Born in Santiago, Chile, his family left Chile in the wake of the military overthrow of the democratically elected Salvador Allende government. His father, Orlando, was assassinated by a car bomb in Washington, D.C., in 1976. Francisco and his brother José, along with Chilean painter René Castro, formed "Brigada Orlando Letelier," painting murals in 12 American cities and traveling to Nicaragua in 1980 to paint five more as part of a national literacy campaign. Now based in Venice with his wife Kayren Pace, sons Matias 11 and Salvador 13 months old. Letelier has worked on public art works, performances, installations, publications, and exhibitions in the United States and internationally. He writes, teaches, and lectures, and has worked with people of all ages creating collective and individual works, such as portable murals, banners, flags, books, medicine wheels, and earth mounds. In spring 1998, he traveled to Belfast, Ireland, to paint a mural of reconciliation with Protestant and Catholic community groups. He is currating an exhibition “Lights Among Shadows” to open this summer in Washington DC.

Last October, I had the pleasure of sitting in my living room, having a cup of coffee with Francisco Letelier. I first heard of Francisco through Greg Landau, when I asked him to do the art work for a program cover. A very dear friend of mine and wonderful photographer, Mary Ann Dolcemascolo, was hit by a truck on Main Street and did not have health insurance. Jackson Browne, whom Francisco had done album covers for, and I knew through my Central American solidarity days, had agreed to perform a benefit concert for Mary Ann.

Ever since then I’ve been interested in finding out more about Francisco and his work.

Suzanne:
Besides being a muralist, you are also a performing artist and a poet and an educator, and…What am I leaving out?

Francisco:
Human being at-large, culturally engaged. Things take a different route many times when you are kind of, just involved organically with groups of people. You are sort of called upon to fill a particular role. Which, I have always sort of done, in a willing and natural way. I think it has to do with my early political education. In Chile, I was a member of the Socialist youth and there was a lot of emphasis on taking rounds and leadership. You know, different people act as a leader - today it’s your turn.

Suzanne:
How old were you?

Francisco:
I started in the Chile Socialist Party as a youth; I’m not a member of the party anymore, when I was around 13, with the youth group. That was after the coup, in Chile in 1973. Returning to United States, my brother Jose, who lives on Rapnuew(SP?) which is a territory of Chile, but now he lives on Easter Island. He and I started a muralist brigade with young Chilean exiled youth. Since we were all very young kids working with older artists.

Suzanne:
Is that the Brigada Orlando Letelier named after your dad?

Francisco:
Yes. So it sort of came from that it would fall to us sometimes to be spokes people, other times to be doing the work on the wall, other times to be doing organizational things or logistical things. For example, I remember during a period when a lot of solidarity for Nicaragua was going on and you were in involved and Mancatol, and you were involved with a community of people bring groups. I would do a little bit of art work but most of the time; I was driving these guys around. I would offer to do it and do it. I would drive them around.

Also, I want to say, I never really clearly established that just my only line of my work is within visual arts. A majority of my work, because of my academic work, and my love of visual art, since I’m socially and politically engaged in things. I’ve ended up writing things and people have seen my work and will say, oh that’s really good you should do some more of that. I have given myself room to write. I really finally came out of the closet as a writer about 5 or 6 years ago when I finally took all of this stuff that I had and put it into a book. And said, “Okay, I guess I write”.

Suzanne:
And, which book was that?

Francisco:
Well, this is a self-published book. There are thousands of them around, circulating. And you know the other thing is that I’m not in a poet’s community. Poet’s have a very close knit community, especially here in Venice.

Suzanne:
That’s because there are purist poets.

Francisco:
It is funny, because for example, for years I worked with Manizar Gamboa who is one of the people who really was instrumental in the beginning of Beyond Baroque and a very power leader and writer, especially people of color in integrating different communities here in Venice. I worked with him for years as a visual artist. He had a program for writers who were incarcerated through a program with LA Theatre Works. Even my relationship with him, whom I really admired and worked with, never brought me closer to the community of writers. So, a lot of my poetry and writing occurs outside of circles where writers and poets look for stuff. My poetry some times comes up in places where it would be more the territory of visual arts for visual artists or other communities. You know we all as protagonist and imbibers of culture we all end up kind of being in certain areas. You know you can’t be everywhere. And I find that crossing from one medium to another often means that you have to go solo. Or, you know I’m not articulating myself…

Suzanne:
Your art is not necessarily to packed houses. You do your art for other reasons. You are making a living on your art? Right?

Francisco:
Yes.

Suzanne:
But your poetry, or writing or your performances are something you don’t have to rely on.


Francisco:
I’ve made a little bit of money over the years writing. I’ve gotten a little bit of support in order to do it. The way I make my living is as a visual artist. Although, I’m the art director for a magazine called El Andar which is a national, bi-lingual, Latino, I use that word very unwillingly- a Latino publication, because it deals with Latino or Latin American or Hispanic culture in the United States. It completely crosses over into all kinds of very interesting subject matter. So, we are trying to build a readership. I feel calling it a Latino publication can make people who don’t speak Spanish feel like this magazine is not for me. You really don’t want to do that with a magazine. But in that magazine for example, I do art direction and am called on to write columns or little things having to do with human rights or human rights events. So, it’s a little bit of what I do.

Suzanne:
What’s the distribution on the magazine?

Francisco:
It has national circulation. We have around 15,000 subscriptions. It’s getting bigger. It’s doing really good. We have had some support from different book stores.

Suzanne:
Hierarchy of Needs something you did with Stephen Durland (sp?). Was that a mural?

