture reaches us on a soul level—then triggers a response.
“Humans are visual beings, and when something as real as a photograph is presented to us, it can touch us in unexpected ways,” says Dan Fenstermacher, who works as a documentary and street photographer as well as a photography instructor at West Valley College. “Reading about the atrocities of war or the effects of a natural disaster don’t evoke as much empathy as a powerful photograph, in my opinion.”
With a knack for capturing strong emotion through the gestures and expressions in his candid shots, Dan “aims to shed light on the perseverance of the human spirit in overcoming life’s challenges.” To see this in action, look no further than his Perceptions of Identity series. Through these visceral images, Dan introduces viewers to individuals combating mental illness. The project, which was featured in Huffington Post, seeks to “humanize misconceived perceptions by fostering dialogue and giving voices to a misunderstood and misrepresented community.”
His depictions of obsessive-compulsive disorder are among the most striking—perhaps because he himself strives to keep the condition in check. In one image, a man pours Windex into a coffee mug while a small army of Lysol spray, Clorox wipes, and Dawn dishwasher soap bottles crowd his coffee table. In another, a woman wearily washes up, seven bottles of hand sanitizer lining her Saran-wrapped sink counter—their nozzles swiveled (almost accusingly) in the direction of her hands.
Surprisingly, Dan discovered his inner shutterbug later on. Although he received a tiny polaroid that captured thumbnail-sized photos as a kid, he didn’t obtain his first serious camera until his undergrad years. And even then, he was planning a career in marketing. “I’m gonna get into advertising and make these really funny Doritos commercials for the Super Bowl. It’s gonna be creative and fun,” Dan says, recalling his naive younger mindset during an interview with photography podcast StreetPX. On realizing marketing was a lot of paperwork and “Excel spreadsheets as far as the eye could see,” he determined to apply his El Camino College photography classes as a fine arts instructor at Xiangfan University in China. Dan has worked with cameras ever since, securing snapshots of life across four continents.
“We are all connected. Life is about helping others and, in return, receiving help as well.”
For one of his international projects, Dan flew to New Delhi, India, to recognize rickshaw drivers. “Yellow and green three-wheeled 150cc engine rickshaws of Delhi swarm the city like locusts and engulf its alleyways and streets,” he writes alongside the portraits. “Decorated to the individual driver’s taste, the rickshaws take on a home-like environment for the drivers and represent the lifeblood of India’s public transportation.” Delightfully dissimilar to New York taxis, these dented, scraped rigs are often outfitted with orange flowers and chili peppers to ward off evil spirits, with pictures of Hindu deities on the dashboard for added protection.
Another project drew him to a nursing home in Costa Rica to take senior portraits. There, he contemplated the cycle of life and our return to dependency, highlighted the importance of elders to society, and strove to catch the essence of each senior. “We are all connected,” Dan explains. “Life is about helping others and, in return, receiving help as well.” He fondly recalls the residents traveling by van to witness their portraits at a local art museum.
Closer to home, Dan documents parades, festivals, and other events around the Bay Area. His picture of a local wrestler backflipping off the ropes to defeat a prone opponent won the American Experience category of the 15th Smithsonian Photo Contest.
Even when he’s giving his camera a chance to breathe, Dan is talking photography with his students at West Valley. “I like seeing the progress of students at the end of the semester compared to where they started in week one,” he observes. “When a student feels excitement or pride about their work, I also feel and share that energy.” It seems teaching, like photography, is an exercise in empathy.
When discussing his career, Paulo “Cutso” Bello says “we” almost as often as “I”—a nod to the collaborative spirit he brings to DJ’ing.
Cutso’s uncle let him loose on a turntable as early as age eight. “He was teaching me with Kraftwerk and Pet Shop Boys records,” he recalls. “I grew up around it.” By the time he was a teenager, he had entrenched himself in the San Jose DJ scene. “We learned how to set up speakers, DJ weddings…we learned how to scratch, do battle tricks, and it all shows in what is considered a Bay Area DJ style. Very involved and very skill-heavy.”
That “we” is the Bangerz, a six-person production group comprising Cutso and fellow DJs Goldenchyld, Replay, Nick Ngo, Squareweezy, and G-Wrex. The group originally formed in 1998, when they were in high school. They began by doing battles together, and they’ve remained connected ever since.
“There are so many creative people, it’s only a matter of time before they start crossing paths and making something.”
Their first break came working with the JabbaWockeeZ, winners of MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew in 2008. That win earned the dancers a show in Las Vegas, for which the Bangerz produced the music. Cutso tried a stint in Vegas, too, but soon returned to his roots, where he felt he had more creative freedom. “Over there…they only want to hear certain things at the club,” he explains.
In 2010, a DJ collaboration at the SubZero Festival with San Jose Taiko became the stuff of legend. The unlikely combination worked, says Cutso, because “we both share the same raw energy.”
Today, Cutso is connected to as many projects as ever. In addition to regular nightclub gigs, he formed the San Jose chapter of Motown on Mondays, spinning classic R&B and future soul tunes at The Continental every week; he co-hosts a Saturday night show on Wild 94.9 called Rebel Pop Radio, featuring cuts by nationally touring DJs; and he continues to record with other musicians, from underground rapper Lyrics Born to local star Anya.
Cutso is hoping his work helps push the envelope in the South Bay. “We’re driving a scene in San Jose where it’s progressive music, progressive technology, progressive art. We’re doing everything we can to set the climate for that.”
“Everyone here is open,” he continues. “Everyone here is hungry, everyone here is looking to create something new. The culture is rich. There are so many creative people, it’s only a matter of time before they start crossing paths and making something.”
When they do, DJ Cutso will be there with the perfect soundtrack.
Since 1991, the SVLaureate program has awarded more than 150 of the finest artists the South Bay has to offer with honors, recognition, and a cash prize to assist them in pursuing their craft. This year, awards were given in several different categories: Off Stage (an artist working offstage, backstage, or pre-performance), On Stage (a performing artist), On the Wall (a visual artist working in traditional or mixed media), Off the Wall (a visual artist working in sculpture), and Emerging Artist (a young artist in any medium who shows promise for continued growth and excellence). This year the program added a new award, the SVNexus Award, honoring an artist who uses technology to fuel their creative work.
These artists are chosen based on the work they have created and their commitment to their communities. Through their work as teachers, artists, and performers, each of the SVLaureates has shown a devotion to their craft that includes mentorship, service, and forging new cultural understanding.
Tasi Alabastro: Emerging Artist Recipient
“I burned a banana tree when I was a kid,” says Tasi Alabastro by way of an introduction. The winner of the Emerging Artist award grew up on the island of American Samoa, dropped out of college at San Francisco State, and wound up in Hawai’i, where he enrolled in an acting class at Leeward Community College. This class launched his career in the arts, and since his return to the Bay Area, he has found continued success, landing roles in a wide range of theatrical productions, short films, and feature films, including the indie hit Yes, We’re Open. He describes many Bay Area artists as “accidentally multi-disciplinary,” and he embodies this description, working as a photographer, visual artist, graphic designer, and content creator on the live-streaming video platform Twitch.
