San Francisco, CA, United States
Fernando Martí is a printmaker, community architect, writer and poet based in San Francisco. His etchings, linocuts, screen prints, and constructions explore the clash of the Third World within the heart of Empire, and highlight the tension between inhabiting place / reclaiming culture, and building something transformative. He brings his formal training in architecture and urbanism to his public projects, including his altar ofrendas. Fernando studied architecture and urbanism at UC Berkeley, and has taught design studios at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco. Today, he works on housing issues as co-director of San Francisco’s Council of Community Housing Organizations. Originally from Ecuador, he has been deeply involved in San Francisco’s community struggles since the mid-90s, creating art for and with many local organizations, including the SF Print Collective, the Center for Political Education, PODER, and the SF Community Land Trust. His art and poetry can be found in an occasional 'zine entitled Amor y Lucha and on his Facebook Notes. One of his biggest frustrations is keeping his houseplants happy. He can be contacted at el_compay_nando at yahoo dot com.
Other Media
With Visioning Colibrí, I set out to visualize the future of Hummingbird Farm, an urban agriculture project created and stewarded by PODER, an environmental justice organization growing out of the…
We think sometimes that cities are defined by their castles and towers, their highways and skyscrapers. But they are also defined by their exceptions: their nail houses and holdouts, scavenged…
It is not that uncertainty and precarity suddenly landed upon our lives in 2020 with the pandemic. It is that our coping mechanism, to ignore the uncertainty and precarity that…
They want our home. Our home. For themselves. They think they have a right to our home simply because they have more money. We are fighting it. The buyers knew…
Echoes of colonialism and dispossession, enacted in the daily rituals of eviction and speculation. In her eviction notice to us, Tatiana Omran writes that she has been saving to buy…
Living in San Francisco for close to thirty years, I am seeing more and more of steel grey painted over the houses of the city, slate grey, gentrifier grey. There’s…
“We’re living in a strange time / working for a strange goal / we’re turning flesh and body / into soul.” – The Waterboys Perhaps I have different attachment to…
It was beautiful to be with the monumentality of Yolanda’s work last week, her three women, her running women, her Guadalupes, at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, ordinary…
Last Friday, Yolanda López passed away. As I put my head on her body, I felt other ancestors in her presence, my own mother and father with whom I wasn’t…
Futuros Fugaces was a way to explore themes and relationships that have concerned me for a long time: what it means to reclaim ancestral knowledge, how we re-imagine the future,…
This year, my son did not have to create a diorama of a California mission, like so many children in California schools used to do. Instead, the class studied the…
Above: Native-American activists Amy Anderson and Mari Villaluna, with Chinese-American elder Pam Tau Lee One of the leaders working to take down the New Deal-era murals at George Washington High…