Francisco:
That was an installation. Steven Durland and his partner were the publishers and editors of High Performance Magazine for many years which chronicled and covered performance art in the United States and really was the main little work horse of theirs. Stephen did that for many years then he and Linda Burnham started the 18th Street Art Complex in Santa Monica in around 1989. I moved their around that time and became one of the artists that started that kind of community of people. He was an incredibly talented and educated artist. He then put himself into the service of the performance art community for many years and then they really sort of moved into building a community arts organization. It was very funny to see performance art, from where it started to see that really these people that were so involved in it ended up with what they thought was the logical outcome of all of this was that it makes no sense if we don’t have community involvement. It makes no sense. We don’t care anymore. We don’t care who’s doing what anyway. They found that really their intension, deep down inside, in the end was to reach people, cross borders, do away with this us and them thing that the left had carried around for so long and continues to carry around. Trying to point out enemies.

They are beautiful people. So we had the opportunity, we got a grant from the City of Santa Monica to do an installation with Stephen which was very ambitious and a great project. We built a sod house in the middle of a gallery with a waterfall in it.


Suzanne:
Was that at the 18th Street Arts Complex?

Francisco:
Yes. The 18th Street Arts Complex Gallery. There are some images floating around somewhere on the web through Steven Durland’s website.

Suzanne:
Which takes me to your mural on Rose Avenue, “Becoming the Circle”. It seems to me that you had a lot of community involvement in that project. Is that your first mural in Venice? You have others?

Francisco:
I have a couple murals in Venice. One is on Machado Street, right off Lincoln Boulevard, right next to the Foot Locker which is one block north of Rose and Lincoln. There’s a taco stand that people stand out on the corner. I forget the name. Then there is this little street called Machado. There are these garden apartments on the left hand side called Machado Court Apartments. Some of the smallest apartments you could ever see.

Suzanne:
Are they in Venice or Santa Monica?

Francisco:
Yes, Venice, just a few blocks from Rose. Yes it’s Venice. It is an environmental mural. It shows native species and animals of the Santa Monica Mountains. It was a mural in direct response to the people that lived there. They are mostly people from Mexico and other places. It was commissioned by the owner of the building.

Suzanne:
Wonderful! How did that happen?

Francisco:
The owner was someone that I had met and seen that I was a muralist and said that he owned a building and it’s a terrible little building in Venice and that he really wanted to do something for the people that live there. Instead of calling him as slumlord, all I had to do was tell him that, “Hey man. I can help you with this”. “Oh, great. Oh, I can put some money towards that. Oh, look at these people.” At the same time, he’s a business man. Bought it as a business. He had lived on Machado for many years. The shopping center, where the Pic N Save use to be, it’s now Big Lot and Save On, the right hand store there has been empty for many, many years. Because he fought them, quietly, not in the papers, he fought them with a lot of money from putting in what would have been something like an EZ Lube big car operation in there. Because the building backs up right to residential properties on Machado. He was living on the property at that time and the mural that I painted on this court apartments is really on a big, enormous retaining wall, a cinder block retaining wall but right beyond it is the shopping center complex. Right where these people live. Like, right through this wall would be a shopping center.

Suzanne:
And you mural is on that wall?

Francisco:
It’s on that retaining wall. It is one of the best instances of going to a place this little urban spot, where people live, could really use some love and it has really transformed this space. So walk by it sometime. It’s really a great feeling. I walk by and go, “Oh wow. There’s such beautiful landscape here where there use to be this big old cinder block wall, just 20 yards from Lincoln Boulevard.

Suzanne:
What’s the name of that one?

Francisco:
The name of the mural? Yes, it is called Ambrosia.

Suzanne:
And where is the other mural?

Francisco:
The other mural is a mural that I finished concurrently with Becoming the Circle. That is at Phoenix High School. Which is the continuation high school behind Venice High School. It is a continuation high school for kids who have had trouble or who haven’t been able to get through high school in conventional ways. It is a small school on a street called Zanja. It was all done with high school students there last spring.

Suzanne:
What’s the name of that one?

Francisco:
I think it’s called “Phoenix Rising”. I kind of forget the names of murals because I very often let other people name the murals.

Suzanne:
How does that happen? Is it the people working on the mural?

Francisco:
Yes, because the difference between the Phoenix High mural and the Pioneer Bakery Becoming the Circle mural is that the Phoenix High mural was a project where funds were available for an artist to come work with the students to create something at the school. I was working through LA Theater Works. Their arts and children program. So last spring was a time where I got an opportunity to work in Venice and create murals in Venice. I had painted this Ambrosia mural a little earlier on in the year and I had really been feeling like I wanted to paint something in my neighborhood. I’ve lived in Venice, off and on, since 1985. The community mural Becoming the Circle that mural is really my project, integrating people to help me as assistants or other artist that come and work with me as colleges on the mural. The Phoenix High mural, its ideas and a lot of the painting are done by the kids. I’m painting with them, so it’s not just a kid’s mural. I’m mentoring them all the way along. So I do a lot of the painting.

Suzanne:
Do you do the design? Or, do they do the design?

Francisco:
They do the design. I tweaked the design for them. I work the design and make it a little bit better. But basically, they are the art directors. So that’s what a lot of the mural painting I do with groups of people has got to do with people putting themselves in the driver’s seat in terms of the idea. It’s not just about painting. It’s about coming up with an idea, addressing issues that pertain to the community and the people involved with creating the mural. For them to feel free to image, to be creative and not worry about production.

Suzanne:
And how do you do this? Do you do it on the side walk with them? Or, do you have a special meeting? How do you get them settled and thinking about this?

Francisco:
At Phoenix High School it worked over an 8 to 10 week period on the mural. We did class room work. We start in the class room, starting with the generation of ideas, brainstorming. Of course, I have very clear ideas when I come and work with a group of young people. These were seniors, going into the world. I have an agenda. Look we are being given an opportunity to show the world what’s inside of these young minds. What’s inside of you? What do you really feel strongly about?

