Roots and Veins Public Art Project for San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center

Entryway Glazing Soffit Painting, Visitation Room, and Light Boxes

Artists Johanna Poethig and Julio Morales integrate the voice of youth from Juvenile Hall into multiple permanent artworks created for the new San Francisco Juvenile Justice Center. The artists held workshops with boys and girls of various ages and ethnicities to develop themes for the artworks. The workshop curriculum included photography, media literacy, drawing, graphic design, botanical studies and a writing project in collaboration with The Beat Within. The workshops explored issues of social justice, youth culture, and the notion of personal roots resulting in the use of imagery based on plant and branch forms.

Four distinct art projects for the new facility were commissioned by the San Francisco Arts Commission in accordance with the City’s Art Enrichment Ordinance.

1. Entryway Glazing. Sand blasted glass in the building entry features a 40’ branch design incorporating text from Juvenile Justice Center youth, which reflects their perspectives on life with advice and messages for other youth coming into the Juvenile Justice System. The design is visible from both inside and outside of the lobby, with a shadow of the branch design cast onto the lobby floor during the day.
2. Living Units Soffit Paintings . Each of 8 different Juvenile Justice Center living units features a unique 9’x20’ color field painting placed on the soffit above the central staff station. These paintings are vibrant multi-colored collages layering text and plant imagery. This project brings color and life into the rooms where the youth spend much of their day in an otherwise muted architectural color scheme.
3. Visitation Room Light Boxes. Photographs taken of the hands of youth were the basis for this artwork in the visitation room, which serves as both a chapel and meeting place. The artists translated the photos into illustrations which were silk-screened onto plexiglass light boxes set into the ceiling of the room . The effect, when illuminated, is of hands clasping halos of light.
4. Residential Hallways. Low-relief sculpted plaster artwork composed of poetry and delicate plant forms surround the doorways into the living units, as a gentle counterpoint to the building architecture. The branch motif used in the entry façade and the day room paintings provides a subtle connection among the various art projects.

Julio Cesar Morales is an artist/educator /curator residing in San Francisco. Morales was born in Tijuana, Mexico. He attended the San Francisco Art Institute and studied in the New Genres department. His artwork includes photography, interactive media, audio, public art and video installation and explores issues of labor, memory, surveillance technologies and identity strategies. His work has been shown extensively in the Bay Area and internationally.

Johanna Poethig is a visual, public and performance artist who has exhibited internationally, creating public art works, murals, paintings, sculpture and multi-media installations for over 20 years. Raised in the Philippines, she has lived in Chicago and the Bay Area. She received her BFA at University of California, Santa Cruz and her MFA at Mills College in Oakland, CA. Her work is represented in San Francisco’s Civic Art Collection. Ms. Poethig is on the faculty of the Institute for Visual and Public Art at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her interest in the dialogue between the public and personal, politics and aesthetics, the ridiculous and the sublime and an inclusive cultural life informs her process and inspires her work.