“I’ve always been inspired by creative problem-solving. When working in theater and film, you come across a lot of interesting problems. I think the sense of empowerment doubles when one applies their personal creative wealth toward solving problems. Growing up and not seeing myself represented in what I was watching, reading, and experiencing contributed to so many challenges in my career, and being the recipient of the Emerging Artist award means I am paying tribute to my past and my roots as an artist. It is the manifestation of all the support I’ve received from those I’ve surrounded myself with and a personal milestone in an arts track that doesn’t have easily identifiable milestones. Even with this distinct honor, I’m still finding new ways to emerge and grow. My craft becomes more defined and specific with each audition, workshop, cast, rejection, article, and role played.”
Suhita Shirodkar, a local artist involved in the Urban Sketchers Movement, fills the pages of her journals with watercolor sketches capturing snippets of everyday life. Rather than rough pencil-drawn outlines, Shirodkar composes intricate watercolor sketches of her surroundings, such as the façade of the historical California Theatre in downtown San Jose (pictured below).
What is the Urban Sketchers Movement?
Urban sketching is about drawing on location, drawing the world around you, and creating visual storytelling and reportage. It is different from other forms of drawing on location, like plein air painting, in that it is not just about color, line, tone, and painting, but also about being a part of the world around you, and sharing it through your sketches.
How did you become a part of the Urban Sketchers Movement?
I always drew in a sketchbook, and while some of my work is purely from my imagination, a lot of it is just capturing snippets of life around me. One question I constantly got when I drew was “What will you do with these? Will you make paintings of them?”—which really confused me. I see what I create in my sketchbooks as my art; it records how I see something or react to my environment in the moment. To refine, gloss over, or recreate a more “finished” form would be to lose that first, immediate, and fresh vision.
I found the work of urban sketchers on Flickr and found that there was a growing community of people worldwide who did just what I did. So, I started sharing my work online through their Flickr group and found this treasure trove of a community!
“Watercolor seems to have its own mind.”
-Suhita Shirodkar
How do you choose your locations?
Sometimes I choose locations based on an idea or a current obsession. Right now, I am on a hunt to find the fast disappearing artifacts of a time before Silicon Valley was as it is today: vintage signs, old-fashioned diners, old buildings…things that harken back to an earlier time, a different aesthetic, and just a very different place than what Silicon Valley is now.
Often, I don’t pick my locations; it is just where I am. I draw on family vacations: Mexico, Hawaii, India, all of it makes its way into my sketchbook. I draw at home. I enjoy it all; it helps me look at the world around me with the fresh and inquisitive eye of a traveler.
And then there is just my everyday life: I sketch in parking lots, when I have 20 minutes before a meeting, I sketch my kids as they play, as they eat dinner. Everything is fodder for my sketchbook. It’s a visual diary I look back at over time.
What is it about vintage signs and landmarks that attract you?
As a first generation immigrant that has only seen Silicon Valley in its present incarnation [Shirodkar moved here from India in 2000], it is fascinating to look at these landmarks and buildings that speak of a different time. It is also sad to see how quickly they are disappearing and being replaced by homogenous malls, parking lots, and chain stores. I feel a need to draw them all before they are gone.
I have only been drawing and blogging these vintage signs for a couple of months now, but I already have people writing to me to tell me about signs in the area I haven’t drawn, things that are going to be torn down, sold, closed…I love that connection with people, that sharing of knowledge. I love that people actually want to see me go out and sketch something they remember from a long time ago. It speaks to the power of a sketch, that someone might want to see this place captured as I see it.
How long have you been painting?
I have drawn and painted most of my life, but this current form of working on location in watercolors? I’ve been doing it for almost five years.
Why watercolor?
Watercolor is, perhaps deceptively, simple and versatile: I carry around a compact little kit with me everywhere, so I can paint as soon as something catches my eye. Watercolor also reacts beautifully to the environment. For example, on a muggy day, it sits wet on the page, refusing to dry, and I’m forced to work wet-in-wet, resulting in a piece that reflects the day.
Watercolor seems to have its own mind. You never control it completely, but it often surprises you with beautiful mixing and textures. The accidents and mistakes, the stuff you cannot correct and cover up in this transparent medium, I love those. They say so much.
Shirodkar’s book of vintage San Jose signs in urban sketches, Sign of the Times, can be purchased on her Etsy site.
Article originally appeared in Issue 6.2 “Device” Print version SOLD OUT
“Art is there to recover what is hidden and what has been lost.… Art starts a dialogue within yourself.”
Roberto Romo was born, as he puts it, “in the middle of nowhere” in the Sierra Madre; and throughout his early school years, he moved back and forth between Mexico and the US, which frequently put him behind in classes. When he did not understand a lesson, he would doodle. Today he is a MALI (Multicultural Arts Leadership Institute) graduate, the first in his family with a college degree, and he’s active in the San Jose arts community as a freelance illustrator, an art director at the newspaper El Observador, and a teacher.
For the Opera Cultura Theatre production Cuentos de Peregrinacion (Tales of Pilgrimage), Romo was commissioned to distill the Mexican migrant experience into five paintings. In “Working in the Fields,” a strawberry pierced by a nail dominates the scene, serving as pedestal for a pale gold hummingbird, its wings serenely lifted as though ready to take flight. The strawberry’s sweetness is juxtaposed with the physical pain and financial struggle of the migrant worker: that sweetness comes at the cost of someone else’s bitter sweat and tears. The hummingbird represents the migrant’s ability to adapt to and to survive, with grace and resolve, any situation. In “Leaving Mexico,” the Mexican eagle perches proudly before the Statue of Liberty as caballero, its familiar features distinctly Mexican, an ochre cowboy hat set firmly atop its head. The symbols of the two cultures are deftly interwoven into one whole, one new identity. In “Crossing the Border,” a silent trio of compass, water, and vulture conjures up the death that awaits so many who undertake that long and harrowing trek through the desert. “The empathy of the artist is universal,” Romo observes.
Empathy is only the start. For Romo, the drive to create is bound inextricably also to the drive to examine and analyze. At the School of Arts and Culture, he introduces art as a way to guide students to live their lives more consciously, exposing the dangers of not looking at the world with awareness, of not questioning, of too readily assuming that what is routine in life is also truth. Art, for Romo, is the cornerstone of mind, spirit, and individual thought: it is the magic created from meditation. “Art is there to recover what is hidden and what has been lost,” he says. “I paint to provoke. Art starts a dialogue within yourself.”
