Weekend 2: NIAD Art Center

Watch the artistic process unfold live this summer at the Mini Mural Festival! Three partner organizations will each host a festival weekend during which the local artists they’ve commissioned will paint 8’x8’ murals outdoors at SFMOMA. Live music, DJs, and other fun surprises will complement the art experience.

Weekend #2 is hosted by NIAD Art Center, featuring artists Miguel Chacon, Deatra Colbert, Julio Del Rio, Luis Estrada, Felicia Griffin, Shana Harper, Esmeralda Silva, Jonathan Valdivias, and Christian Vassell with NIAD studio facilitators Andres Cisneros-Galindo and Nan Collymore.

Schedule

Saturday, Aug 14
11 a.m.–4 p.m. Live mural painting with artists Miguel Chacon, Deatra Colbert, Julio Del Rio, Luis Estrada, Felicia Griffin, Shana Harper, Esmeralda Silva, Jonathan Valdivias, and Christian Vassell with NIAD studio facilitators Andres Cisneros-Galindo and Nan Collymore
Noon–4 p.m. DJ John Everett and Live NIAD Sounds performances
Noon–4 p.m. NIAD Mini Gallery

Sunday, Aug 15
11 a.m.–4 p.m. Live mural painting with artists Miguel Chacon, Deatra Colbert, Julio Del Rio, Luis Estrada, Felicia Griffin, Shana Harper, Esmeralda Silva, Jonathan Valdivias, and Christian Vassell with NIAD studio facilitators Andres Cisneros-Galindo and Nan Collymore
Noon–4 p.m. DJ Bill Z and DJ Horse
Noon–4 p.m. NIAD Mini Gallery

+ more creative performances throughout the weekend by NIAD studio artists Eddie Braught, Luis Estrada, DeShawna Kinard, Halisi Noel-Johnson, Xiomara Rosales, Jonathan Velasquez, and Kiesha White.

About NIAD Art Center

For nearly forty years, NIAD Art Center has provided a contemporary visual arts program in their downtown Richmond, California, studio and galleries for a community of seventy adult artists with intellectual and developmental disabilities and twenty-two staff members. NIAD’s visual arts programs provide participants the time and space to make work; material and art marketing resources; and teaching and learning opportunities they need to maintain thriving contemporary practices.

About the Artists and Facilitators

Miguel Chacon is a figurative artist whose frequently politically charged work often has a pop art bent to it. Miguel has practiced at NIAD since 2013, and his work has been shown at OMCA, Walt Disney Family Museum, NIAD, and Art et Marges Museum in Brussels.

Andres Cisneros-Galindo facilitates printmaking, drawing, and painting in NIAD’s studio program and is a practicing artist working in print, painting, and mixed media. For many years, he served as studio manager and continues to be one of NIAD’s most experienced staff members, having worked with Florence and Elias Katz, the founders of NIAD, Creative Growth, and Creativity Explored.

An immense wrestling fan, Deatra Colbert’s works on paper, canvas, and textiles, as well as her ceramic sculptures, detail the ongoing activities of sports figures and actors in densely patterned mark making and portraiture. A practicing artist at NIAD since 1994, she has participated in dozens of exhibitions at NIAD as well as curated exhibitions at Mule Gallery in San Francisco and through NIAD’s onsite galleries and Online Exhibitions Program.

Nan Collymore facilitates jewelry and fashion construction in NIAD’s studio program and currently serves as one of NIAD’s studio managers. With Celia Lesh, she co-founded Soft Material, a collaborative garment construction project supporting and connecting artists living with disabilities. She is the editor of The Black Aesthetic Series III, contributing editor of The September Issues, Teeth Mag, and Contemporary And (C&), and a mother and interdisciplinary artist.

Julio Del Rio’s ceramics and works on paper depict powerful and strange humanoid and animal figures, sometimes etched with text or symbols, and often glazed or painted with bursts of bright colors. He has worked and shown at NIAD Art Center since 2007 and has exhibited at museums and galleries throughout California, as well as with the Arts Council of Steamboat Springs and Portland Art and Learning Center (now Elbow Room).

Luis Estrada’s work takes the languages of meteorology, public transit schedules, and worldwide wrestling as its pictorial subject, creating complex layered images from text and diagrams. He also creates poetry, dance, and social sculpture in his friendships and collaborations at NIAD, where he has practiced since 2004. He has shown widely at NIAD and elsewhere in the Bay Area, most recently with a solo exhibition at Richmond Main Street Initiative.

Felicia Griffin, is a NIAD studio artist. Here’s an excerpt from a conversation between Griffin and former NIAD art facilitator Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo, published in New Life Quarterly, Volume 6 by E.M. Wolfman Books:

Why do you like to make art that involves circles? I see that’s a repeated shape in your pompoms, prints, and paintings — where does that circle shape come from?
The circle is inside of me, a square too. I see it in the world too.

You engage with a lot of people while you work at NIAD — how does that relate to your art making?
Yep, I like doing it and um, I like to help out. It makes me feel happy. I started doing this: giving gifts…I am always looking out for who needs help.

Shana Harper is a NIAD Studio artist. In Harper’s own words: “I am a phenomenal artist who works primarily in printmaking, ceramics, textiles, and drawing. I want my art to expand into the world. Things that people use and wear every day. I want you to know that being an artist is the best feeling in the world.”

Whether using clay, fabric, or paper, Esmeralda Silva creates lively interpretations of daily life: a family house, fancy cars, and domestic animals.

Artist Jonathan Valdivias prefers moody colors but goes multi-pigmented for self-portraits. The resulting narratives reflect his perceptions of himself and others, emotions and sensitivities, as well as his mastery of painting in acrylic.

As a painter, Christian Vassell is mainly an abstractionist, icing layers of paint on canvas, or revising found objects with paint and mixed media. He has practiced at NIAD Art Center for the past nine years and has exhibited in Portland, Chico, San Francisco, and at NIAD in Richmond.