Artists Cece Carpio and Miguel “Bounce” Perez of Trust Your Struggle bring a new mural to YBCA’s glass passageway in collaboration with SOMA Pilipinas. This new public artwork is viewable safely and socially distant along Mission Street.

There is no doubt that we live in trying times. Throughout the pandemic, Cece Carpio has worked with San Francisco elders to assist with their health and safety. This experience has made the universal need for communal care all the more evident. This mural, a collaboration with fellow Trust Your Struggle member Miguel “Bounce” Perez, and its title call upon lines in Tim Blunk’s 1987 poem “for comrades who ask, ‘what is to be done?’ during this particular historical conjuncture, a (partial) list of practical things to do” that remind us to check on our elders and to hold our ground. We must remember to tend to our communities, our loved ones, and ourselves, to see our way through this crisis. There is hope, and it exists in how we hold each other.

Carpio and Perez hold long relationships with both YBCA and SOMA Pilipinas. Carpio was recently featured in YBCA’s Come to Your Census: Who Counts in America? (2020) art and civic experience, and was a recent contributor to Caleb Duarte’s evolving sculpture The Monument as Living Memory (2020-2021) currently on view on YBCA’s 701 Mission Plaza. In 2014, Perez was a featured artist in YBCA’s Bay Area Now 7 where he created a mural outside the Blue Shield of California Theater at YBCA, celebrating San Francisco’s resilient sense of hope through struggle. Both artists have also worked with SOMA Pilipinas, creating a mural with students at San Francisco’s Bessie Carmichael Elementary School in 2018.