Julio Rodriguez

As someone who has lived their entire life within the SF Bay Area I have been able to witness how drastic the changes to the landscape have been, and am interested in researching more about what drives certain “development” and how that affects long term residents. I want to critically look at how people are affected by policy that prioritizes property. I want to explore feelings of witnessing the place I grew up slowly transform and become unrecognizable; how one day the place you were raised in is no longer home. My family experienced the effects of gentrification; slowly moving further away from the Mission district where I was born, until eventually moving to Richmond in the early 2000’s. I would continue to commute from the East Bay to San Francisco for school, memorizing public transit lines and witnessing how different lives intersect and interact in spaces like these. These experiences helped shape me and influence so much of my practice as a visual artist, and community member.

Graffiti has been a major factor that has shaped my creative development, and informs much of my practice as a painter. I frequently approach my studio work with techniques and materials I learned to use as a teenager doing graffiti. It has changed how I think about the scale of artwork and the significance of the context in which art is experienced. It made me realize the incredible amount of potential for artwork throughout the city, which I feel is often overlooked. I frequently bring finished paintings out to locations around the Bay Area to document in urban settings, like abandoned buildings next to train yards or on huge concrete walls beneath freeway overpasses. This has also helped sharpen my propensity for self-direction, to create an opportunity if there isn’t one immediately visible.