Suzanne:
Where they open to doing that?

Francisco:
Oh, sure.

Suzanne:
Were these kids that wanted to do this? Were they selected from an art class? Because, you know you hear so many horrible things about teenagers and high school kids these days. All they want to do is all this negative stuff. So I want to hear more. I’ve seen the end results. I want to know how you got there.

Francisco:
Well, arguable these kids are kids who have had some challenges in academic environments. That’s why they are in this continuation school. It is different from a regular high school. You have to take into count that these kids, I reluctantly call them kids but I have to make the distinction they’re really young adults. They are leading their lives as any adult would. Right? They have relations. They have cars. They go out. They do what they want. You have to have an adult relationship with these young people even though they are in high school. Many of them are caught up in the habits that brought them to this continuation school. This is the last stop. This is the last opportunity for you. We are going to make it different. Let it flow into your life situation so you can finish school. And, a lot of them have bad habits. It has to do with empowerment. It has to do with you understanding that you are in the driver’s seat in your life. That you can make certain things happen for yourself. So, we begin there. We begin by kind of weeding out people by saying that you got to be involved in this because you’re in this class. I tell people, go ahead, and be involved. Just let me know where you are at so I can create a real work team of people. I work on people consistently to get them to show up for themselves. The thing about murals is as the thing starts taking shape, something very powerful always happens with people. So they start getting more and more involved.

Suzanne:
Because…. it’s hard to say?

Francisco:
Well because you start getting positive feedback. You start getting positive feedback from people who that go by the school, from the staff, the faculty. A teacher comes up and says, “This is amazing. Are the students doing it?” The students are like ya. These are our ideas. This is what we thought of. So, it’s not so much about like I’m an accomplished painter but this is a project and I’m involved in the project and I have a big voice in it. It’s a process of community building, conflict resolution, empowerment for myself. Sort of in a very quick way, we sort of go through a lot of principles that are at work in the work ideal. Your principles for conflict resolution. Principles of non-violence. Principles of being open and understanding of other cultures, of having a multi-cultural point of view. An understanding of people speaking other languages that comes from different places. It’s constantly being an ambassador of a bigger world for them. So one day, they’ll kind of look at me and go, “Wow. You were just some crazy guy. It is true. I looked it up on the internet and it was true what you said. This reporter came by and was interested in what we were doing. We were talking about young people that, like most young people, are completely disarticulated. They don’t have any idea what effect could I really have on a community. It is very hard for young people to have any sense of that and very hard for young people to have the sense of something I do is going to be paid attention to.

Suzanne:
So you have obviously built some very special relationships with these people, these kids.

Francisco:
Sometimes.

Suzanne:
What happens when you leave? Do you stay in touch? Do you have a mailing list? Do you have a following? You know. What happens to you? In your heart. How do you deal with it?

Francisco:
On the one hand, I sort of got use to the idea of leave taking of projects, with working with communities then you leave. And then you try really hard to stay in touch with people. I’m the kind of person that doesn’t answer the phone during the day. I don’t have a cell phone. I make my phone calls at night or over email. My communication lines are kind of laser beam. Because, I want to be in my light here today, be present and aware. It’s not that I want to be. It is all that I can manage. If I can manage just to be here. I was working with a group of young people last week, painting some banners. This new class from USC. This student asked me how long I had been doing this. I told him, this particular work, about 30 years. How many people have you worked with? Well, I have never really worked it out but I know it is in the thousands. You know there are thousands of people doing this cultural work. But you get use to saying goodbye to them. Understanding that maybe I put a little drop in the bucket. Once in awhile you get these waves and surges in your life. For example, the Pioneer Bakery mural which sense I did it in my community, you really get a strong sense of the community ties and links over many years with the people who are involved with that project.

Suzanne:
Tell me more about this because like I said, I was over at SPARC the other day and picked up this little brochure. Actually, I paid seven bucks for it. That’s ok because all of us are going to have to support the arts even more because the government is continuing to cut the arts even more. And that is part of my two-fold question to you. One of the things that stand out is how important it is to work with the community, before you even start your project. And, I think the Pioneer Bakery story is a wonderful story and I want to hear that. The other question, we can get to it later is that funding has ended. There are no more projects like that. I know you also worked on the metro rail. Some beautiful pieces there. I want to talk about funding.

Francisco:
About the mural at the Pioneer Bakery. I already had it in me that I was going to paint a mural. Somewhere in Venice. Somewhere in Oakwood. I wanted to paint a mural in Oakwood. You know I use to live across the street from here. Probably when I first met you, that brown little weird A frame house when I first came to Venice. Then I moved over to Oakwood on 6th Avenue. Now I’ve moved to Brooks Avenue. But it had been a really long time.

Basically, since 1985 when I came to go to school. I was feeling very strongly that I wanted to paint a mural just in my neighborhood where I lived. Since I would constantly go to other communities and sort of talk to them about, well who are you? What are you doing? What are you feeling? Shall we express those feelings in some way? I wanted to do it here.

These are the challenges for an organization like SPARC... Judy Baca, after all, is one of my cultural heroes. What we are talking about in community is human inter-action, friendships. It is your daily life with people in your community. If you’re a community member that gets along with lots of different people, you have friends, you have people you love, know this kid since they were 2 and you’ve known that person. I’ve been hear for a while so I have lots of friends in the community. So basically, if I start doing a project on the street, it already has a lot of community involvement because people know me. People kind of support me and the ideas. I have a reputation.


