Berkeley Figures

After living in Berkeley for the past nine years, I decided to find a way to meet some of the interesting residents packed into our little city. In 2022, I began photographing and interviewing Berkeley writers, artists, business owners, LGBTQ+ leaders, and personalities about their lives and professions. Thanks to everyone I’ve spoken with for offering their time and insights.

Interviews edited for length and clarity.

Jessica Ferri is a writer who recently moved to the hills of Berkeley with her husband, son, and French Bulldog Ralphie. Jessica grew up in Georgia and then spent over a decade in New York before moving to California. She is the author of “Silent Cities San Francisco” and “Silent Cities New York”, which explore the region’s burial histories, relocations, and notable grave sites. Now teaching in Berkeley, Jessica is also working on her first novel about art and motherhood.

So is this where you work?

This room is the reason why I wanted to see the house. I found it on Craigslist. And I saw this picture of the built in bookshelves and I was like, we have to go see this house. The dream was always to have an office like this. The first time my husband and I came to Berkeley was when we looked at this house.

Were you an avid reader as a kid?

I always loved to read. We had a fair amount of books in the house. My mom always had interesting books on the bookshelf, like “Wuthering Heights”, “Orlando”… And as a kid, I remember being really curious about them, not knowing what they were about, and not being able to read them.

I always thought I would be an actor, from when I was young. I have a master’s degree in voice performance from Brooklyn College, and I went to Indiana University to study music. But I ended up changing my major to English when I was there.

Do you still think about acting?

All the time. I actually just took an acting class at Berkeley Rep about King Lear. It’s more about having the time! I just started teaching last year at a private school here in Berkeley. It’s my first year teaching, and it’s a unique model. It’s one-on-one instruction, so the classes are student-driven.

How do you reach the more challenging students?

The job is called teacher/mentor. So they try to pair the students with whichever teacher that they think would be a good match. I learn so much from the students. The past three years have been really chaotic, but when I spend time with my students I think, we’d be alright if these kids were in charge.

Until reading your book, “Silent Cities San Francisco,” I had no background on the mass grave exodus from San Francisco to Colma, California, and was especially surprised by how many bodies were left behind.

It’s pretty common, actually. The way that we used to bury people was predominantly in churchyards, and as cities were developing they just ran out of room. It’s pretty devastating to think about. It’s the development of space and sort of just plowing over the history of the area.

Here in Berkeley, the Fourth Street development was and is a shell mound. God knows how many burials are still there. They’re 1000s of years old, and they’re just underneath a Lululemon.

It’s coincidental I guess I’ll say, the timing of COVID and mass deaths, and how we’ve dealt with the pandemic in the United States. You could see the parallels between sort of plowing over the past and the history and the dead and just moving on, like nothing happened. Nothing was there.

I also enjoyed some of your writing on Joan Didion and Shirley Jackson. Favorite stories of theirs?

While her essays collected in “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” and “The White Album” are probably her most famous, forever writing, I think Joan Didion’s novels are interesting too. “Play It As It Lays” is really dark and disturbing and very funny. And “Year of Magical Thinking” is perfect. I read it probably once a year. I read that she did a fair amount of revision — she would write something and then let it get cold, take a break and have a drink and go to bed. And then she’d wake up the next day and revise. But it doesn’t feel that way at all, it just feels like this sort of divine monolith that just was dropped onto the earth through her.

I love teaching Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” to the students who haven’t read it, because they wonder, what happened? What’s going on? I don’t understand. So it’s always a lot of fun. You’re exorcising the spirit of Shirley Jackson when you teach that story. Shirley Jackson was a genius; it’s a tragedy that she died young.

In your LA Times review of Karl Ove Knausgaard’s “In the Land of the Cyclops,” you quote Knausgaard, “All artists know this, that what they are going to paint already exists within them, as what Gilles Deleuze calls ‘the painting before the painting.’” I love this idea.

I’m really interested in artists. Most of my writing is about writers who are also visual artists or writers who are writing about visual art. I think I’m obsessed with artists because of the control I feel they have over their lives. Just yesterday I read this quote by W. H. Auden, “This fascination is not due to the nature of art itself, but to the way in which the artist works; he, and in our age almost nobody else, is his own master. The idea of being one’s own master appeals to most human beings, and this is apt to lead to the fantastic hope that the capacity for artistic creation is universal, something nearly all human beings, by virtue, not of some special talent, but of their humanity, could do if they tried.”