His current project, La Nueva Loteria, explores what he calls his hybrid self: the intersecting bloodlines of aboriginal and European. This 54-painting series is based on the widely played card game in Mexico, brought from Europe and assimilated into Mexican culture hundreds of years ago. “We are a society that has been vandalized,” Romo says. “We’ve been obligated to survive by any means.” Romo’s reenvisioning of the cards brings to the fore the symbols of a Mexican and an Aztec culture smudged out of existence by a dominant European system. In the original deck, La Muerte, the card of death, features the standard Grim Reaper of European religion and folklore. Romo has depicted instead a skeleton reclining, as if sleeping, on a pillow, an homage to the aboriginal view of death as a long sleep. In his vision of El Corazon, the heart is fully realized in ultra-realistic anatomical detail, with two delicate gold bands beside it, anchoring love within marriage and family.
The exhibition is scheduled for this coming November at the School of Arts and Culture, and Romo’s goal is to have the paintings available in card form as a real game: La Loteria reinterpreted for the new millennium.
In a world of ready mechanization and assimilation, a world too formed of and by mass culture, Romo pushes himself, his students, and us to question the picture of reality the world offers, calling upon all of us to press past that picture and to see what really is. In this quest, the artist leads the way. “We form matter out of antimatter. We are like God, like creators. Artists provoke the spirit,” he says. “We artists are the earthquake. Everyone stops and listens.” To do this, to be this, sometimes means leaving the comfort and safety of the established. But do not shrink from the task, Romo tells us. “You are a coward if you don’t launch yourself at the unknown,” he urges. “Go out and get it.”
Maxwell Borkenhagen and Hiver Van Geenhoven have known each other for years. More recently, they’ve become partners with a shared vision of attracting more people to downtown San Jose—SoFA, specifically. Van Geenhoven is the roaster at Chromatic Coffee, which is served at Cafe Stritch, the renamed and remodeled SoFA restaurant that has been in the Borkenhagen family for over 35 years. Maxwell Borkenhagen books the musical acts and art displayed in the restaurant and music venue, bringing new life and crowds to downtown San Jose. Both Borkenhagen and Van Geenhoven are optimistic about the future of downtown San Jose and want to share their passions with old friends and new customers alike.
How did you two meet?
MB: We had a lot of mutual acquaintances when I was in high school…
HVG: The way we met was actually over coffee. The guy that taught me how to roast coffee was hanging around with Maxwell. We just got along. Maxwell, your parents owned Eulipia before Cafe Stritch, so you’ve been a part of the restaurant business for a long time. Did you ever think you’d be here, running part of it?
MB: No. All throughout high school, I was very weary of getting into the family business. Mixing business with family can be good for the business but not as good for the family. It adds a level of strain. Part of why I moved back to San Jose is because I had started discussing reviving Eulipia, bringing it back to its origins, and modeling it after these places I encountered while in Portland.
When I moved back, I saw potential in this place to do more than a restaurant. There was potential for live music. For so long, that’s what I’ve wanted to do. Seeing that opportunity with this place gave me a new motivation to work for my family. I’ve come to embrace San Jose more. I love San Jose. I truly want to commit to building a better community here. When my parents opened this place in 1977, there was nothing here. They were the first young people to open up a cool, hip place down here.
What sets you guys apart from other businesses in downtown San Jose?
HVG: Passion. When it comes to Chromatic, it’s a dream that I had. I love what I do, and I love working toward it. I love seeing the reaction that people have of “Wow, this coffee is different.” That drive to provide an authentic experience…I want you to have something that’s unique.
MB: What sets us and a number of others apart is that we have a belief in San Jose that it does not have to be a secondary market. I want San Jose to be respected as a place where quality doesn’t have to always be less than San Francisco. Whether it’s in music, art, food, beverage, what have you. I don’t want to be better than SF, but there’s no reason we can’t be as good.
Hiver, where did your love of coffee come from?
HVG: I started working at Peet’s Coffee and learning about coffee. It caught my attention and held my attention. Nothing much had ever really held my attention. After a couple of years, Peet’s had moved their roasting facility, and they had an open house. I went and saw the machines and thought, “This is what I want to do: I want to roast coffee.”
I’ve thought of coffee as a medium of directing culture. The ideas that can be shared over coffee can be very interesting. I’m mainly interested in bringing coffee to the forefront and sharing the value of what that beverage is.
You’re both a part of businesses that are bringing people to downtown San Jose and breathe new life in the SoFA district. What else do you want to see happen here?
MB: Low-rent housing downtown. I see this as a huge resource. I would love to get to the point where San Jose State students make this community their home, but SJSU only accounts for a segment of the community that I’m a part of. If we had one high-rise that had rent that your average 20-something could afford, that could bring such a breath of life into this community. We need a bigger group of people concentrated down here.
HVG: We want to show the rest of the Bay Area that we too take things seriously.
You are both raising the bar in your respective fields in San Jose: downtown venues and coffee culture. Can you talk about your influence on your customers?
HVG: I’d like people to enjoy themselves. But if I can spark an interest to where they want to learn more or be exposed to more… For so long, this area has been inundated by mediocrity. Mediocre clubs, restaurants, food, shit on TV. We don’t overwhelm; we’re approachable.
MB: There’s a lack of tastemakers in the South Bay. Inevitably, if we’re going to build a culture here, it’s going to be much more embracing and unpretentious than in other cities.
I attribute the lack of this niche art and music culture that we’re trying to cultivate to a lack of people that have the confidence to take things they perceive to be good and expose those things to as many people as they can. I don’t claim to have better taste than anyone, but I do have the drive to take something I like and have the confidence to put it on stage and create an environment where all these people can be exposed to something. It’s not shoving things down anyone’s throat, but it’s “Hey, look at this, we think this is good.”
What’s next for each of you? What can we look forward to?
MB: A big motivating factor that drives me to try and build the art and music community is that I don’t want the youth in San Jose to have the same experience that I did. San Jose can be a cool place. You don’t have to just love it because it’s your hometown. I want to see South First Street be the central point of downtown San Jose.
HVG: We’re aware that there were these culminating points in SoFA history, but it always fell off. I feel determined that this is the last time that’s going to happen. We’re bringing authenticity. It’s important to me to create this sense of a little city in San Jose and allow that sense of community to evolve around music and coffee.
Entire article originally appeared in Issue 5.4 Form
Print Issue is Sold Out
President Dwight Eisenhower established the sister city program in 1956 to foster global awareness and peaceful relations. A design team from Okayama, Japan, one of San Jose’s sister cities, presents their view of their hometown.
Often called the “Gateway to West Japan,” Okayama is a quiet, modern city that serves as a transportation hub for travelers moving from eastern and central Japan into the further reaches of western Honshu, Shikoku Island, and Kyushu Island. The central area of the city is easy to get around via the well-developed transportation system that features local and high-speed trains, streetcars, buses, taxis, and rent-a-cycles. Incorporated as a city in 1889, when Japan moved from a feudal system to a centralized government system, the city actually has a much longer history which extends back to the Sengoku Period (1467-1603).