I was looking for a wall. Then I saw that SPARC was going through another funding cycle. So I wrote to them and said you know I want to apply for your funding cycle. I don’t have a particular site but I really want to paint a mural in Venice. In Oakwood. Because I feel that this is really the community that is undergoing the transformations that we talk about. They’re the people that are the living subjects of history. Los Angeles has this reputation as a mural mecca. SPARC has help create this mural mecca by commissioning all these murals for several years. The Venice Boardwalk is known for all its murals. And there are no murals in the Oakwood Community.

So, it is like we are living in the supposed mecca of murals. Other people look at Venice as this community arts place and there are all these things happening but what’s happening in Oakwood? Where’s the art? Where are people making art together? So I really felt that I wanted to do something for SPARC. After talking to various places I approached the Pioneer Bakery and they were very positive about it. Then, they simply said, “What wall do you want? You want to do a community wall – that’s great! Go ahead. That was it in terms of editorial. They had no financial commitment. They did not commission the mural. I just came in and said, “Can I use your wall?” I got some funding. I imagined that the mural will cost more because they had very little money at SPARC but I had enough money to start this project. And they said okay. Great! Since my idea for the mural was to actually paint portraits of a lot of people that lived in Venice- this really diverse group of people who lived in the community who I felt were protagonists and leaders in their own kind of sub circles in community. It was automatically a community project because it was basically bringing all these different people together into one place.

Suzanne:
Did you do it alone? The design?

Francisco:
Yes. I did all the design. We really ran into some classic Venice situations. SPARC requires that you have public, community meetings during the design of the mural to have community input. So we called for a community meeting at Pioneer Bakery.

Suzanne:
What did you do?

Francisco:
We put up flyers all over Venice but mostly more towards the surrounding community; it was down on this side of Abbot Kinney, up along Rose, across Lincoln. Sort of had a strategy for putting leaflets up. The idea was to let SPARC produce the event. SPARC has its offices here but when you ask people where SPARC is they really don’t know. They are kind of a city organization. You say Beyond Baroque and everyone knows where that is. Everyone knows where Abbot’s Habit is, but SPARC? They haven’t had much of a local presence. They are more of a citywide organization. People come to work there and they may or may not live in Venice. But they don’t have great community ties. So they put up these flyers. I come to the meeting. And guess what kind of people do you think showed up to a meeting like that? It’s at 5pm on a Wednesday. So, that pretty much leaves out a lot of working people. And it brings “community activists”, people who do not speak for any particular constituency. Or do not necessarily have any community. There is a link missing. A lot of self appointed ideas. The majority of community activism is engaged in confrontation and adversarial situations. Which of course it is. A lot of community activism is about “Hi. What’s your name?” “Where do you live?” “Oh, I live over here.” “Oh, so nice to meet you”. What goals can we create in common? What common ground do we have? So it was amazing because I had the initial designs for the mural and basically this room of people who I had never seen or met before, trashed all the designs.

Suzanne:
How many people were in the meeting?

Francisco:
Maybe 15 people. A few of my friends. They came, pre-disposed to say “Why is something happening in my community without my power?” So we are determined to come in and not let it happen because anything that happens is bad. We live in a world were everything is bad. Because I’ve been eating off that tree for awhile. We live in a world where we are oppressed and people with less get oppressed all the time. There never is an opportunity for anything positive to happen. And, nothing positive can happen so if something is happening I have to go in there and make sure that I put a stick in the works so that nothing happens. Nothing really gets created.

Suzanne:
Well that’s control. That is a sense of power. That’s a sense of feeling powerful. That’s how people get their power trip. So what did you do?

Francisco:
Well, I feel an enormous amount of compassion for people because really it gets to a point where you can see somebody that’s starving and come to them with food and they say “Get away from me. I’m starving and you’re another agent of my starvation. They can’t really see the food you’re carrying. It is so patiently clear, since I’ve lived in
Venice along time, just as a person who lives here, being involved in the things I do, working with community organizations here, and working in the schools. So I know a lot of people. So if I go to a community meeting in Venice and I see a lot of people who are professional meeting goers but they are not involved in the community. I don’t see them at the drum circle. I never saw them hanging out somewhere at a coffee shop just being one of us. I never saw them dancing on the streets. I’ve never seen them. I say, well I’ve lived here for 15 years I must have run into you somewhere. And did we catch our eyes? Did you look at me with some acceptance? So, I was feeling like there must be someway to win these people over to make them see that I’m not their enemy. I’m really a community artist. You must have me confused with someone else.

One discussion that occurred was that one part of the mural had a portrait of a young African American man, based on a photograph of one of these kids. I’ve worked with a lot of kids that have been involved with gangs, all over LA County. Kids that have been incarcerated and it was based on a portrait of a kid who had gone through this whole experience of being locked up, being in gangs, committing crimes and somehow managed to pull himself together, finish high school and go on to college.

This portrait was just my way of acknowledging that I live on the corner of 6th and Brooks Avenue in a place where over the years I’ve seen dozens of children get shot. Dozens of children get shot. You know it is very different to live in another place in Venice then to live right on the corner of 6th and Brooks where you see the crack come in and out. Attitudes are very different about the police, about what needs to be done, about racial harassment – about many things. I myself have been stopped by the police and put up against the wall and harassed before. Nevertheless, I welcome the police presence in my neighborhood because I have children and I have seen children die. My neighbors have died. I’ve seen kids die on the street. Until you’ve seen that, you realize that this isn’t just some stupid academic discussion. Children are killing themselves on the streets. So in my mural I thought it would be immoral to create a community mural without acknowledging the fact that dozens of children have died right in front of my house. There are no monuments. There is no mention of them. There is more in the press now. There are more people that talk about it – they serve as examples and things like that. But, still it is a cultural phenomenon and you know it would be great if there was freedom to acknowledge it. The reaction was that those were gang members. They got was they deserved. They were involved with illicit stuff. Then this big discussion occurred to me. What are you talking about? Innocent people get killed. Other people were discussing this at the first meeting. Other people were writing their city council members saying that they were dismayed to fine out that a mural that celebrates gang cultural and violence is going to be painted on the street. Comments like that. So, I was involved in a lot of correspondence trying to say that, no you have it all wrong. I can understand why you can walk away with that feeling. But we are people discussing ideas in a community in which these are complex ideas. And, just because I’m allowing these discussions to occur in a public meeting does not mean that the mural is about gang violence. We are talking about gang violence because somehow we need to leave a place where people can carry the pain and the memories of violence in their neighborhoods onto the wall. And, we are going to find an appropriate way of doing that. We are searching for that. That is what this project is about. It is about searching for common ground.

