Melanie Cervantes is a Xicana activist-artist who translates the hopes and dreams of justice movements into images that agitate and inspire. Her work includes black-and-white illustrations, paintings, installations, and paper stencils, but she is best known for her political screenprints and posters. Employing vibrant colors and hand-drawn illustrations, her work moves those viewed as marginal to the center by featuring powerful youth, elders, women, and queer and indigenous peoples. Her training began with her mother and father: she learned color theory while helping her mother select fabric for school clothes at Los Angeles swap meets, and she developed some of her technical skills by watching her dad repurpose neighborhood junk into her childhood treasures. Cervantes received formal training in ethnic studies at UC Berkeley, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2004. Cervantes fuses what she learned from this interdisciplinary study of racialized peoples, her art skills, and her strong decolonizing politics in order to serve as an “artist of the people.”
Sun September 1st Open 11 AM–5 PM