Although the surrounding area was and is farmland, the city has played an important part in history and boasts a castle that attracted important political figures in the past, such as the Ikeda clan, who developed the economic and cultural status of the city under their rule between the 17th and 19th centuries. Currently, Okayama Castle attracts only tourists, but it’s considered one of the top castles in the country. The main tower (and most of Okayama city, for that matter) was damaged during WWII when the city was largely destroyed after having been bombed by the US Armed Forces. However, two of the watchtowers survived and have been designated as Important Cultural Properties by the government’s Agency for Cultural Affairs, and the damaged sections have been restored.
Geographically, Okayama falls in the humid subtropical zone: although it does get chilly in the winter months, the summer months can get hot and very humid. Okayama enjoys relatively low rainfall year round and is known as hare-no-kuni, which means “Sun Country.”
While the municipal and the prefectural governments have been working diligently to post multilingual signage around the city, Japanese is the only language spoken and understood by most of the population.
Although there are pockets of history sprinkled throughout the city in neighborhoods that were not damaged by bombing, visitors will want to head to the suburbs to enjoy the city’s best historical features.
Points of Interest
Okayama has many historical points of interest, with Saidaiji Kannon-in being one of the most intriguing. This small, quiet temple dedicated to the Buddhist deity of Kannon is also home to the oldest and largest Naked Man Festival. The 500-year-old festival, in which nearly 10,000 men dressed only in loincloths participate, is held late at night on the third Saturday in February of every year. The men compete for two lucky sticks that also carry a large cash reward for the winners.
The Saijo Inari shrine and temple complex is a great location to visit any time of the year, and boasts the largest torii gate in West Japan. Visible for miles around, the giant torii gate beckons to visitors. The shrine is dedicated to the Shinto fox god Inari, the patron deity of business, which is appropriately ironic as the souvenir shops leading up to the shrine are fantastic in number and variety.
Visitors would also do well to stop in at Kibitsu Shrine, which is located near Saijo Inari. Folklore sets Kibitsu Shrine apart from other shrines: legend holds that a demon’s head buried under the temple causes a cauldron to ring out during fortune-telling ceremonies. The shrine dates from the ninth century and exhibits many unique architectural features, several of which are registered as Important Cultural Properties.
Dining
For a taste of fresh, local seafood, stop in at Tontonme in the southern part of the city. This seafood restaurant is known for its sashimi and sushi made from fish harvested from the nearby Seto Inland Sea.
For another healthy option, Okabe in central Okayama is a long-standing tofu shop with attached home-style restaurant. The restaurant has counter seating only and there are only three main menu selections, but you can bet the food will be fresh, delicious, and surprisingly filling.
For secret hideaway dining, Balloom is the place. This elegant and cozy little cafe/restaurant/bar serves up fresh and healthy meals made with ordinary but fine-quality ingredients. Guests can enjoy a selection of fine wines, draft beer, cocktails, drip coffees, herbal teas, and imported sodas. Lunch and dinner are served. Tapas and pinchos are available in the evening.
Shopping
For shopping, AEON Mall Okayama is a must-visit. Newly completed in December 2014, this shopping mall is one of the largest and top ranking in the country. Visitors can find an array of boutiques, interior shops, restaurants and food courts, a movie theater, and many other shopping options. The wine shop on the first level includes a winetasting vending machine.
Okayama has a number of covered shopping arcades, and Hokancho is one of the older ones. However, a recent influx of young, hip shop owners have breathed new life into this arcade, making it a great place to explore. Check out the eclectic mix of cafes, green grocers, boutiques, book and toy stores, dish supplies, bakeries, etc.
Nightlife
For a relaxing end to the day, stop in at Padang Padang to unwind. This chic little bar in the heart of the city also serves up European-style fusion cuisine selections made from top-quality local and imported ingredients.
Beautiful Places
Any itinerary should certainly include Korakuen. With a history of over 300 years, it is one of the top three traditional gardens in the country, and is well known for its use of “borrowed scenery”: in this case, Okayama Castle becomes part of the garden scenery despite the fact that it is a separate property. The garden is spacious enough to accommodate large groups while still imparting serenity.
Off the beaten track, the beautiful Sogenji Temple pleases the senses at any time of the year. Surrounded by tall trees and Maruyama mountain, this Zen temple of the Rinzai sect is near the city but feels secluded. Zazen sessions are open to the public on Sundays.
Kaigai Connection
We are a small branding company specializing in helping local businesses get their product overseas. We help customers with foreign language support, out-of-country PR, homepage and business document design, and nonnative staffing. We also work with a large, local tourist agency to bring visitors to Okayama and the surrounding prefectures.
Mike McGee is a spoken word artist, author, and comedian. Every month, he hosts a series of live performance events in San Jose and Santa Clara, encouraging comics, poets, musicians, and other artists to contribute to the South Bay’s growing arts community. These include a talent competition (Go Go Gong Show), a storytelling open mic (The Burning Tale), and a literary arts open mic (Live Lit). At these and other events, he displays a rare talent for capturing audience attention and engagement.
According to McGee, the key to this is incorporating both dramatic and comedic material and being aware of audience experience at every part of the process. “It’s my job,” he says, “to make the audience’s facial expressions change—happiness, sadness, belonging. It should be an audible adventure that is malleable in some way.”
His book of poetry, In Search of Midnight, mirrors this sensitivity by offering a series of narrative poems that bring the reader to many different stops on an emotional spectrum. Understated and reflective pieces are often followed by what McGee calls comedic “release valves” that make the collection unique in its readability.
McGee also serves as a board member of Poetry Center San Jose, a non-profit offering programs and events that promote diverse literary expression. He wants to help local literary and performance art communities outgrow some of the traditional rigidity between performer and audience. “A lot of people perform as if the audience isn’t there, like they’re uncomfortable having a conversation, but performance isn’t that different from a conversation. Real conversation,” he says, “isn’t just about you. It’s about everyone involved. It has to be an equal blend of both. The whole time I’m performing, I’m listening to the audience. If you listen, they’ll tell you what they need.”
Mike McGee twitter: mikemcgee newsletter: mightymikemcgee Video and synopsis by David Perez Photography by Gregory Cortez
______________BELOW INTERVIEW FROM 2015________________
“It kills me that loneliness and boredom often are not motivating enough to generate more art.”
How would you describe yourself?
Professionally, I am a stand-up poet—a poet with a healthy dash of humor added for flavor. I am a late-blooming vagabond. A hobo-humorist. A get-paid-to-talk and say-things-my-way. Personally, I love making people laugh and cry in close proximity. I’m an ambivert—half extroverted, half introverted. As much as I love being the center of attention, I also eagerly desire solitude. One state helps me create; the other helps me promote. I love people and creatures very much. I am very honored to be alive in this now.