Suzanne:
How long did this period take?

Francisco:
We were involved in for around two months with stuff like that. Modification of the drawings, calling for another meeting.

Suzanne:
Was Council member Ruth Galanter involved?

Francisco:
Because it was at the time of transition, when the council seat was being changed, there were some people from her office. Mike Bonen supported my project in a very powerful way. I’m very grateful to him. With all the criticism the project was getting, he suggested to people to go and look at the history of projects I’ve done. Go talk to people. Look at the other things I’ve done. Then to judge me then. He said that he was very grateful that I was doing something here. He didn’t just pop out of the ground suddenly.

It was a successful dialogue with everyone who had input. Some people didn’t come back. Some people would sit in meetings and say, “why does everything have to be political?” Other people, people who wanted political murals would look at my murals and say, “this isn’t political. What happened to you Francisco? You use to paint political murals. It’s got to show the man, or some powerful system of oppression and people rising up against the system of oppression or else it isn’t a political mural. Because, you know, that is the definition of politics. Well for me that’s not it at all. It’s a little bit of it
A very important part and link.

Suzanne:
Maybe your next mural should be a mural of the process of doing a mural.
Francisco:
I really stacked the deck in my favor. There are beautiful and wonderful people who live in Venice and I’m lucking enough to know a few people and use the mural as a vehicle to get closer to some, and to acknowledge others I’ve known for a while. You put all these people together in a mural, people of all races, also show economic backgrounds, different personalities and types and you put them altogether in a mural. What happens is that one day so and so comes by to see how they’re thing is going and he comes with his sister. Then this other person comes with his two kids. Then they meet and kind of create a community of people that are in the mural. So you take 20 families that are associated and you have a real powerful community building tool. You send ripples. There is a certain amount of acceptance. We are all being represented here. It’s almost an easy way of achieving that. I really love doing this. I love including community members in the mural doing what they do.

Suzanne:
Getting back to the Pioneer Bakery mural. What is in it?

Francisco:
During one of the first meetings, one of the oldest members of the Derashey (SP?) family from the Pioneer Bakery when we were coming up with ideas for the mural said that he remembered that Rose use to be a really hot street. It was like the entrance to Venice, like the whole area. We use to have this parade here. Every year. One of my earliest memories was sitting on the balcony of this building. This is the same building. Just the facade got stucco covered. He pointed towards the building and said to me, “see there, there use to be a balcony there. I was born up in there. Just like may dad and my grandfather were born up in there. I use to sit on that balcony. My earliest recollection, before the Second World War was sitting on that balcony watching the parade. It was incredible. Just like watching the New Orleans Mardi Gras. Because at that time, we modeled our parades like Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras was being invented in New Orleans.

Suzanne:
Did you know that Arthur Reese was brought to Venice from New Orleans by Abbot Kinney? I’ve read some books on the history of Venice and Kinney’s chauffeur was this black man, Arthur Reese who was very, very talented. He made these huge paper Mache Mardi Gras types of figures. He used real fruit, grapes to decorate the arches on Winward during Mardi Gras. At the end of the festivities, people were invited to enjoy the fruit or take it home.

Francisco:
It was great. You know, I wasn’t in anyway adverse to the idea of integrating the Pioneer Bakery into the mural. I found that to be the perfect image to start the mural with. So I said, let’s create a mural that has you on the balcony and the building as it was and that way we also show a little bit of the architectural legacy. The changing nature of what our place looks like. All very subtle but powerful. Here are three generations of families that lived here. This is beautiful. I love that. Where can we find a site?

Suzanne:
So, you picked the building before knowing this about the family?

Francisco:
Yeah. The mural turned out to be four distinct panels. But, really the idea was let’s show a parade and have locals be in the parade. So then it will turn into panels of different people doing there things in different places in Venice. So that is how the whole mural got developed.

Suzanne:
So when you say panels are they actually attached to the building?

Francisco:
Its four sections and two of the sections are painted on panels which are mounted on the wall. This all has to do with the fact that Pioneer Bakery is quickly outgoing this facility and if they could have their druthers they would move their whole baking operation somewhere else. To a brand new, modern bakery because this is a bakery which started on the second floor of this Victorian type house in which they kept buying, changing and adding things on. You know now days a real modern facility is all designed beforehand. So they are thinking if that ever happened, they would remodel the building, create housing around an inter court yard. They have this vision but it isn’t very far along. So I said, let’s create a couple of the parts of the mural on panels just incase. Because it is the western facing façade of the building. There are no doors or hardly any windows on this wall where I put the mural on because that is where big oven is. Any architect who might be designing this space would probably look at the western side of the building and say that this is probably on obvious place to put doors or windows. So I wanted to create a little bit of plasticity in this thing so we could maybe take this panel off and maybe put it somewhere else in the building so the whole mural wouldn’t disappear or get destroyed.

Suzanne:
So you got the design going. How did you get people to help? I know Bill Attaway helped. Someone helped you with beads. Lisa Marks?