Billy Curtis, director of the Gender Equity Resource Center (GenEq) at UC Berkeley, has been a force for change in the LGBTQ movement for decades. Originally from the Bahamas, with threats of violence against same-sex relationships prevalent, Billy followed in his sibling’s footsteps and moved to the U.S. Attending the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Billy found himself accepted and encouraged by the established activist lesbian community who helped expand his understanding of gender identity. After getting his Masters from the University of San Francisco, Billy went on to become UC Berkeley’s first full time LGBT coordinator and eventual director of GenEq, devoting 23 years to aligning his passion for the marginalized with the university’s goals of providing a safe and supportive environment for their students.

Thank you for your time, and for all that you’ve provided to Cal and the LGBTQ community. You came out in 1978, correct?

Well, there’s the coming out and there’s the falling out. Mine wasn’t a coming out, it was a falling out. My gender presentation performance was coded very much toward the fem. I got called sissy before I knew what the word meant. By 1978 I told my first person that I was gay.

I’ve had several types of coming out. I’ve had a long sexuality on many different levels, and genders, to the point where everything’s just basically queer. And using titles or norms based on what makes other people understand me in the moment and the context. So some days I’ll tell someone I’m gay, because it’s easy. And other times when it’s safe to unpack it, or to help folks understand how I’m being rendered in that moment, I’ll say queer.

If I’m doing a workshop and need to get to the point, I’ll use gay because people know that and we can move quicker rather than me becoming the center of the conversation. But I don’t do that too often, because that’s a lot of unpacking and a lot of airtime I’d be taking up.

Do you feel like we’re always waiting for other people to catch up?

I did in the past. But now I’m older and hyper aware of what I’m learning from the younger people.

What’s at the top of my brain right now is the amount of violence and violent language toward our trans community. That has me worried and furious. It’s triggering the warrior in me that hasn’t been there for a while. I have to be ready for whatever’s coming, because I’ve seen it before. That’s the same language that was used.

How do you manage to come in day after day and not let this moment devour you, to stay sane and continue to make progress? I guess there’s no choice.

Yeah, there’s no choice. People ask those questions as if there’s a choice. As a black person there’s no choice. I don’t get to put my skin color away.

But how do we continue to survive and be happy in our own lives, while still fighting, beyond voting?

Thank you for saying vote (laughs). One day at a time, one foot in front of the other. And I can’t allow folk’s judgments or assessments to bug me.

I’ve read that your feminist roots came from your time at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst.

I was raised by the lesbian wolves of Northampton. They took me under their wings. I absolutely have no idea why I was this queen. These lesbians loved me. And I loved them.

One time during Awareness Week, I was with my group of women friends, and we were going to go out dancing. But first we went to see this speaker, who was great. Afterwards my friends rush forward, gathering around the speaker, as I was standing behind them. They’re mostly white. And the speaker points and says, “Who is he?” My friends push me forward and said, “He’s going to be speaking on the steps of the Student Union.” And she said, “Just remember to take care of him.” The speaker was Audrey Lorde, an amazing black feminist writer. Her essay, “The Master’s Tools Will Not Dismantle the Master’s House,” spoke to me very directly.

What do you make of the divisions we sometimes see between gay men and women?

Well, first of all, it depends on what time period you’re talking about. It was lesbians who took care of men who were dying of AIDS. It all depends on the political circles. Political spaces are far more gender and racially diverse.

I think sexism and transphobia still plays its role. It took talking to a lot of women, in particular cis women who identify as lesbian, to understand how to not take up so much space. So I think the infighting is so much around folks not dealing with sexism and misogyny, and gay men refusing to deal with the fact that they benefit from that.

How do you think student’s needs today are different from when you started?

I think we’ve become more aware of the basic needs around food and housing security. That’s increased dramatically. We now have a better idea of how many queer and trans folks are coming into the university. So what’s changed is the university is now recognizing and learning rather than the other way around.

I can easily take a look at that through another lens, “Oh, there are more non binary people.” What if they were always here we just didn’t have a language for it? We are talking about a community who hasn’t been recognized before, and has no opportunity to dialogue in the same way. So we have to wait another 15 years before we can say that there’s a difference.

Where do you think the LGBTQ community will be in 10 years?

If you think about someone who’s been observing since 1978, it’s cyclical. There will be an ebb and flow. I think in 10 years, we’ll have gone through some pain and will come out the other side. On the other side where there’s more space for trans folk. It brings us back to that MLK quote about the Ark of justice (“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”).

For someone like myself, though, it’s really always been about having the university prepared for what’s the next emerging understanding of sexuality and gender, because that is a constant. That’s a constant, but it’s more emergent.