In his book, The War of Art, Steven Pressfield explains “resistance” as anything that blocks you from creating. What are some forms of resistance for you, and how do you deal with them?
I am often blocked by my lack of focus and motivation to write, due in large part to loneliness and boredom. It kills me that loneliness and boredom often are not motivating enough to generate more art. Three quarters of the time, I end up turning to my addiction: mindlessly surfing the internet until I fall asleep. The rest of the time I will go for a walk or ride my bike. If I am uninspired to write about life, it probably means I need to go live more of it. Whatever happens, I am always sure to never beat myself up for not being creative that day. It does nothing for future me. I am always productive—whether it is a product I can sell or merely a new thing I know, it’s still beneficial to me, especially future me.
Dream dinner party: You, Andy Warhol, and…?
Tough call. On a whim—Frida Kahlo, Nina Simone, Mark Twain, and James Baldwin.
What’s the best creative advice you’ve ever received?
Be patient and keep editing until it makes sense to all of your senses.
Content Magazine Literary Series is curated by Santa Clara County Poet Laureate David Perez
“I’m intrigued by the idea of how and where we live, how we relate to each other, and our physical environment.”
Susan O’Malley
We were honored to interview Susan O’Malley and consider her a friend. Her work reflects her soft voice, gentle spirit, and kindness. We were inspired by her desire to make a positive change in our world. We will miss her and her influence. Our prayers and condolences go out to her family.
You graduated from Stanford with a degree in urban studies. How has that helped you become an artist?
Urban studies have always influenced the way that I see art or think about my own practice. I’m intrigued by the idea of how and where we live, how we relate to each other, and our physical environment. Urban studies help me explore ways to think differently about the space we inhabit.
The residential project I did in San Jose in 2008 was all about that; I was fascinated with suburban spaces, and private and public spaces. By re-arranging what was already available, like leaves on a lawn or the frost on a house, I was able to bring some fun responses in relation to everyday life.
In a text project I am doing, I am interested in how these spaces can be intervened through different texts. They might look a little like advertisements, but also part of it is an art project. I really love the blurriness of presenting work in this context because sometimes it’s not important, whether it’s an art project or just something that happens in the streets.
What’s important is creating a space that will shift one’s perspective to see the world a little bit differently. How wonderful would it be if we could leave our homes and look at everything with a sense of wonder?
Art has a way of heightening that experience for us.
So you were already thinking in terms of art space creation rather than going into city planning?
Focusing on community organizations and working as an intern at non-profits, it took me a while to put it all together. I wasn’t really exposed to contemporary art as an undergrad. As a graduate, I started going to more art shows and seeing the flexibility and expansiveness in the way these artists asked questions. It was exciting and much different than an academic way of viewing the world. It was a way of thinking I had never been exposed to, and it sparked a light in me.
How do you see the role of art in society?
That is such a huge question because there are so many different perspectives in the world. Art can help push us forward to be more radical, but it is not the answer to everything. It is just one thread of our cultural makeup. Art can help us see things in different ways and relieve the stress of everyday life. Art heightens our sense of space and how we relate to each other.
We live in such an isolated way. The way we’ve organized San Jose, it is a pretty decentralized city. If there are ways to go downtown, see different things, and connect to that space, that will begin to bring people together in a worthwhile way.
What are you working on now?
I have been working on two projects as part of Montalvo Art Center’s exhibition with two other artists, Leah Rosenberg and Christine Wong Yap. One is called “Happiness Is…” and is part of Montalvo’s 20-month theme, Flourish: Artists Explore Wellbeing.
One of my projects is a “Walk” on the Montalvo grounds. Along the walk, there are certain texts and signs that will hopefully help the walker be focused and reflective. Walking is such a simple thing that can make you feel good. It is amazing how altering your body can change your feelings.
The other project is creating a space within the gallery where people can sit down and talk to one another. One of the things I was most interested in in this space was getting people on the floor because being on the floor is so different than being in a chair; it brings a sense of groundedness. There is a lot of science behind what we do with our bodies and how that chemically makes us feel different. This project is about how our bodies exist in the world and how our bodies’ position and activity can change the way we feel.
Doing a project on happiness has been fun, as I had to think about what makes me happy. It comes down to trying to notice the small things. If we focus more on our current state of mind, on smaller things and the things that make us happy, and put those into practice, then maybe we can be happier.
One of the things that I notice makes me happy is being in dialogue with people. Talking to other people and sharing ideas really bring me a lot of happiness. It’s something I need to focus on more. Just noticing that has given me more permission to pursue it as a practice. So rather than meeting someone for coffee and feeling good about connecting with them, it is actually what I do as my work. That has been a really interesting result of working on these projects.
A public celebration of her life and contributions as an artist and curator is planned for March 22, 2015, 2- 5pm, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 701 Mission Street, San Francisco.
In lieu of flowers, the family asks for donations to the Susan O’Malley Memorial Fund for the Artsto support emerging artists and to commission a permanent installation of Susan’s work. Non tax-deductible donations can be made via Paypal (by using the donation button below or sending to inmemoryofsusan2015@gmail.com), or by check to the Susan O’Malley Art Fund (acct # for memo field 036838938). Checks can be deposited at any Bank of the West branch or mailed to Charles Angle, 555 Market Street, Suite 100, San Francisco, CA 94105.
The interview originally appeared in Issue 5.0: UNDERGROUND
“We are an eclectic, nutty group of people of so many amazing, fun personalities.”
From the moment audience members enter Camera 3 on Second and San Carlos, they are transported into a world of play. Theater Two’s turf-covered stage is home to ComedySportz San Jose, an improv comedy staple.
Each performance divides the cast into two teams who compete in exciting, head-to-head comedy games. The audience, fueled by Psycho Donuts and coffee, decides who wins the match using plastic flyswatters called “whapnerz.” The referee can call fouls on both the players and audience members for offenses such as inappropriate language, the “Groaner Foul” for using a bad pun, or the “Too Soon Foul.”
To keep the experience fresh, the team can choose from over 250 games. The games they play just to warm up include titles such as “Zoom Schwartz Profigliano,” “Bibbity Bibbity Bop,” and “Zip Zap Zop.” Some of these come straight from the ComedySportz World Championship, where 22 teams from all over the world convene each year to share ideas they have created and to battle it out for a tiny trophy called the “Meaningless Cup.”
Although teams are competitive, it becomes clear that making everyone laugh, including each other, is the goal. For players like Michael Wilcoxen, ComedySportz San Jose represents more than an improv comedy team. “ComedySportz is the Island of Misfit Toys. We are an eclectic, nutty group of people of so many amazing, fun personalities. A month ago, one of our players married one of the house managers, and it was a ComedySportz-style event. We take care of each other. That’s one of the biggest things—it’s a family. Some of my best friends I met through ComedySportz.”
