We are pleased to announce that Interface Gallery has received a $1000 Matching Grant from the East Bay Fund for Artists at the East Bay Community Foundation to commission Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo to produce a large, public mural with Oakland International High School Students. The mural will reflect the colorful, pattern and text based style of Branfman-Verissimo’s work, which addresses social justice issues.

Branfman-Verissimo has lived in the Temescal neighborhood where the school is located for over 10 years. She will host a number of listening sessions to cull stories from students at OIHS. The artist will use their words and color choices to create a text based design that is vibrant and beautiful, but most importantly, calls attention to their stories, strengths and aspirations, and inspires community solidarity.

Oakland International High School is a special public school serving recent immigrants to the United States. Many of them are unaccompanied minors. The population includes students from over thirty countries who speak more than thirty-two different languages. Thirty-three percent of the students are refugees who have escaped violent conflicts in their home countries. OIHS is run by an incredibly committed, creative and caring staff and it provides tangible support on all levels for its students, including placing them in valuable internships, teaching digital literacy, providing emotional support, and, of course, teaching English reading and writing skills.

This mural is intended to lift up the voices of the students at the school, while creating a feeling of welcoming for them within our shared neighborhood and the broader Oakland community.

Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo is a queer, Jewish-American, African-Brazilian artist, activist, educator, storyteller & curator who lives and works in Oakland, CA. Branfman-Verissimo’s work is informed by her commitment to craft and community, her engagement with society, and interests in storytelling and cultural geography. Her work has been included in exhibitions and performances at Deli Gallery [Long Island City, NY], EFA Project Space [New York City, NY], Leslie Lohman Museum for Gay & Lesbian Art [New York City, NY], STNDRD [Steuben,WI], San Francisco State University Gallery, Signal Center for Contemporary Art [Malmo, Sweden], San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art and San Francisco Arts Commission, amongst others. Branfman-Verissimo has been awarded residencies and fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, ACRE Residency, Kala Art Institute, Dos Rios Residency and CENTER. She is the Co-Founder and Lead Curator at Nook Gallery, a gallery in her Temescal apartment kitchen.

Lukaza has dedicated her practice to working with the stories of individuals from various communities, using a colorful text-based style to lift up the voices of marginalized groups. The text used in Branfman-Verissimo's work often evolves from interviews and conversations with stakeholders in the communities where she works,

It takes special skills to have a meaningful dialogue with individuals from diverse communities and distill those exchanges into works that respectfully represents them in rich and layered ways.

Branfman-Verissimo brings a clarity of vision, a strong aesthetic style and the necessary skills for engaging community required for this project. Her community engagement skills and commitment to social justice issues were on full display in the recent Market Street poster series she produced for the San Francisco Arts Commission. For her project, which was entitled “On Whose Shoulders,” the artist produced nine posters highlighting words drawn from the stories of those who are being marginalized from, and pushed out of, the neighborhoods that run along Market Street—stories of house-less folks, of the LGBTQIA+ community, of artists of color and community activists, of the people whose roots the city of San Francisco was built on. Branfman-Verissimo interviewed and included members of Compton’s Transgender Cultural District Community, Skywatchers ABD Productions, Hospitality House and Transgender Variant & Intersex Justice Project. (Project link: https://tinyurl.com/v7gqt9w)

We are very excited to get this project started, but we need YOUR support to match our grant and to secure the funds necessary to move forward.

Make a Tax Deductible Donation here:: https://www.flipcause.com/secure/cause_pdetails/NjYxOQ==

Thanks for your support!