Francisco:
William Attaway is a close friend of mine. So we conspired and worked on different things in different ways. He has work all over Venice. Originally, I had painted an Attaway like wall into the design. But, I was even conspiring then. I’d say, “Hey, look Bill I to honor you Attaway. So look if I’m going to put something up that looks like your stuff – it would be really good if you did the mosaic work here on this section. And of course he came and one thing led to another. So we started to get more fanciful with that because of courses it was great once I had him there and he was willing to do some stuff and he was excited about it. It kind of changed that design. Then he gave me a lot of other stuff to do. Other things that he didn’t necessarily do.

Liz Marks is an artist that I’ve known for a long time who I met here in Venice. She does not live here right now but has in the past. She donated stuff for it. She worked on it a little bit. A lot of people would come by and go “Oh wow this looks great”. And, I’d say well, I could use some help so if you want to come by. I had a lot of help from people that would just walk by and say, “Okay, I’ll be here tomorrow” and they would come and help.

Suzanne:
How long did it take for you to finish the mural?

Francisco:
It took a while. I think I started in November and cranked out almost half of it, the big half of it by January. Then it took me five more months to finally complete it. What happened was that I got around $4,000 from SPARC to do this mural. I could have painted a mural that was a tenth of this size for that money and everyone would have been really happy. But this was a big project. I wanted to use this beautiful big wall. So after just going along, kind of paying myself for it, I really wasn’t making any money but I had enough money for the materials. So I dedicated myself to it for a couple of months but then I had to get back to work. Find other ways to make work. By the time I had it two-thirds done. Another person that I knew, that doesn’t live in the United States, who lives in Spain, was here and saw this project and loved the mosaic part. He said, “Oh, they should do this in Barcelona too. Are you almost done”? I said that I didn’t know because I only had this much money. He was surprised that that was all I had. I told him that I had been so busy working and that I would have to stop for a while and do some fundraising efforts do some letters and hope it would get me though the last hurtle. Then he said look and wrote me a check to finish the rest of the mural. A couple of months had gone by where I was just coming one a week. Also, I was also working on the Phoenix mural and working on other project at SMASH elementary, in Ocean Park between 5th and 6th. Those murals will be up in a few months because we did them on portable canvases. The will be put up on the new SMASH elementary on Ocean Park.
So, I was working on those things as I was working on the Pioneer Bakery mural.

Suzanne:
So, we didn’t really talk about money. Public money for art, for murals.

Francisco:
This is what has happened to me personally. I basically came of age as an artist during the Reagan/Bush area. And so, during the Reagan/Bush area, the mantra that was given to me by my mentors, teachers and the social world was there is no money for art. There’s no money for art. There’s no money for art. From then, to here, twenty years later or whatever, they are telling me, “They’re talking the money away”. But I thought there was no money? So guess what? I grew up and learned to be an artist with no money for art. And, I’ve been doing art this whole time with no money for it. I know there are some people who are loosing their fellowships. Some people who have the time. I’m always working really hard to survive and to pay the rent. They’ve had the time to be able to create the space in their life for two months where they could actually apply for this grant. Oh, there is some money coming up. The deadline is in October and I don’t have time…. you know it’s like fucking insane. Who has time to do that? I have to get up and go to work. So I realized, especially after the Pioneer Bakery, if I had been waiting to get the funding from somebody else, that project would never have occurred. A politics and the cultural politics and the multi-diversity blah…blah…blah... or the whole thing. I just choose to bypass it and go start to the heart. It just takes my body working on the wall. Paint is pretty cheep. I can start it. I will create some momentum through the power of what human beings can do. Keep talking to one another. The old grassroots way. That’s the way I’ll do my projects for now. Maybe someday, I’ll get some enormous funding from things because I’m getting better. You know, like its Thursday night. There’s a deadline. I’m just going to do it. Everyone leave me alone. The kids won’t eat. Everyone in their spaces for forty-eight hours. I can pump it out and crank it out. I manage to do that sometimes.

Also for SPARC, it is time for SPARC to undergo a change. And this is the agent of their transformation and change. Everybody in Venice should know where SPARC is. Everyone in Venice should know who Judy Baca is. It’s a powerful, strong organization which has had to fight and struggle to remain alive and afloat. We ended up with this great complication of fighting for the piece of pie. The piece of pie in funding had a lot to do with the maintenance and restoration of murals. Along with getting funded for commissioning murals, SPARC was also funded to maintain a mural inventory and restoration program. That’s been rustled away from SPARC. The thing is mural also need to be maintained. Public art needs to be maintained and there is nothing uglier than a mural in disrepair. Especially, when it is a big, enormous mural. It is not only that you have to provide funding for the new murals but how do you take care of the ones that are there? So you see all these old murals around Los Angeles, the Freeway Marathon mural, this and that and they are all covered with graffiti. Well, because there is something wrong with the system, ten years later, and all the murals are covered with graffiti and where there is no mechanism to which we can repair the murals. So whatever was in place wasn’t a good system anyhow. Because we are talking about, the whole deal about a mural is that it perseveres and lasts through time. We do all this stuff to make sure that it lasts and we use the right materials.

Suzanne:
Doesn’t the city of San Francisco have this hotel tax which I think 1% tax goes to public arts or something? Why don’t the artists or SPARC lead a city initiative for funding?

Francisco:
Because, I don’t want the City to run my murals. I don’t want the City to determine my world as a cultural protagonist.

Suzanne:
So then, how do these murals stay preserved?

Francisco:
If they are community murals, the community will take care of them. If they are not community murals, they will go the way of things that know one cares about. It’s not that they aren’t valuable works of art. It’s not that they shouldn’t be preserved. I do think it would be excellent if there were mechanism for which the state would preserve these works of art, if we lived in a system that was capable of responding to us in that way.

