CompArte: The Ballad of the Zapatistas Art Show

Donations are welcome at the door / No one turned away for lack of funds.

100% of the donations collected at the door benefit Chiapas Support Committee Oakland and La Peña Cultural Center to continue important community programming.

This art exhibit and talk is to revitalize the relationships between local communities and the indigenous peoples in Chiapas through art and dialogue.

Come meet and listen to Bay Area artists that have collaborated with the Zapatista community and an update by the Chiapas Support Committee at 8pm. There will also be arts and crafts for sale by the Zapatista Women’s Art Collective.

The Chiapas Support Committee Oakland with La Peña Cultural Center present this CompArte artwork created by diverse, political and powerful Bay Area artists in dialogue with the Zapatista community.

The painters from Oakland and San Francisco participating in this show include: Jhovany Rodríguez, Daniel Camacho, Yescka, the Asaro collective from Oaxaca, Rafael Sanhueso, Andres Cisneros and Agustin Barajas Amaral.

La Peña Cultural Center is a long-time community space for artists, cultural workers, women and youth of color, queer and culturally rooted groups working in specific traditions to produce and perform works of social justice and solidarity.

The Chiapas Support Committee (CSC) is a grassroots collective based in Oakland, California, and serves as a center for education and information about Chiapas, the Zapatista communities and Mexico. CSC has worked worked with Indigenous Zapatista communities since 1998 to support and accompany their process of constructing autonomous (self-governing) institutions such as health care, education and economic production. CSC organizes forums and other events and activities to share and discuss ideas, analyses and human rights issues related to the Zapatista communities, Mexico and the U.S.

In this art exhibit, painters that create works of art imbued with symbols and images of justice, exposing capitalist exploitation and its inhumanity, share practical visions where our communities live free of oppression, want, poverty, pollution, racism and hierarchical suffocation on canvass. Social justice art shows us how to imagine the revolution.

CompArte is a play on the Spanish words “compartir” (to share) and “arte” (art), “CompArte: The Ballad of the Zapatistas” is a show of sharing art to help us dream a different world where we all fit and to show solidarity with indigenous communities in Mexico and everywhere else.