Documenting the Quiet Minimalism of MCASD

The world is a stunning place full of culture, nature, and really great food. To celebrate our annual travel and adventure issue, we tapped some of our favorite globetrotting photographers to help us experience life through their lenses. To tickle your travel bug we’re heading around the world to buy cheese in a Puglian market, stroll the streets of Osaka, and admire wild donkeys in the Oaxacan mountains. You’re guaranteed to come away longing for your own far-flung adventure. These photos are even sexier and more enticing on the page, so be sure to subscribe to San Diego Magazine for more gorgeous travel photos.

Matt Furman

Lucianna McIntosh

Valerie Durham

Andrew Reiner

Mario “OG” Lopez walks me through a maze of display cases: tapes, old photos, vintage DJ equipment. It’s all part of the New Americans Museum’s Beyond the Elements exhibition—a San Diego hip-hop retrospective and passion project he curated.

“There are four elements in hip-hop, and the vision of the exhibit was to go ‘beyond the elements’ and embrace the multicultural roots that are a huge part of hip-hop,” he says.

Through airbrushed jackets, throwback posters, and VHS footage, those four elements—deejaying, emceeing, graffiti art, and breakdancing—mix together at the Liberty Station showcase, telling the story of rap’s local beginnings.

“These are my friends,” Lopez says. “I’ve always wanted to show the art.” It’s a short answer to a long question about inspiration and ideas, about what goes into putting something like this together.

As we continue through, he points out a face. “There’s Zodak,” he says, gesturing toward a framed, black-and-white Tribal ad featuring the legendary local graffiti artist holding a name plate. Highlighting his own work (he’s a graphic designer), Lopez motions to the cover of Aztec Tribe’s cassette single Diego Town. The artifacts are a dense tapestry, a timeline four decades long of rappers, breakdancers, DJs, and painters, spread across two rooms.

It would be easy to recognize the players if this were New York or LA, but rap stars aren’t traditionally plucked from around these parts. There’s talent, for sure; however, most of it has had little influence outside of SD. That’s to say that this is a self-contained history, based on a homegrown ecosystem held together by storytellers, smooth talkers, and colorful personalities.

There’s no defining sound or even a single approach. Aztec Tribe carved out a lane as Chicano rap pioneers in the early ’90s, while San Ysidro’s Legion Of Doom (LOD)—who are featured prominently throughout the exhibition—worked their tag-team, Run-D.M.C-like chemistry into a formula that repped South Bay.

And while the vocalists were manipulating rhymes, local dancers were adopting the movements and body contortions of hip-hop’s B-boy element: a choreographed set of ticks, spasms, and spins that, in our neck of the woods, was part West Coast pop lockin’, part East Coast footwork. They’re represented, too, in the exhibit.

A wall marked “80’s Breakdance Era” shows off hand-drawn flyers and pictures of teenagers frozen mid-routine, rocking on linoleum. Inside a glass square stands a July 2, 1984, copy of Newsweek magazine that reads “BREAKING” in bold, white letters. And resting near the top sits a black medallion from the Universal Zulu Nation, an international awareness group and official fraternity of hip-hop—a true mark of legitimacy. The pieces speak for themselves. The hometown B-boys were the real deal.

That’s how Lopez got his start: managing a group of breakers called the Floor Masters. “My mom’s house was kinda like the home base,” he says. They were unique on their block, but the culture reached beyond his ’hood. It wasn’t until he and his squad ventured past their side of town that any of them realized breakdancing was everywhere.

“We didn’t know that it was happening in other neighborhoods,” Lopez says. “So, when we would go and perform at Balboa Park or something and put out the hat to make money … then [we] had other crews coming and [trying] to battle.”

Just as hip-hop in NYC was a byproduct of its boroughs (even though it started in the Bronx), rap’s local vernacular differed depending on its enclave. Aztec Tribe was based in Spring Valley, while Mario and the Floor Masters grew up in Sherman Heights.

