2020 - present collaboration with Planting Justice

In 2020 Hiroyo Kaneko, I began working with Planting Justice nursery employees supported by the Reentry Through the Arts and Kala Art Institute. The vision of the project has been to use collaborative art making to make space fore creative healing, generate joy and imagination, intentionally ground in values of abolition, and to transform the nursery space with installations that affirm the power and dreams of the nursery team as they work to create an organic food hub in the Sobrante Park neighborhood in deep East Oakland. The project has included cyanotype, stencil, stamp, poetry and screen-printing workshops. Malaya Tuyay joined the collaboration in 2022. After finishing a series of flags created from deconstructed prison uniforms and cyanotypes featuring native plants, now the team is creating work wear that features poetry, affirmations of their mission and native plants like pomegranate, kale and Hawthorne. Very soon portraits of PJ employees will be installed as a giant sculpture at the nursery. The support of Alternative Exposure is helping us carry this dream through the finish line!

The next phase of this project will shift to tell the story of the reforesting of Sobrante Park with Native organic fruit trees, a partnership between the Black Sobrante Community Healing Council and Planting Justice. So far almost 500 trees have been planted in the yards of neighbors through Sobrante Park.