Students came together to kick off Women’s History Month by
painting a mosaic mural
representing impactful women in San Jose at the Student Union on Thursday.
Women Empowerment Through Art was a workshop put on by In Solidarity in collaboration with Local Color San Jose, which included a discussion about women solidarity, empowerment and social issues.
“Local Color is a woman-powered 501.c.3 nonprofit, with the mission to build equitable opportunities to keep emerging and established artists active, employed, and engaged in San Jose, California,” according to its website.
Aminah Sheikh, speech-language pathology master’s student and program assistant for In Solidarity, said she wanted to work with local communities and empower them to work with students.
In Solidarity is a program that develops student leaders through social justice initiatives and fosters civic engagement under the César E. Chávez Community Action Center.
“I wanted to celebrate Women’s History Month and they are a woman-owned organization, so I thought it would be a good collaboration,” Sheikh said.
To bring attention to women’s empowerment, Local Color sketched a mural on 16 canvases, all six-by-six inches, each with numbered sections dedicated to a specific paint color.
“They are all going to have a small piece,” Sheikh said. “You’re not going to see the full artwork until it all comes together.”
Alumna Erin Salazar started Local Color in 2015, an artist non-profit led by four women with a mission to build equitable pathways for artists to thrive.
“I believe very much in the power of women and a lot of times the work that women do has historically gone unseen,” Salazar said. “We can’t go back in history to retell those stories so we have to start now.”
She said people have to be proactive in telling the impact and stories of women throughout history in order to help balance the scales.
Salazar said having one artist in the spotlight can be a “masculine” approach to creating, something she wanted to stray away from with
this event.
“While it’s not like overtly girly or curly,” Salazar said. “I think things can be feminine in a holistic way without having it be one person being the star of the show.”
She said she wanted to make it a point that students held the power in this event, similar to how she felt when she was a student at SJSU.
“[Being] in the Student Union right now is wild,” Salazar said. “Over a decade ago, when I was still a student here, this
building was under construction.”
Salazar said there was an ugly blue construction wall that wrapped around what would become the Student Union.
With the permission of her professor, she said she led a group of SJSU students to make the wall more than blue nothingness.
“It was the very first mural I had ever worked on,” Salazar said.
What were blue walls of wood a decade ago, are now self-portrait murals framed and displayed on the second floor of the Student Union near meeting rooms 5-6.
“Really, it seems like the organization started from that one mural project back here in 2009,” Salazar said.
Sheikh said the César E. Chávez Community Action Center worked with Local Color for a student mural in fall of last year for Rooted, a social justice music and art festival.
“I saw what they did at Rooted and it looked really cool,” Sheikh said. “I wanted to do a more intimate program with them to give them more, like, creativity and the students more creativity.”
Salazar said she and her organization jumped to the opportunity to co-host the
event last Thursday.
“In our mission to build these pathways for artists to thrive, [. . .] we are trying to put together opportunities for artists to lead very different types
of workshops,” Salazar said.
She said Local Color programs include commissioning public art to beautify the community and fiscal sponsorships that sees Local Color leveraging their non-profit status to support grants for dozens of community organizations.
In addition, the organization works to establish affordable art studios by corroborating with developers to reactivate buildings that are scheduled for demolition
“Because of this partnership we’ve developed with the César Chávez Action Center, we are starting to lean into bringing art to people who are maybe not traditionally artists,” Salazar said. “It’s so fun, and everybody deserves to have that much fun.”
Communications freshman Saray Mendoza said the organization’s purpose to bring light to women in San Jose intrigued her to participate in the event.
“Not a lot of women get recognized for what they do,” Mendoza said. “Women are really strong and I think it goes over a lot of people’s heads.”
Mendoza said she appreciated that each canvas had numbers labeled to a color of paint.
“I wasn’t going based off of my imagination and I’m not a really good painter, but I thought it was very therapeutic,” Mendoza said.
Salazar said she is in a lucky position to be able to come back to SJSU in her paint-covered overalls and guide students with expressing themselves through art.
“It looks like a lot of friendly and bright individuals from varied backgrounds and ethnicities coming together to paint,” Salazar said. “There’s going to be a bit of flavor in the individual piece, but when it all comes together it will have a
bigger impact.”
Sheikh said the mosaic mural will hopefully be displayed in the César E. Chávez Community Action Center in the Student Union by the end of next week.