From the county’s eastern edge to its downtown hub, there’s an extensive history documented in Beyond The Elements. The exhibit captures our rich heritage, one that’s worth exploring. And, as a narrative, this isn’t a nostalgia exercise or a trip down memory lane. Instead, it’s a commemoration, a nod to the hometown trailblazers who helped mold local culture through sound, art, and dance with imagination and virtuosity. A powerful message as hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary.

As my visit winds down, Lopez and I are joined by Zard One, an original member of the Floor Masters. We’re seated in the gallery space across the hall, and I notice his fingertips are stained with paint. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, he’s an artist and lifelong friend of Mario’s.

The docents are making their rounds, turning off lights and securing items. It’s a signal that I’ve overstayed my welcome. But, before I head out, I ask them both what they hope visitors take with them.

Lopez is first to answer. “We have tours coming in from different schools that are interested. It’s [about] educating the kids,” he says.

Just like hip-hop, the exhibit serves as a generational legacy. Each one teach one, as they say.

“It’s for the youth,” Zard One adds.

“I think of us as a culture of deniers,” John Halaka says. “We tend to shy away from complex topics. We tend to shy away from our responsibilities to the histories that brought us to where we are.”

The artist, a professor of visual arts at the University of San Diego, has spent much of his life immersed in those histories. Moved by the US Civil Rights Movement as a college student, Halaka developed “a deep-seated interest in justice and in human rights,” he says. He studied the history and politics of Palestine, eventually traveling there to interview and record individuals’ memories and stories. As a Fulbright scholar in 2011 and 2012, he spent nearly a year in Lebanon working with four generations of Palestinian refugees, an experience that deeply informed the pieces in his new exhibition at the Oceanside Museum of Art (OMA).

Entitled Listening to the Unheard/Drawing the Unseen: Meditations on Presence and Absence in Native Lands, the exhibition runs through February 18. Hung in stairwells and filling two galleries on OMA’s second floor, Halaka’s drawings—portraits of the people he interviewed, interpretations of the narratives they shared—are enormous, arresting, beautiful. And their meaning is undeniable.

It’d be easy to imagine the exhibition’s titular absence as emptiness, faint outlines, blank space. But Halaka’s work is the opposite. His drawings are densely layered, packed with stamped words (“RESIST” and “REMEMBER” among them) and tiny lines that coalesce into faces, hands, thorny vines. Approach too close, and they dissolve into visual snow.

“Absence and presence are essentially the two sides of a coin,” Halaka says. “When I engage with displaced individuals, there’s always this duality. They’re absent from the land, their homes; their history has been shattered. But all of that history is present within them. I try to visualize that by having two or more things exist at the same time.”

Some of Halaka’s most moving works superimpose portraits of Palestinian refugees over photographs of villages that were destroyed in Palestine in 1948—or vice versa, with the villages drawn over photos of the refugees. Faces, bodies, and buildings are rendered semi-transparent, ghostly. When underlaid beneath the portraits, the ruins appear as part of the refugees, giving texture to their skin.

A few pieces in the exhibition feature drawings of activists (including Lakota author Mary Brave Bird and Palestinian historian Hussein Lubani) on maps of the US and Palestine, visually melding people and their ancestral lands.

Other works, less layered but no less complex, are portraits and drawings made with a wood-burning tool. Thousands of scars form images on large panels of reddish oak, referencing “the cuts and burns that shaped [the refugees’] lives on a personal, communal, and national level,” Halaka explains.

I ask Halaka how he approaches the responsibility of translating others’ experiences for a wider audience. It’s a question that plagues me as a journalist, I admit to him.

He says that, in some ways, their story is his story—as the son of a Palestinian father and as an immigrant who came to the United States when he was 12, he shares many cultural touchpoints with the people whom he interviews, though he himself was not a refugee.

But even more critically, “I’m very, very aware of asking permission and of letting them guide my learning process,” he says. Behind each piece on the museum’s walls are hours of trust-and relationship-building with the refugees whose narratives he transforms into art. “I’m allowing their stories to shape me,” he adds. “I’m the empty cup waiting to receive knowledge so I can grow from that knowledge.”

