Welcome to another Not Real Art takeover hosted by Erin Yoshi for the month of March to celebrate National Woman’s Month. Today Yoshi sits down with two of her Trust Your Struggle crew mates, Nancy Hernandez and Cece Carpio.
Trust Your Struggle is a crew of visual artists who partner with communities across the world to fight for social justice using murals and other forms of protest action.
Nancy and Cece both have longstanding careers that occupy the intersection between art and activism, and we kick the show off by hearing about their individual backstories and the compelling projects they have been involved in.
From there, Erin, Cece, and Nancy take a trip down memory lane and share their different experiences of working, painting, living, laughing, and fighting the powers that be together over the years.
We hear about Nancy’s involvement in the painting of a two-block-long stretch of San Francisco's Montgomery Street in a protest that demanded banks stop funding the fossil fuel industry. Cece then talks about the work she did in collaboration with the Standing Rock project in reaction to the approved construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline.
The theme of fighting for the preservation of our natural resources has been a big driver for many of the interventions done by the Trust Your Struggle collective, and Erin, Cece, and Nancy share some memories of working in the Philippines, Palestine, and other locations to align themselves with issues of water, mining, and more.
To hear more about how Erin, Cece, Nancy, and the rest of TYS are fighting for what is right while weaving lifelong friendships at the same time, tune in today.
“Trust Your Struggle is a crew of visual artists, photographers, muralists, designers, silk screeners, videographers, freedom fighters lovers, all those different things, brothers and sisters. We form a crew, a community, but essentially, we are all just a bunch of homies who love what we do and do it alongside a community. We paint in different parts of the world to build solidarity but also to really elevate messages and histories and stories that are often not told.” — @cececarpio [0:04:21]
“It’s not our purpose to make our living by extracting resources from the planet.” — @nancypili [0:35:07]
“One of the intersections that I am most interested in in the art world is the intersection of art and direct action.” — @nancypili [0:16:49]
“We are visual translators for people, communities, organizations, and groups that we partner with, translating messages so that our stories can be amplified.” — @cececarpio [0:05:48]
Key Points From This Trust Your Struggle Episode:
- A quick intro into Nancy and Cece and their careers in art and activism.
- The main aim behind the Trust Your Struggle collective of using art to fight for social justice.
- What drew Nancy and Cece to social justice projects that use creative strategies.
- Bonding experiences and memories of being on tour doing work as a collective.
- The place of art in social justice and Nancy’s perspectives on defunding the police.
- Nancy’s experiences protesting climate change on Montgomery Street.
- Cece’s and Nancy’s experiences being involved in the Standing Rock protests.
- Erin, Cece, and Nancy talk about painting across the world on the Water Writes project.
- Getting involved in the struggles against the extraction of resources in the Philippines.
- Nancy speaks about protesting Trump’s presidency by unfurling a banner off of a crane behind the White House.
- Upcoming projects for Nancy and Cece, and how to find them online.
Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:
- Erin Yoshi — https://www.erinyoshi.com/
- Erin Yoshi on Twitter — https://twitter.com/erinyoshi/
- Trust Your Struggle — https://www.trustyourstruggle.org/
- Nancy Hernandez on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/nancypili/?hl=en
- Nancy Hernandez on Twitter — https://twitter.com/nancypili?lang=en
- Cece Carpio on Twitter — https://twitter.com/cececarpio?lang=en
- Cece Carpio on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/cececarpio/?hl=en
- The Indigenous People’s Power Project — ip3action.org
- The San Francisco Arts Comission — https://www.sfartscommission.org/
- Native Renewables — https://www.nativerenewables.org/
- Water Writes Murals — https://www.estria.org/water-writes/
- The National Domestic Worker’s Alliance — https://www.domesticworkers.org/
- Man One — http://www.manone.com/
- Man One on Twitter — https://twitter.com/ManOneArt
- Scott “Sourdough” Power — https://www.instagram.com/sourdoughpower/
- Not Real Art Conference — https://www.notrealartconference.com/
- Not Real Art on Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/notrealartworld/