Christo Oropeza: Aun así, pienso en ti
THIS EXHIBITION WAS ON VIEW DURING FORT MASON ART’S 2022 TO 2023 SEASON
Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC) presented artist Christo Oropeza who created Aun así, pienso en ti, a mural painting commissioned for the FMCAC campus for FORT MASON ART’s Summer 2022-2023 program. The painting commission is on view from July 2022 to June 3, 2023 in the “Corridor Gallery” between Landmark Buildings B & C.
In FMCAC’s second outdoor painting commission, Christo Oropeza remaked former Army loading docks into portraits of FMCAC’s machine history. Continuing a thread realized in his 2019 Whatever the Work May Be exhibition at Guerrero Gallery and mural projects for Facebook and SFMOMA, Oropeza took up the specialized tools and everyday objects that help us hang art works, maintain hallways, and generally keep the lights on. At FMCAC, the artist added the “extraordinary” to his mix of the unusual and the mundane, as archival photographs document the super-sized nets, nozzles, and winches in use before, during, and after the site’s service as the U.S. Army’s San Francisco Port of Embarkation (1932-1955). Oropeza created a suite of still-life paintings drawn from this military history and civilian uses of the site (1977 to the present); he then adapts these paintings for a new mural suite in the corridor gallery between Buildings B and C.
Oropeza’s new commission also built on San Francisco’s illustrious mural history, from Diego Rivera’s landmark indoor works to the now more than 500 Mission District murals originally launched and inspired by the Chicano, Black Power, and United Farm Workers movements. FMCAC hopes this new work transformed a silent alley into a fluent tableaux that can speak to the often hidden actors, implements, and systems that steward FMCAC and make it “go.”
About The Artist
A San Francisco native, Christo Oropeza describes himself as a “cultural worker” so as to embrace his distinct work as an artist, curator, gallerist, producer, and museum staffer. His recent work includes mural commissions for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and for Facebook’s Artist in Residence program; the painting exhibition Whatever the Work May Be at Guerrero Gallery; and as the curator of Con Los Animales Estamos Conectados for the NIAD Arts Center. With fellow artist Brian Perrin, Oropeza co-founded Incline Gallery in 2010. He has been named to the YBCA 100 list of transformational figures. A graduate of San Francisco State University, he founded the San Pancho Art Collective to create a post-school community for Bay Area artists.
Learn more about Oropeza in this profile at on.off.site: www.on-off.site/artists-christo-oropeza.
Christo Oropeza’s Aun así, pienso en ti is made possible by generous support from Dunn-Edwards Paints.
All Fort Mason Art Programs are generously supported by San Francisco Grants for The Arts and the FMCAC Board of Directors.
Image Credits: Stephanie Garcés and on-off.site