This enduring connection extends to local high school students in ComedySportz’s workshops. Workshop alum Chayton Whiskey has even gone on to join the main cast. As Wilcoxen explains, “We bring the kids here twice a week and do workshops here on site. A lot of schools do challenge shows, where they’ll play against each other. They create a ton of relationships and friendships within that community. That is another Island of Misfit Toys. It’s so much fun to see kids that may not have fit in somewhere else. We don’t turn our back on people. No matter where you come from, we have space for you.”
More than just pure fun, these workshops communicate a core value of ComedySportz: showing respect for each other in performance and everyday life.
“Inappropriate comedy isn’t funny. That’s a really cool maturation for a high school kid to realize: ‘Oh wait, I don’t have to put somebody down or make fun of a group to be funny.’ We elevate their humor to realize, ‘I don’t have to bully, or I don’t have to hurt somebody or make fun of somebody to be funny.’ That’s something Scott [Schroder], the director of our high school league, has always done. We’re more than just a comedy group. We have a social justice message, and we don’t hurt people, and we don’t make fun of people. We never want someone in our audience to feel uncomfortable.”
Silicon Valley companies such as eBay and HP have taken notice of ComedySportz’s positive effect on team building. The troupe comes in with tailored games to bond new employees together and to help dysfunctional teams cooperate. The dichotomy between comedy actor and the tech world is part of what makes the interaction work. “Dropping us into a room full of engineers gives them permission to look at things different ways. You see everybody sitting with their hands crossed in their laps at first, and usually by the end of the workshop, everybody’s up and playing and laughing and doing all these silly activities, [such as] trying to build a grand piano just using human bodies.”
Back at Camera 3, the sense of community continues as audience members—once strangers—are now bound by their shared creative experience. At the end of every performance, the players line up to high-five everyone leaving the theater. The chorus of laughter and clapping whapnerz reverberate across the downtown streets.
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It’s about what you give back and how you change and help other people to become their best selves. I just want to give to others what they have to me.
Bay Area curler Gabrielle Coleman stands out in a sport that doesn’t.
Most Tuesday nights, Gabrielle Coleman can be found inside Stanley’s Sports Bar at Sharks Ice in downtown San Jose. She doesn’t drink, she’s not an employee, and she says she’s never been a great skater either. She’s not there for the hockey. She’s there for curling.
Once a week from 9:30pm to 11:30pm, Coleman and 40 or so other curlers join up at Sharks Ice for a curling league and a good time. Coleman, however, has aspirations that many of her co-competitors do not. The 33-year-old is such a good curler that she’s competed at the national level, even reaching the US Olympic trials in 2009.
Yes, her sport is curling, that shuffleboard-like ice sport that draws a lot of attention every four years when the Winter Olympics come around. But most of the time, it is forgotten here in the United States. There are a little more than 16,000 curlers across the country on record. Canada, regularly the favorite to win gold at the Olympics, has approximately 1.3 million by comparison, despite a population that is little more than a 10th of the size of the United States’.
Coleman and her coach Barry Ivy are part of one of the largest clubs in California, the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club. Established in 1958, their mission, along with the rest of the United States’ curling community, is to help the sport grow. Recently, it’s worked. Participation has grown by more than 50 percent since 2002, with an even more impressive 16 percent jump from 2010 to 2011.
For Coleman, it isn’t just the country’s reputation she’s trying to improve, but her specific region’s. Ivy calls the West Coast “the boonies of the curling world,” and while this statement is in jest, it’s not far from the truth. There are very few competitive curlers from the country’s Pacific coast. In fact, just one of the 10 teams at the US Olympic trials in 2009 was based west of Bismarck, North Dakota. Most are located in the country’s longtime curling hubs like Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Coleman, a Mountain View native, was a part of that sole western team, based in Seattle, Washington. She was also the lone competitor—of 42 total—who resides in California. It’s that obstacle that makes her curling commitment so much more demanding.
Paying out of her own pocket, she flies to Seattle or Vancouver almost every weekend from August to March for training. During competitions, she has to take time away from her work at NBC, which she credits as being not only accepting and understanding of her love for curling but “enormously supportive.” She doesn’t mind the commitment though and finds the bright side to her travels. “It’s like a mini-vacation every week.”
Other curlers live nearer to facilities dedicated to curling, and those among the highest ranked teams receive funding from the US Olympic Committee. Coleman and her teammates do not. As Ivy puts it, “People who play at a dedicated facility can go down and throw rocks at lunchtime for an hour.” The lack of practice time Coleman can get during the week presents a real challenge that other curlers, even in Seattle, don’t always face.
But while they have their advantages, Coach Ivy believes Coleman has some of her own. “If the rest of the United States curling world at the elite level was as committed as Gabrielle, we would be winning Olympics,” Ivy says.
The competition hasn’t always been that strong. Just seven years ago, Coleman attended her first curling event, just hoping to have a fun experience. Challenged by her brother that she couldn’t make nationals, she decided it was on. Within a year, she was competing at the women’s club nationals, who had trouble fielding enough teams for their 10-team tournament. That year, only seven teams had signed up to compete. This year, there are 18 teams vying for those 10 spots.
The US Olympic trials have also grown more competitive in recent years. The field of 10 from 2009 has been trimmed to just four for the upcoming 2013 trials. For Coleman, this means getting back will be harder than ever. In 2009, her team finished eighth, which wouldn’t be good enough to qualify this time around. Coleman knows her team has to win at nationals to qualify, since two teams have already qualified and the national governing body chooses the fourth.
She gives her team an outside chance at coming out with the win if they “have a good week.” Ivy is especially high on their chances. “Don’t let her fool you,” he says. “This is definitely doable for Gabrielle.”
While the increase in the sport’s popularity has made her goals more difficult, the NBC Bay Area morning show director is ecstatic to see so many new curlers, not only at her own club but around the country. As a member of the board for SFBACC, growing the curling community is important to her. She’s trying to help the club secure ice that’s dedicated to curling for the first time in 20 years, rather than having to share ice time with hockey players and recreational skaters.
Just like the sport as a whole, the Princeton grad has come a long way since 2006. She recalls her first national competition as something of a nightmare for Ivy, who tried to lead four curlers with about three years of combined experience. “I was so lost,” Coleman says. “In my first game, I had to ask my opponent when to start.”
Since then, she’s gone on to write an e-book on her experiences, directed at helping other beginning curlers. Break Through Beginner Curling details everything from curling basics to the confusing nature of large national competitions.
At Sharks Ice, it’s clear how much interest Coleman has in teaching others, taking time out to encourage a teenage girl who was just watching to give it a try. But while there is an inclination to teach, she also hopes to curl competitively for a long time.
The sport keeps drawing her back because, no matter how good she gets, she feels there will always be a new challenge. “Everybody who’s any good can throw the stone accurately,” she says. “It’s the complexity and the strategy of the shots at the higher levels that keep getting tougher.”