Halaka hopes that, for museum visitors, viewing his art is merely the beginning of their own process of confronting the legacy of settler colonialism. “My drawings don’t tell the whole story,” he says. “They’re little stanzas of a much longer story.”

A Border Kindness group heads out just after sunrise. An average group is “usually around 8 to 12 people with an average hike length of 5 to 10 miles,” Cordero says.

James Cordero

Every week a group of volunteers heads to the eastern reaches of San Diego County, somewhere in the mountains, past the end of the big fence. They’re with Border Kindness, a California-based nonprofit that provides food, shelter, clothing, medical care, and legal aid to asylum-seekers, migrants, refugees, and the displaced along the United States-Mexico border. The San Diego chapter, run by James Cordero and his fiancé Jacqueline Arellano, handles the area’s water drops, which require arduous hikes into the deserts where migrants cross by foot, regardless of whether there’s searing summer temperatures or snow.

Border Kindness volunteers leave water, food, and clothing in canyons, mountains, and desert flats known to be frequented both by migrants and Customs and Border Protection (CBP, border patrol). They also remove trash from through-hikers and migrants who leave their personal effects along the rocks. The team has come across just about every likely scenario from border patrol apprehensions to encountering the remains of people who lost their lives in the final stretch of what was almost surely a long journey throughout the Americas.

A keychain left behind with the image of la Virgen de Guadalupe—patron saint of both the Americas and vulnerable people. It’s a common image seen on items belonging to migrants.

James Cordero

Aside from witnessing and experiencing trauma in real-time, there are other risks: in 2019 a volunteer with an organization doing similar water drops in Arizona was charged with two counts of felony harboring and one count of conspiracy. In the end, he went free with a hung jury, but the legal risks of unsanctioned humanitarian aid are real.

“We provide humanitarian aid for many reasons,” Cordero says. “We have family that has immigrated to the United States. We want to help minimize the suffering and death that occurs all too frequently along the US-Mexico border. When you have a serious issue presented in front of you, it becomes a moral responsibility to do what you can to help. That is what we do.”

A view from the top of a mountain ridge shows the canyons where migrants have to travel to try to evade border patrol. “Some caches are deposited over 5,000ft of elevation in the mountains, but most drop sites are less than 1,000ft, some below sea level,” Cordero says.

James Cordero

A sombrero lays on top of a bush in a very windy area. “We presume the hat blew off the head of someone traveling through,” Cordero says.

James Cordero

Border Kindness Water Drop co-director James Cordero poses with a consumed gallon of water he left behind on a previous drop. The volunteers pick up trash, including discarded water bottles, as they deposit supply caches along their hiking routes.

James Cordero

Border Kindness volunteers leave a supply cache consisting of gallons of water, canned food, and sun-protective clothing.

James Cordero

A juvenile rattlesnake, coiled up, camouflages into the decomposed granite and sandy wash believed to be transited by migrants.

James Cordero

Cordero scribbled a bible verse from Romans 12:13: “Share with the Lord’s people who are in need. Practice hospitality.” It is assumed that the vast majority of migrants are culturally familiar with Catholicism.

James Cordero

A camouflaged CBP motion detection surveillance camera was recently installed in a highly migrant-traveled corridor to track human movement.

James Cordero

A border patrol truck races toward the Border Kindness Water Drop team. After realizing who they were, they let them be.

James Cordero

Children’s clothes strewn about a hillside, at the site of a border patrol apprehension, shows the reality of who’s actually crossing the desert.

James Cordero

A Border Kindness group scales a rocky mountainside, scouting for traces of recent migrant travel.

James Cordero

Melody Moulton runs a small shop filled with esoterica in the front of her South Park art gallery, Trash Lamb

Madeline Yang

Ones to See

The most recent mural to go up in national landmark Chicano Park pays tribute to a major cultural institution of Chicano life: the car club, and the lowriders who created rolling works of art. The five-story mural is dedicated to Brown Image, the shop in Barrio Logan where many clubs workshopped their cars. According to artist Henry Rodriguez, he funded the mural and sketched it out using photos from his family album.

