Support NOW! For the past week, we have been speaking with artists and friends in the art community about sustainable ways we contribute to various organizations around our own local home-base in San Francisco. Today, Juxtapoz will be donating and creating a print fundraiser for two organizations that are embedded in the Bay Area: the Black Earth Farms Collective and the Willie Mays Clubhouse Boys and Girls Club in our neighborhood of Hunter's Point, San Francisco.
The first print. We Free Kings, that we are releasing in partnership with If You Were Here Now is a work by activist, physician and artist Chip Thomas, who currently lives and works in the Navajo Nation in Arizona. Chip tells us of the print, "The source photo comes from the bicycle trip I did from the top of Africa to the bottom 1992 - 1993. This photo was shot at the Tanganyika Boxing and Swimming club set on the Indian Ocean in Dar es Salaam. I always loved this image and as a jazz head I love the song 'We Free Kings' by Rahsaan Roland Kirk which he recorded in 1961 and released in 1962. The word play is inspired by jazz and how we see ourselves."
The print is $100, with all proceeds going to these charities. 11 x 14, Giclee print on cranes lettra, 100% cotton stock, 2020. BUY IT HERE. The print will be available through Monday, June 8th.
The Black Earth Farms Collective is an "agroecological lighthouse organization composed of skilled Pan-African and Pan-Indigenous farmers, builders and educators who spread ancestral knowledge and train community members to build collectivized, autonomous, and chemical free food systems in urban and peri-urban environments throughout the Greater East San Francisco Bay Area." Their mission is to establish "food sovereignty amongst our community. We grow, harvest, and deliver nutrient dense and chemical free food to low-income, houseless, and food desert communities. We also recover otherwise wasted food from organic community gardens, markets, and backyards (with consent). We make our produce accessible to all people by providing sliding scale or free produce boxes, but we prioritize the distribution of food to students, houseless folx, elderly folx, indigenous, afro, trans, and gender non conforming folx."
Our second organization, Willie Mays Boys and Girls Club in San Francisco, is just down the street from where Juxtapoz has been based for the last 26 years. Their art programs for the youth is very important to the history of our neighborhood, and helps create a sustainable creative mental and physical health practice through the arts.
