Adrian Arias: Tarot in Pandemic and Revolution

October 30, 2021

 Adrian Arias, is a visual artist, poet, performer, curator, activist, and cultural promoter, who brings together multidisciplinary artists to engage in community projects with messages of social justice, racial equality, climate change, peace, beauty, health, and hope in the San Francisco Bay Area.

He has participated in international poetry performances: The poetic Nights of Struga, Macedonia, winning the prize for the best poem of the festival, and is one of the founders and creators of MAPP (Mission Arts Performance Project) and creator of festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area such as: VideoFest, Luna Negra, and ILLUSION show.

In Pandemic 2020-2021, Adrian has been commissioned to create a series of pieces related to both BLM movement and his personal vision of freedom, like BLM on the pavement of the Petaluma Regional Library, the altar dedicated to George Floyd in Somarts, among others. Adrian uses his dreams as creative initiatives, which he makes come true in performances and community projects, such as his multimedia shows called DREAMS, or most recently Tarot in Pandemic & Revolution, where 24 visual artists and 43 poets from the SF Bay Area have participated. “Adrian Arias, the ever brilliantly inventive poet of the gesturing Word”. Jack Hirschman, Emeritus Poet Laureate of San Francisco.

 
Dr. Rupa Marya is a physician, an activist, a mother, and a composer. She is an associate professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, where she practices and teaches internal medicine. She is a cofounder of the Do No Harm Coalition, a collective of health workers committed to addressing disease through structural change. At the invitation of Lakhóta health leaders, she is helping to set up the Mni Wiconi Clinic and Farm at Standing Rock to decolonize medicine and food. She is a cofounder of the Deep Medicine Circle, an organization committed to healing the wounds of colonialism through food, medicine, story, and learning. Working with her husband, the agroecological farmer Benjamin Fahrer, and the Association of Ramaytush Ohlone, she is a part of the Farming Is Medicine project, where farmers are recast as ecological stewards of repatriated land and food is liberated from the market economy. She has toured twenty-nine countries with her band, Rupa and the April Fishes, whose music was described by the legend Gil Scott-Heron as “Liberation Music.”  

Pancho Peskador is a visual artist and muralist from Chile. He attended Escuela de Bellas Artes in Valparaíso and Viña del Mar, where he was introduced to printmaking and other mediums. Due to his interest in printmaking, in 1995, he joined a cooperative of printmakers, Taller de Artes Visuales (TAV), in Santiago, Chile. He was quickly identified by senior artists, Carlos Donaire and Guillermo Frommer, who invited him to participate in shows in Chile and abroad. In 1995, Pescador immigrated to the Bay Area and it is here where he developed a passion for street art. Soon after, he began to work on public art projects, primarily through murals. In 2003, Pescador and other Chilean artists and intellectuals from the Bay Area found the 9-11 Squared Collective, a group dedicated to raising awareness about the complex relationships between.

Jodie Kleeman (also known as Jójø Wildeflèür) channels Lady Dosis, and is the co-writer of Poetry Nap. Jodie has been participating in performance art since she was 8 years old. She loves the funny, queer, fabulous, grounded, real, and surreal, and is a self-taught, self-identified curious, and hilarious woman.

Robert Wyald—like you, every moment a coordination of many efforts throughout time, including trees, algae, sunlight, plants, and humans—has moments as a producer, director, actor, artist, writer, guide and multicellular organism symbiotic with plants and microorganisms. His most recent work includes the podcast and live show, Poetry Nap, La décadanse, and Knights of Revery.

Mara Lea Brown explores human singularity and relationships through charcoal drawing, painting, and mixed media with elements from nature. In her portraiture Mara enjoys the process of learning from the individual as well as from a phenomenological exploration of the human form. The search for connection and belonging are often subtly present in her work. 

Paul S. Flores creates plays, oral narratives, and spoken word works about transnationality and citizenship that spur and support societal movements that lead to change. As a San Francisco artist of Mexican and Cuban-American heritage, Paul S. Flores has built a national reputation for interview-based theater. He integrates Latino and indigenous healing practices to tell the stories of real people impacted by immigration and systemic inequalities. From “Along the Border Lies,” “Brown Dreams,” to “Representa!,” “YOU’RE GONNA CRY,” “PLACAS,” “ON THE HILL: I AM ALEX NIETO,” to “We Have Iré,” his most recent play, Flores dives deep into his themes. 

Mark Eisner is the author of Neruda: The Biography of a Poet (Ecco), a finalist for the 2019 PEN/ Bograd Weld Prize in Biography. It caps off a series project on the poet that began with City Lights’ 2004 Essential Neruda: Selected Poems, which he edited and was a contributing translator. Most recently, Mark co-edited the anthology Resistencia: Poems of Protest and Revolution, published by Tin House in 2020.

Kim Shuck is a complex protein. Both a bead artist and a poet, Shuck served as San Francisco’s 7th Poet Laureate and her work is danced in ceremony across the Northern parts of the Western Hemisphere.

Guillermo Galindo | Post-Mexican composer/artist/ Jungian Tarotist
The extent of the work of experimental composer, sonic architect, performance artist and visual media artist Guillermo Galindo, redefines the conventional limits between music, the art of music composition and the intersections between art disciplines, politics, humanitarian issues, spirituality and social awareness.

Susana Aragon is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. She works with paint, print, video poetry,poetry, video installation,costume design and education. Aragon has shown her work internationally. Currently the pandemic has shown how interconnected we are as human beings and how art can help to connect, process and imagine our spiritual world. 

Tania Esmeralda Padilla is a visual artist working in watercolor, ink, graphite, and digital media. Her work explores themes of introspective awareness, nature, mythology and the impacts of technology. Currently, she is based out of Santa Fe, New Mexico creating new bodies of work in illustration, animation, and interactive code based art. She received her B.F.A. at California Institute of the Arts in Experimental Animation and 2 Single Subject Teaching Credentials in Art and Computer Science from SF State University.