During a Zoom gathering filled with cheer, chatter and enthusiasm, Local Color, a woman-owned nonprofit, unveiled two new murals at the Billy DeFrank LGBTQ Community Center by artists Matty Heimgartner and Sarah Gendler.
The center provides community, leadership, advocacy, service and support to Silicon Valley’s LGBTQ+ community.
The center livestreamed the event over Zoom on Nov. 23 and San Jose City Councilwoman Dev Davis and president of The Billy DeFrank center Gabrielle Antolovich attended the event alongside Local Color organizers and a supporting audience.
“This project was facilitated by Local Color and we are a woman owned and operated [nonprofit] dedicated to creating economic opportunities for local artists and providing affordable workspace for artists here in San Jose,” said Haley Cardamon, creative services manager for Local Color.
The center’s walls were decorated with murals because they were frequently vandalized.
Antolovich said she needed a solution to the problem and sought help from Davis to move ahead with creating murals.
“When you put up a mural, the people who normally tag, they leave the mural alone,” Antolovich said. “They also covered the murals with anti-graffiti covering, so if somebody does tag we can wash it off.”
Heimgartner said he began painting as a career about five years ago.
“I just happened to get kind of lucky and connect with the right people in the San Jose art scene,” said Heimgartner, an SJSU 2018 alumnus.
He was reluctant at first when Local Color contacted him about painting a mural, but eventually decided to give back to the Billy De Frank center.
“That center has such a special place in my heart, because I used to go there both as a teenager and in my mid 20’s.” Heimgartner said. “So, I told them, ‘Yeah, I would absolutely love to do that.’ ”
Heimgartner’s brightly colored mural displays a large tree with a heart in the middle and colorful butterflies with wings painted as flags representing various LGBTQ+ identities.
“I plugged the heart into a tree and then to make that work with the queer community, I put butterflies all around the mural and different queer flags to make it inclusive,” he said.
Heimgartner said he hopes to make people smile with the mural’s bright colors and evoke the realization that even with all our differences, we are all human.
“We're all kind of just the same, because we are like butterflies that come from caterpillars,” he said.
Heimgartner said our intersectional identities shouldn’t be the only things that define us.
“We all start the same and then we grow out into different individual people, I think that both in the queer community as well as differences in races, genders and every other form,” he said.
Heimgartner included pink elements within the mural.
As a gay man, pink is a source of joy and comfort to him but he didn’t feel comfortable wearing the color as a teenager. He incorporated the color as a nod to his progress and comfortability with his identity.
“I wanted to kind of give a nod to my younger self [by choosing pink],” Heimgartner said. “So it is kind of a little homage to that.”
It took him about two weeks to complete the mural, which he hopes evokes a newfound respect for trees being a life source following the pandemic and deadly wildfires this year.
San Jose artist Gendler also incorporated the idea of inclusivity into her mural for the center – including a single large flower with different colored petals and flags representing the queer community.
“This was my first public mural called ‘Fam Bam Thank you Ma'am’ [which] is about the chosen family,” Gendler said in an email.
The mural took Gendler four days to complete.
“I painted a primer coat of grey, sketched out my basic plan with white and black chalk, then started painting the larger background shapes and colors,” Gendler said. “Then [I] did the lettering and final details, mostly everything needed at least two coats [of paint].”
Members of the LGBTQ+ community who come out as queer are often not accepted by their own families and are instead taken in by others, Gendler said.
“[The mural is] a big, bright reminder that we are all in this together and anyone identifying under the Queer umbrella has a place in the family,” she said.
Gendler hopes people can identify with the mural’s message about family, connection and personal growth.
She said her color choices for the mural were a conscious choice to make sure dark tones were not used to symbolize negativity but inclusivity.
Gendler plans to become a full-time artist and is looking forward to being a part of the public mural scene.
Both artists hope their murals promote inclusivity and acceptance of the LGBTQ+ community into the larger society.
“I want to remind people that in the end we are all just people,” Heimgartner said.
