Oscar Lopez: Your Food, My Work, Our Land

Oscar Lopez brings his Your Food, My Work, Our Land, originally a screen-printed poster of laborers toiling under a dominant sun, to Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture as the latest mural commission for the public art corridor between Landmark Buildings B and C. With Haight Street Art Center, along with the support of Creative Work Fund, Lopez conducted pop-up printmaking workshops to create and distribute the image at farmer's markets from Pacifica, CA to the Ferry Building in San Francisco.

More Info: https://fortmason.org/event/oscar-lopez-your-food-my-work-our-land/

Lopez expands the frame of this work for Fort Mason Art and depicts a historical sequence of agricultural labor in the San Francisco Bay Area, paired with portraits of individuals working the land today. He finds his subjects through interviews conducted at small farms and markets across the region, picturing them in a visual grammar drawn from the great Mexican muralists of the 20th century and the re-imagination of those artists in San Francisco's Mission Muralismo movement of the 1970s. Like the posters of the United Farm Workers union, Lopez's multi-panel mural builds a living world for his subjects and calls us to action as witnesses for their vital stewardship -- a cultivation that keeps us all alive.

Your Food, My Work, Our Land is on view through January 2025. The Fort Mason Art mural commission is punctuated by ongoing public programs and art-making activities. Lopez continues his partnership with Haight Street Art Center at FMCAC, where their ongoing pop-up printmaking workshops take place in the public art corridor during the Fort Mason Center Farmers' Market on June 9, July 14, and August 11, 2024. Additional activations with FMCAC resident the San Francisco Children's Art Center, as well as an artist-designed coloring book of the mural panels, are launching in Fall 2024.

Lopez turned to farm workers during the pandemic shutdowns of 2020, as the country focused on those "essential" workers who would still need to perform their jobs outside the home. These front line and back of house workers rarely commanded high salaries or social prestige, yet society could not proceed without them. Lopez thought too of his grandfather, a farm worker under the Bracero Program (1942-1964), originally a World War II-era initiative to provide legal if short-term contracts for Mexican laborers. Your Food, My Work, Our Land asks us to see these essential individuals whose necessary work renders them invisible, like the infrastructure we use but take for granted every day.

"These hardworking individuals are the backbone of our communities, yet we so rarely appreciate their labor, acknowledge their existence, or even see their faces," said Lopez. "With this new version of the work, I want to elevate their stories and honor the vital role they play in sustaining all of us."