I do think that there are a lot more crucial problems right now. I’m not going to be sitting around saying that “you should be restoring murals” when there’s hundreds of homeless on the street, when there’s kids being shot on the streets, and there is still crack running up and down ruining people’s lives in Oakwood. I think that the priorities are wrong. So, public art needs to be community art. Art that somehow, supposedly has its root in actual community. Community is capable of bringing up the funds and taking care of these things. The community is capable and we have to give ourselves that power. We have to acknowledge that we have the power to do that.

As an artist, I really feel that I’m going to self produce the things that I do from now on because it is easier. It is a better system. The problem is, look, hey Francisco; you want to do a project? Where are you going to get the funding? You’re going to walk around and do a fundraiser. Ask this and that and hit some people up and end up with $3,000 to start something. Wouldn’t you much rather be sending in your qualifications for a project like the new metro line? They have $250,000 for whatever station here and we want community involvement and all this stuff.

The other thing about public art is that the state and cities don’t have mechanisms to which the population, or the electoral public, or the community can articulate their ideas about being people in the world. You know they can design a park and you don’t have to talk about people or racial politics or diversity. The only people who have to do it are the public artists. So when it comes down to it, like the bigger the budget…. it’s like a big boulder on your head. Because you’re the artists, you somehow have to be the social articulator for all the conditions that exists for everybody right now. You know, they build this big enormous sky scraper right here and in no way does it talk about people. But you have to for this for your little thing over here. It’s all too crazy for me at this point. It just doesn’t make sense. It is wrong. Something is wrong there.

I feel like on one hand it is tragic that perhaps the city of Los Angeles will not be commissioning any more murals, at least through SPARC. I do think that it is a wonderful opportunity for SPARC to create murals in a different way, instead of being dependant on city funding and in that particular way they were depending on city funding. If you have an organization that 15-20% of our budget comes from here and 15-20% comes from over there, we get this and that, then you are diversified. Then you know you have more broad based support. Supported by people within you own community or within your own local region. You have more viability to reach larger audiences. If your funding comes from one source and you do things in only one way you become ghettoized. Your audience starts becoming smaller and smaller. I don’t really have clear answers for everything. But, I am so grateful that I’m not completely encumbered by the bureaucracies that exist in this city in terms of cultural activities. I very willingly try to shake it off. It’s an enormous world. Culturally, Los Angeles is still a little cow town. We have all these enormous organizations here now and we have all these sources of funding for different things and the city of Los Angeles is like a city in crisis. The discourse is about how are we going to make downtown work? Downtown is never going to work. For Francisco, it’s just never going to work. How do you make this thing better? You’re going to put on another coat of paint? You’re going to put in another big building that’s cute? It’s just not going to work for me. Don’t you get it that human beings like to be in pleasant …. so…. I’m going off.

Suzanne:
Okay. Go off some more. “Art is not a mirror held up to reality but a hammer with which to shape it”, Bertolt Brecht. Do you agree with that?

Francisco:
I love Brecht. He’s also a product of historic discourse, the words that held power and the ideas at that time. If Bertolt Brecht was here, right now, today, he would probably be talking in words that sounded a lot more like let’s create common cause. He would have a whole environmental and spiritual aspect to his discourse. Not that he didn’t. But it would be more on the surface. I don’t partake of a hammer with which to shape it. You can’t shape reality with a hammer. You can bash your thumb and bash things around but reality is going to shape you. You can come in and create a symbiotic relationship by going out and seeing what’s there.

But, there was something missing from the idea of what human beings are. What we are. What we can do in the world. It is not fair to judge a writer from just one thing. Especially, Brecht. He was such a humanist. For me, as an individual, it’s about, what am I hear to do in this life time. And what precisely we as a species are going to do. At that time the idea was that we’re just going to change means of production and exploitation so that they favor the poor instead of the people who have historically been favored, the rich. Now we understand that that whole way of doing things, in the end, kills everyone. Nobody survives with that hammer of industrialization. We are going to go and subjugate the world into a way. So, there’s larger forces at work, even than that. So we need to dive deep into wisdom, understand that we as members of the community in Venice we are much, much larger than these petty little terms like globalization and gentrification. Like these are passing little understandings, like little coins that we are using right now to kind of approximate an understanding for certain phenomena that are going on in the social sphere.

There are some essential ingredients, especially the left needs to pick up because of the intense social struggles the left has been involved in this century. We kind of left something in the corner. We forgot that we are spirit also. We forgot that whenever we talk about any kind of political thing, any kind of thing. We’ve had powerful leaders. That’s where their power came from. The power of Gandhi. The power of Martin Luther King, Jr. The power of Che Guevarra. The power of all these social motivators. The power of the Dali Lama. The power of people that can motivate and move great masses of people as if they were somehow, in this century, they were able to articulate the social with the spiritual. And, that’s the way I see it. The left is in great need of a renaissance of the language. Of cleaning house. The way we look at things. Making sure we don’t continue doing the same things. Gentrification is the word we use now in this community to create division between ourselves. Another us and them. It was yuppies. Now it’s the gentrification. Ya know, we kind of love it. We are addicted to thinking that if everyone did things in this particular way, all problems would be solved. I don’t really mean that. I guess it’s just that I’m much more interested in working, in finding bridges, and common cause than working on pointing out differences. That’s what I’m completely committed to. I don’t care who I work with, where they are from, or what they did in the past or how they did it. I think this has a lot to do with being a Chilean and that we went through many years of a harsh dictatorship.

Suzanne:
And you brutally lost your father. Do you work in Chile?