The unity and bond of a team is another aspect she loves. For casual observers, the team aspect might not be as obvious on TV as it is to those who know the game. “From the instant I release the shot, me and my teammates are communicating,” Coleman emphasizes. “It’s like any other team sport. We can’t win unless we’re all on the same page.”
On the ice, that communication is unmistakable. The sweeping of the ice, one of the most unusual aspects of the sport, relies on it. If their timing on when to speed up or slow down the stone is off just a little bit, the shot could end very differently.
Whether her team wins or not, Coleman hopes she and her teammates can be good examples of the increasing geographical diversity of the game in the United States. She also recognizes that her personal success can help grow the sport on the West Coast, especially in California.
“For me to win, for us to win, it would be a big deal,” she says. Both Coleman and Ivy believe that that kind of statement at nationals could lead to big improvements in not only her own curling environment but the West Coast overall. It would go a long way towards helping to find the dedicated curling ice SFBACC is still looking for.
From experience, Ivy knows that a lot of clubs don’t go to the lengths that SFBACC does. They require lessons for those wanting to join any of the club’s leagues, and Ivy knows they lose some curlers because of it. But he and Coleman both have a strong interest in passing the culture of curling on, and they want to do it the right way. “A lot of clubs will say ‘wing it’ and send you out on your own,” Ivy says. “We want to teach.”
Coleman remembers going to those training sessions and finding much more help than she thought she would. Though it was swarmed with close to 200 people, she said important members came up to her encouraging her to stay on because of the lack of women in curling. Ivy was one of those early tutors that kept her confidence and interest high, even if it was her brother’s challenge that made it stick.
With some of the founders of the club having moved on, Coleman calls Ivy the “resident expert” and lists him as her greatest inspiration on her USCA profile. She wants to give back, just like he has to her. “Even though it is about trying to be the best curler you can be and winning medals, it’s not really about that,” she says. “It’s about what you give back and how you change and help other people to become their best selves. I just want to give to others what they have to me.”
Joe Miller has always had a thing for words. As owner and principal designer of graphic design firm, Joe Miller’s Company, he specializes in “identity and brand development through graphic, typographic, and environmental design.” Miller has worked with companies like Atari, HP, and The New York Times, as well as several local organizations. As Lecturer in Graphic Design at San Jose State University, he shares his love of graphic design and typography with students three times a week. Miller is also the president of the Board of Directors for Works/San José, an art and performance center located downtown. If all that wasn’t enough on his plate, Miller is also a spoken word performer and poet.
How did you come to San Jose?
It’s not easy. I grew up in the East Bay, in Richmond, and went to high school there. At the urging of an art teacher, I went to San Jose State. I was into words and I thought maybe I’d be a journalism or art major and then I saw this graphic design program, At the time there were only two in the state. I graduated in ‘83 from San Jose State. I was the first person in my family to go to a four year university. My mom was always really encouraging about that.
How did you get into teaching at SJSU?
In 1988, I got a call, “Sam Smidt said you’d be great at teaching, would you like to come in and talk?” Teaching always sounded like a great thing.
I had no idea if I could teach. I interviewed my old teachers. I went out talking to them, and I went out talking to alumni that I knew. Teaching started to work out right away. The student response was great to my thoughts and it was really fun to see that activity. I think for me, it balanced out my office. Now I have three really full days of teaching. The other days I run my office.
As you’re working with students, how do you help someone who is young and wants to be a graphic artist? How do you teach them that you have to do hard work?
First, you gotta do your hard work. No matter what’s going on in the economy, people are going to notice you if you’re doing hard work. During the dot com bubble, we were getting people recruited away from us, eager to leave school or sign a contract when they graduated to go work on websites. You go from that to times like in the ‘90s when it’s super competitive and all those people who didn’t finish college are going back to college.
And then the “sexiness” of graphic design as a major really boomed, too. Don’t you think?
Now it’s part of the national lexicon. Everyone has an idea of what design is. When I went to school, my brothers were supportive, but later they would tell me, ‘We couldn’t imagine what you were going to do, we couldn’t imagine what graphic design was.
Joe Miller’s Company came out of the ashes, rising out of other companies’ misfortune. Are students right now kind of nervous?
Graphic design is a pretty impacted industry, but I’m amazed at the number of places that are hiring. There’s a lot of business spending. They’re not spending tons, but they’ve got more to spend. Basically, something’s going to happen for students who do the work and have the goods.
For you, what’s it like managing the creative and business sides of your own company?
I’ve been super lucky with having clients follow me mostly. That’s pretty unusual. I’m trying to think about that more, lately. On the business side, typically a design firm has to spend 20 percent of their resources going after the next thing. That’s generally standard. I’ve been really lucky that projects have rolled into other things. It’s all about the people you meet.
On the business side of things, I’m just pathetic. My clients email me three times to invoice them. I’m trying to take care of the next thing, and I always want to get the creative work out.
“It all comes down to the space that the typography occupies.”
You started Makeshift Design School at SJSU. Was it your idea?
Yeah. The students had a portfolio class and an exhibit. It was a one-night thing put together called the design mixer. Students would put up their work for one night, and everyone would come. People from the field of design would come, too. It was just to show the work, a portfolio show. When I was offered the class, I said I’d love to do it, but I want to turn it into a real exhibition that stands on its own. It would be a design exhibition that would show their work, but the thing itself would be the thing they produce. Now that’s become the standard. This is more of a production.
Do you think that helps students be prepare for th ereal workd since it is more collaborative than just showing your own work?
Yes, and also to be less isolated about it. I really wanted to get them to do some sort of storytelling – to be dispassionate about showing their own work. It’s so painful to take something out, but you’ve got to learn [how] to not show something.
In terms of your work, what’s your favorite thing?
Typography is my favorite thing. I like dealing with things in type that are not like destroying the type. Not necessarily always deconstructing it, but doing things that are new to me. You can work it into signage or an exhibit. Some of those things look simple and you’re mocking it up for the client.
Works/San José has been this place that has been very open to anything even when I wasn’t on their board of directors. They were always pretty much encouraging. Those adventures where I don’t know what’s going to happen necessarily are really fun. At the same time, I like very straightforward type, very grid-oriented. I like bouncing back and forth between those things, deconstructed and readability.
Do you find that as an artist you have this pull towards a safe zone in a way that you go back to? Do you find yourself going down a similar path all the time?
There is a starting point like that where I start in my safe zone, and then I go, ‘Well, that is too safe, I’ve gotta try to get out of that.’ Not just for the adventure, personally, but for whatever the utility of the thing is. You’ve got to make it more tailored to the situation.
That’s maybe the hardest thing about the business aspect of things: getting a client to buy into the thought that the uniqueness of something is for their benefit. You don’t want to look like these four other places look because that’s not gonna help you. Uniqueness isn’t a bad thing.
