Sanctuary City Project
Sergio De La Torre & Chris Treggiari
Sergio De La Torre and Chris Treggiari have been researching and documenting projects related to immigration issues, specifically looking at the Sanctuary City Ordinance, for the past 10 years. Their artistic practice strives to investigate how art can enter the public realm in a way that can connect wide ranges of people and neighborhoods in a variety of communities. The collective has received grants and commissions for several foundations including the San Francisco Arts Commission, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Vachon Gallery at Seattle University, Kala Art Institute and For-Site Foundation. Both Sergio and Chris are based in the Bay Area.
On The Artwork
Art+Action partnered with Sanctuary City Project (SCP) to develop a series of silkscreens and posters with 2020 Census messaging: “Who Counts in America?,” “We Will Not Be Erased,” and “10 questions. 9 minutes. $20.000.” Together, we invited community members into conversations about the Census, as they created custom screenprints in Chinese, English, Spanish, and Tagalog, with Sanctuary City Project’s mobile bicycle print cart in locations across San Francisco: San Francisco Civic Commons, the San Francisco Public Library, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Versions of the posters were also made available in Art+Action’s free online open-source Census toolkit.
As Art+Action pivoted to online programming amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, SCP created ‘Undercounted’ an animation that was shared digitally via Instagram, which outlined research by the artists on communities historically undercounted in the Census. For Coalition Partner Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s online art+civic experience, Come To Your Census: Who Counts in America, SCP was asked 9 questions (mirroring the 9-question Census) around activism, community-building, and art in an interview inYBCA’s Zine.