The painting—which uses lowrider-art techniques like airbrushing and gold flakes—took 10 months to complete and involved over a dozen local artists, including well- known muralists Victor Ochoa and Roberto Posas. The artwork features dozens of faces Barrio locals will recognize and completely covers one of the massive pillars holding up the 5 Freeway that straddles the Chicano Park playground. Murals are a huge part of the Chicano artistic expression, but Rodriguez says few, if any, have depicted the iconic car clubs. “It’s art as education,” he says.

The binational art scene is alive and well, thanks in large part to San Ysidro’s Casa Familiar. The organization recently ran a paid apprenticeship for 17 emerging artists in the San Diego-Tijuana region, which resulted in an exhibition called New Native Narratives (Nuevas Narrativas Nativas) at The Front: Arte & Cultura. Ones to watch include Natalia Ventura, whose Arropada is almost like an embroidered veil or a map to a continuous, somewhat convoluted journey; Evan Lopez, who uses 32 ceramic letters made from Tijuana River Valley sediment in She Gives Us Water to display natural links between San Diego and Tijuana; Adrián Del Riego, whose sculpture of an antenna with plants evokes both the shared flora and radio waves of the border region; and Casiel Sanchez, a visual artist and one of San Diego Magazine’s designers.

Created during the pandemic, Melody Moulton’s Trash Lamb Gallery in South Park is a leap of faith into the realm of quirk and oddballism. She’s struck a chord and seems to be nourishing a section of San Diego’s bohemian soul. Trucker hats get a cheeky graphic update and eccentric posters pack a visual punch. But Trash Lamb isn’t just another source of radical low-brow tchotchkes. Moulton, a visual artist herself, is a talented curator with an eye for the interesting. She curates shows at the shop at least twice a month, featuring work from local and national artists.

Cornado’s Kendall Becerra won the highest award in the country for high school musical theater

Broadway San Diego

Ones to Watch

Local playwright Christian St. Croix grew up as a working-class kid and only ever expected writing to be a hobby. As a result, his plays feature brightly written, honest-job characters from Black and LGBTQ communities, set in situations where compassion and grace undergird their every move. “I like to give the working class and everyday queer joes—we exist—a sense of magic and possibility,” he says.

Hailed by American Theatre Magazine as a playwright to watch, he recently debuted plays in Seattle, and his work was a finalist for the Eugene O’Neill National Playwriting Conference. Locally, his award-winning play Monsters of the American Cinema (which debuted at the San Diego Fringe festival in 2019) will be staged in the upcoming season of the recently reopened Diversionary Theatre.

It’s no secret San Diego is a secret theater hotbed. Playwrights and actors come here to cut their teeth before venturing to NYC and nationally renown stages like La Jolla Playhouse encourage a strong crop of homegrown young actors. Every year, the Broadway San Diego Awards recognizes the top high school thespians, then sends them to the National High School Musical Theatre Awards (The Jimmys) in New York. This year, they sent Kendall Becerra from Coronado School of the Arts and Ryan Sweeney from Canyon Crest Academy. Performing on a Broadway stage, Becerra took “Best Performance”—the highest award in the country for high school musical theater.

Lizz Huerta

Courtesy of Lizz Huerta

Ones to Read

Earlier this year Lizz Huerta, a San Diego native with roots in Mexico and Puerto Rico, released her eagerly awaited YA novel, The Lost Dreamer. It’s a story of Mezo-America, female seers, and life among indigenous peoples. Huerta has been on a wide-ranging book tour where the audience is largely comprised of young Latinas.

“Representation is so important when you are trying to figure out who you are,” she says. “And there are very few models that speak to pre-[colonial] contact culture. I would have loved a book like this growing up.”