Francisco:
I was just in Chile. We had an amazing thing happening in Chile right now. The present government, which is a Socialist government, has decided that all the Chilean Diaspora, which is around a million individuals that left Chile, now number about 2 million or more Chileans living outside and abroad, they’ve decided to call us the 14th region. So we are another state. So, now for example I can receive healthcare. I can apply for public arts money as a Chilean. And, soon, perhaps I’ll vote. Soon, perhaps my children will be granted Chilean nationality. So it’s creating the institutional mechanisms to create a virtual state. There is a lot of talk about it, but Chile is on the forefront of countries and nations imagining the idea of a nation completing surpassing national geographic borders.

So now my Chileaness isn’t any greater or less because I live outside or inside. It is about what is inside of me. This is where I define my nation. In order to achieve that, in Chile for example, people say that oh Pinochet is still there and the military still has some degree of power. In 1973, we had about 10 million Chileans. Let’s say there were around 800,000 uniformed people that time in the country. Then, think about all their families and their children, we are talking about a third of the population in a small enough country still to image that we had the power to create a new way of life. You really start seeing the us and them. You know it is like Pogo, the old comic strip – we have met the enemy and the enemy is us. You understand to create a new society; you really better start shaking hands with a lot of people.

Suzanne:
Where was it? In France, they denied Maurice Papon’s appeal. Fifty years ago he was shipping Jews off to death camps. They have put him in prison for Nazi war crimes. I was reading your press release for the Pioneer Bakery mural and you said you were not interested in whether Pinochet goes to jail or not. It is more important to you that there is justice and people know the truth. A friend of mine disagrees with that. He feels that Pinochet is a criminal and he should be in jail.

Francisco:
I’m not saying the Pinochet shouldn’t go to jail and I wouldn’t fight the good fight for him to go to jail. It is more in response to what creates justice. Because the whole idea is to create justice. It’s not about revenge. Because if you think it will bring one person back to life, or you make any historical event go away like taking some old guy and putting him in jail, you are very mistaken. You see this with people who have fought very long to put the murderers of their children and family members in jail. The crises they go through when they finally get that kind of justice. Jails are necessary and of course it is necessary for us as just societies to say this person committed these atrocious crimes against humanity and they should be put on trial and be put in jail. Since jails are this terrible, terrible, and I’ve worked in jails a lot and the more you work in jails you really see how degrading it is. It doesn’t matter what kind of criminal. Who’s going to take care of the jails? Who’s going to be the prison guards? We all hate prison guards. You want to put criminals in jail. You want to put political criminals in jail. Who’s going to run the jails then? Somebody’s got to do it. We’ve got to be responsible for it. Are you going to be the person that does that? Are you not going to feed him in jail? You start to think that this is really a clanky vehicle for the creation of justice. Jails. It’s like it’s left over. It’s all we got. We can’t get rid of it.

Suzanne:
So, what should we do with him? Pinochet. The truth is coming out and your family worked very hard for that to happen.

Francisco:
If our Supreme Court has now ruled that this man is so senile that he absolutely can not stand trial, then the present government, and the people involved in the government, the elected people, will continue to create mechanisms to which we can try the institution which was Pinochet. There are several ways we can do that. Pinochet can not be put on trial. But other people involved in his regime can be put on trial. We can create, for example an international library. We’ve created the archives of memory which are akin to the kind of work the tolerance museums have done all over the country which is to rescuing all the information from those years. Creating historical facts. Having the information available for subsequent generations. Also, creating mechanisms that allow people to have more healing.

A lot of people talk about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions which were instituted in South Africa. This is a step in the right direction. Some people would to naively assume okay we will allow people to confront their oppressors. Then they got amnesty for just showing up. Like ya, I killed your mother. The person gets to cuss at you, spit at you and throw rocks at you and say publicly that yes I did it. Then they exonerate you and you get to your business. Now in South Africa, they are looking at what the impact of this has been. Let’s go back and talk to people who were supposedly victims or who were victims and see if this really helped them. Did you really create peace within yourself? Do you feel that justice was done? Well, ya know, this was really nice but I’d really like it if this guy was in jail. I know I had my day in the sun which I was able to say, you killed my brother. But I’d really like him in jail. Other people were like, you know, I really feel a great sense of hope for my country because we were able to do that. We were able to turn a page in history and continue into the future. Because the deal is continuing into the future, after a horrible events like that it is always difficult. There is no easy way of figuring it out.

Suzanne:
People are struggling so hard in South Africa. They don’t know how not to fight. They have fought for so long – what is Peace?

Francisco:
What is peace? The thing about Pinochet is that those statements that I made were in the aftermath of Pinochet being sent back to Chile after being in England. Me realizing, here is an 83 year old guy and knowing that he ends up in jail for the rest of his life. It has been 25 years since my father died. I’ve seen what’s happening in those 25 years. How some members of my family have become bitter and others, somehow through principles of love, compassion and nonviolence hated to not let that death of my father be also the death of them. A shutting down of their humanity, of their hopefulness of their optimism for their future. It is really the whole seven generations thing.

I’m resentful in many ways of my up bringing because as I said, I became of age as an artist during the Reagan/Bush years. The discourse was, there’s nothing here for you, there’s nothing here for you. It sucks. The world sucks. There’s no funding. There’s nothing. The NEA has been dismantled. Well, I’m not going to give that to my children and I don’t give that to my students. I give them, the world is yours. Do the right thing. You are the generation we have been safeguarding the world for. There are challenges here but it is going to be beautiful and you have the power to create a powerful world. There are people who died and fought for you for your lives. That is what I want to give kids. I don’t want to give my children, look this is what happens. When some terrible person like a Pinochet or Hitler appears, after he does his bad work, then you work really hard for years and years to get him in jail. Then you put him in jail because that jail makes everything better.