I’ve been painting and drawing for as long as I can remember. My mom says that I learned how to draw before learning how to speak. Spending the first few years of my life in a hospital, I fought cancer. After I was permanently released from the hospital my mom and I returned home to our apartment in San Francisco’s Mission District. The Mission was filled with color, murals, culture, and life. It must have been so different from my experience at the hospital that I’m sure it was as if I was Alice living in Wonderland. My mom was a photographer who had a lot of artists for friends, many of them were muralists.

    I helped design a mural at age five, under the guidance and mastery of Johanna Poethig.  She was my first art instructor.  Johanna was a friend of my mom’s who taught an art class at Bodecker Park in San Francisco’s Tenderloin District.  She is still one of my heroines--teaching and painting murals all over the world. 

    This photo was taken by my mom at one of Johanna’s drawing sessions for the mural.  It is one of my favorite artistic memories.  I was drawing and painting next to a young boy who had immigrated from Vietnam and was really good at drawing.  I remember him drawing an exotic bird. He drew beyond his age.  Though he was bringing in attention from everyone in the room, I felt that my work was just as good and important. I put my heart on my page.  This is what I think we all aspire to feel and achieve as artists.  It’s even more profound when several hearts are seen on the same project, or wall, in the case of murals.  

Over the last nine years I’ve worked with over twenty different groups in communities all over the Bay Area, helping to create walls that are filled with color, hope, beauty, and soul.  Though I’ve made many new friends, colleagues, and art connections, what is always most important about the outcome of these projects is that the community is moved.  I’ve had people of all ages, races, sexual, and religious backgrounds tell me how inspiring and thought provoking our work is and that it makes them happy.  It’s something I take with me when life seems at it’s worst.

               Photograph by Justine M. Perez