Formerly known as The Grove, The Book Catapult is giving South Park some percolating literary cred by luring notable authors for its reading series—like the aforementioned Ms. Huerta, as well as national best-selling author, L.A. Times columnist, and San Diegan Jean Guerrero.

Co-owners Jennifer Powell and Seth Marko revamped the shop and envisioned what Powell calls “a third space” where books one might not usually find come together with people to build a sense of curiosity and community.

They’re featuring a long-running mini-exhibit of graphic art, curated by Marko, the latest of which is a charming mural by local graphic artist Sara Gharemani.

Digital Gym

Ones to Experience

Movie theaters have taken a huge hit, especially indie film houses. One of the last standing in San Diego, North Park’s Media Arts Center, closed its doors during the pandemic. But the biggest arrival in downtown culture—UCSD Extension’s Park & Market—gave them a new home. Now called Digital Gym, the 58-person screening room must be heard to be appreciated. It has well-balanced surround sound, employing 5.1 Dolby, and a sensitive range that allows sounds like footfalls on grass and breathing to round out the viewing experience.

Earlier this year, it hosted a Sundance Film Festival showing. Exhibitions director Moises Esparza is actively curating the most noteworthy new films from Latin America and Europe. What was once the East County Performance Center in El Cajon is now The Magnolia—its manifestation after an extensive $8 million renovation.

The 1,200-seat venue has improved sightlines, more legroom, better seats, VIP lounge, bars, and all-new modern stage lighting and sound. Live Nation is booking, so the venue will have pull. The debut season includes modern icons (Marcus Mumford, Andrew Bird with Iron & Wine), a strong Hispanic lineup (Mexican pop star Yuridia, Cafe Tacuba), heritage rockers (Pat Benetar), TV stars (Countess Luann), comedy (Kathleen Madigan), and something called Wardruna (a dirge-laden, melodic Norse language prog folk band born out of black metal—yes, you read that correctly).

The crew from Dice Roller Radio records a podcast episode at Imperial Co-Lab in Sherman Heights.

Madeline Yang

Ones to Hear

Every American is now given a podcast at birth, but that doesn’t stop us from loving them. Like Dice Roller Radio, a fun-as-hell pod hosted by a crew of San Diego and South Bay creatives focused on street art culture—recorded at Downtown’s iconic cocktail den, El Dorado. With over 65 episodes, the show spotlights local musicians, artists, and fashion designers, and now a monthly live show called Memoirs Mondays with live performances.

They also host parties, clothing drops, and other recording events at Imperial Co-Lab in Sherman Heights, an all-in-one coffee shop-boutique-salon-taco-joint-gallery-event-and-co-working space that’s owned by the same folks as Por Vida just down the road in Barrio Logan. Recent features include pop art-inspired fashion line Makeout Club, as well as dance, hip-hop, and electronic artist RyRy.

Multi-hyphenate musician Jesus Gonzalez has an ear for the eclectic and an eye for the beautiful. For his latest project, Tour of Enchantment, he created site-specific soundscapes (looping beats, poetry, naturalist lyrics) at various locations across San Diego like Villa Montezuma, Jacumba Hot Springs, and the Fleet Science Center. Gonzalez says he wants to show people, especially locals, what he thinks are the “hidden gems” of the region. So if you’re’ at one of these spots, take a moment and listen. It’s one of the city’s more creative musicians translating your current experience into a soundtrack.

IYKYK: It’s an apt acronym for the mauve behemoth of a building now called Pink Haus. Sounding like an offbeat German hostel, it’s actually an unpretentious, underground venue that has become the codeword for local music cool. Modest music happenings grew through word-of-mouth and a bit of social media sleuthing (one has to DM them for the address). Hidden in a backyard shed, the tiny concert hall is equal parts Andy Warhol’s Factory (silver-lined walls) and college dorm (comfy couches and all-ages). Three years after curator Gonzalo Meza decided to form this little art commune, it’s furtively become the hub for a rotating roster of emerging artists and musicians. Several bands are on Pink Haus’ own record label, Egg Records. Next underground thing is September 3. Happy sleuthing.