Talk about the design scene here in San Jose…
San Francisco has always been the design and cultural focus of the Bay Area. The sports focus, too. There’s a lot less going on here, in those realms. There’s the in-house world that’s really huge in the South Bay. The San Jose scene is a lot of these things that are in-house. Here it’s a much more corporate scene than in SF, as far as design goes.
When it comes to typography, what rule would you never break?
It’s tough to define, but it has to be of quality. It all comes down to the space that the typography occupies. There is this conscientious use of space in typography that is what I would always shoot for.
What’s that right balance between where meaning sits and where elegance sits? Maybe there’s a time where meaning pushes it away from elegance, but you still try to stay very conscientious. I would say to students, ‘Have I attended to the details?’ If it’s supposed to be ‘effed-up looking,’ is it ‘effed-up looking’ down to the last detail? And if not, why is that? It comes down to that attention to detail and space. If you can master that, then it’s going to be a great piece.
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Lacey Bryant’s curiously innocent demeanor, cloaked in an army jacket and paint-spotted boots, does not convey the depth of her talent or the grandeur of her paintings. San Jose is privileged to have Lacey and her work so accessible. For art enthusiasts, she is someone not only to watch but also to get to know.
Your work has been described as “cute and creepy.” How did that style come about? I guess I like the contrast. I think things are more interesting when there is a duality to them. If it is just one or the other, I would be done thinking about it pretty quickly. I like that kind of tension between things. I am not necessarily trying to make things hyper-cute. I like drawing things that are pretty, but at the same time, that’s so boring to me. The “weird” is always something that I have been interested in, and it took a while for that to come out in my work because I thought, “Oh, no one wants to see that.” But since I have been putting out more of the things that I think are great and weird and cool and I don’t care, people have actually really responded to it.
Your painting includes innocent characters and then things like birds flying out of their faces or berries that resemble blood. What’s your creative process in doing that? Oh, dang, that’s a hard one. A lot of them are just images that sort of pop into my head at random. I use a lot of imagery over and over again—things that I think are interesting or kind of symbolic of many things at the same time. It makes it more interesting, I think. The more things something can mean, the more interpretations the painting can have, and the more people are going to think, “Oh, that’s me.” So I like birds a lot; I like fruit a lot. Fruit is so cool. It means so many things to me, but when you combine these things in certain ways, they just become so much more interesting.
How intentional are you in that? Are you trying to say that you want the contrast, or do you think, “I enjoy this”? Where does that little nugget of inspiration come from? Or is it art school? Haha, no, it’s not that. It kind of evolved naturally with things that I like, but at the same time trying to make paintings that say a little bit about life and emotion. My paintings are very emotional. A lot of times, it’s just about a feeling of expressing some sort of longing or mourning and changing or shifting, just different feelings. A lot of things are hard to put into words. I try to put them into pictures instead. People can see the picture and get the words for themselves.
So the images communicate more of the emotion but not necessarily a story. Yeah, but they feel like a story to me in a way. You can look at them and wonder what just happened, what’s about to happen, what’s going on in this image. You have all you need to say, “Okay, I could leap from this to this.” It’s more interesting and reaches more people if they can bring their own context into it.
So when you come to a painting, you’ve got your canvas, and you’ve got your paints, and you’re sitting down…do you have a story that you are coming into it with, or is it more like how different artists talk about how the canvas brings it out? How do you come to that? I usually spend a lot of time in my sketchbook. I draw a lot of little tiny drawings. I will fill a page with just a whole bunch of things, and I’ll have an idea. Right now, for instance, I am interested in things with two figures. I’m interested in their relationships and how they are interacting; a lot of them end up looking like two of the same person. I’m not sure if they are twins or if they are just different aspects of the same person or if it’s all in their heads. I guess I usually don’t really know what’s going on because I don’t want to pin it down. But I’ll draw a whole page of something and pick out the ones that I think would be really interesting to take further. And with paintings, too, a lot of the time, I’ll make a small painting, and it will really work, so I’ll make it bigger so I can get more into it.
So you go down a path of noticing that something is interesting and then go on from there. I definitely notice things a lot. I go hiking once a week with a couple of friends, and I’m always out there taking pictures. I have a huge fascination with crawling things like little bugs, so they make it into my work a lot.
Do you think in your paintings it is just a curiosity that you have or a fascination or a longing/searching…or all the above? Yeah, it kind of goes back to the whole contrast thing because there are so many bad things that happen. The world has so much horribleness in it that we focus on that a lot. But if you get down to these tiny little crawling things, you get this sense of awe like, “Oh my God, there are these little teeny tiny things that survive somehow and are really magical.” And even things that are often thought of as ugly—for instance, cockroaches—I think they are fascinating. I think spiders are really cool. People think that’s the creepy stuff, and I think it’s really cool. There is this whole other side of things.
I love that about your work. It is full of emotion and tugs on so many different levels. There is such playfulness. Do you find yourself returning to some of those figures out of security, habit, or a desire to grow in that area? Usually it’s about taking an idea as far as I can take it. Then once it gets a little stale, I will move away from it. If I really like a painting, I will want to do it again but in a slightly different way to see if it still works. A lot of times I will repeat it on a larger scale so I can get more detail. A lot of ideas that I had and did in a simpler style, I want to bring back and try with a better background. You can change the mood so much with just changing the setting behind someone.
I have actually been doing the people in my paintings a lot older lately. I did the kid thing for a while and now am more interested in a slightly older mentality. The commission piece I am working on now was actually a guy who came in and saw a bunch of my paintings and said he would really love me to paint him as a kid, so he brought in a picture of himself as a kid. Most of the time when I paint people, I don’t have a model. I usually just make them up, and, for the most part, I can kind of fake a face, but they all end up looking like me a little. So I have been trying to explore other faces. I have actually been bothering people that I meet and asking them if I can get a picture of them.
You are exploring. What are you proud of recently? And then what do you want to explore more? I am not sure. Adding background and adding space, paying attention to the whole picture and not just the subject, has been a big step for me. It’s really something that I think has made my work more interesting to me and hopefully to others. I am using more actual people. A lot of the times when you are making people up, you still have to go to the mirror and see “how does the elbow bend like this?” and see how things actually work. To some degree, I like a bit of distortion in my images. So if you go and measure them, they are not quite right. But I like for things to be a little off sometimes. It’s interesting to me, and it gives it a bit of character when you let things be more exaggerated. But I am starting to move in the direction of using actual people. It’s kind of hard for me because I’m not super outgoing about going up to people and saying, “Hey, can I take pictures of you?” But I am getting to where I am doing it just to bring in more faces and more people.
I want to keep going in that direction right now. I am really interested in pushing the humanity of my characters a little bit so that they feel even more real. Not necessarily “real” as in realistically painted, but just real emotions.