Even in the moments where I’m like, oh, that feels very different, to not be what I’ve observed from other gay and lesbian people who push back against trans, push back against intersex, and now pushing back against non binary and almost join the conservative movement to beat up on gender minorities. And I see that and go, I’ll never want to be that.

Dianna Dar and Birgitta Durell own and operate Cult Crackers, an artisan cracker manufacturing business in West Berkeley. Their four-person team works out of The Berkeley Kitchens on 8th Street which houses a community of small food businesses from bagels and French pastries to mochi donuts and sourdough breads. Cult Crackers creates small-batch organic crackers, loaded with seeds (sunflower, flax, sesame, chia, pumpkin, and hemp) that are sold in more than 400 grocery and specialty food stores across the country.

How did you come up with the name Cult Crackers?

We tossed around many ideas from traditional Swedish cracker words to modern brand names. We also spent a day in Whole Foods going up and down the aisles looking at all the different CPG (Consumer Packaged Goods) brands, and that’s where Cult Crackers came to us. We liked the alliteration and thought it would look good on the packaging. We knew we had a good product, a cracker with a following, and hoped we would become like a cult winery (small boutique wineries). We were also inspired by the cracker culture in Sweden. Birgitta will tell you the one thing Sweden outshine America is with their selection of crackers. They have aisles of different crackers, hence the cracker cul-ture.

You two met and became friends as your daughters were in school together. How did this friendship turn into conversations of starting a business together?

Yes, our daughters were at the Berkeley School. Birgitta would bring her Swedish crackers to school events and everyone just loved them. One night our families were having dinner together and Birgitta’s husband, Mitch, asked Dianna, who has a marketing and culinary background, if she would help Birgitta start a business making and selling her Swedish crackers.

How do Cult Crackers differ from Birgitta’s original Swedish recipe?

The original recipe for our Classic Seed Crackers came from a Swedish friend of Birgitta’s. We adapted it by replacing some of the ingredients and changed the baking process so we could scale it for production. Our second cracker flavor, Crunchy Cassava Crackers, came from a request for a grain-free cracker from Three Stone Hearth, a local Berkeley institution.

What were those early days like as you quickly built up the business?

We started in 2017 subleasing space from Muffin Revolution at the Berkeley Kitchens. We would buy our ingredients in bulk at Berkeley Natural Grocery, and test bake recipes with a bowl and a few sheet pans. With every new store we would get into, we allowed ourselves to buy a few more sheet pans, so we were financing our own growth. We’re pretty scrappy and are still completely self funded.

Our first package was a compostable container that melted on sunny days at our stand at the North Berkeley Farmers Market, popped open during shipping, and didn’t stay fresh for that long. Along the way, we had to tweak the baking process so the crackers could withstand shipping. We’re now in a recyclable pouch that is heat sealed.

We still make each batch of crackers by hand, but now we have several hundred sheet pans and two bowls. Dianna’s husband, Youval, a physicist and engineer, helped us scale our production and improve our workflow for efficiency. If we’re baking 120 sheet pans a day and we can shave off a minute of the process, we’ve saved two hours of production time. It all adds up.

It’s definitely a labor of love and requires a lot of determination and drive. Every day, there’s a new problem that didn’t exist yesterday, so a lot of our days are spent solving problems, which can be fun, as well as challenging. When we started, the two of us were doing everything ourselves – baking, packaging, sales, marketing, delivering, bookkeeping, washing the dishes, and mopping the floors. Thankfully, we now have a wonderful team helping us. To be honest, it’s now much more than just baking crackers, we’re running a successful business, employing people and supplying stores all over the country.

How did your previous careers inform what you do now?

Dianna, a Cal grad, has a background in Marketing and a degree from the California Culinary Academy, and brings together the business and food background, and Birgitta worked for her family’s Swedish bakeware business and had a successful career in real estate.

What have your experiences been like operating a small business in Berkeley?

One of the reasons for our success is Berkeley. People here appreciate artisan, local, organic foods. Our community has embraced us from the many local stores who carry our crackers to the people who buy them. We still get excited every time an order comes in knowing that we’re making a product that people love, that brings us so much joy.

What other types of crackers or products do you have planned?

We’ve been developing a third cracker flavor with buckwheat flour that’s got a crispy toasty flavor. Because of the supply chain issues out there, we’re reevaluating the recipe, and still working on it.

Ian Wood, a Berkeley native, studiously documents local garages on Instagram at berkeleygarages. From lavishly themed garages as extensions of a house, to the vine infested and dilapidated, Ian has cataloged thousands of garages in and around Berkeley. Ian’s own garage door in North Berkeley features an unpretentious mural of Mount Tamalpais in the background, which holds memories of hiking with his wife when they first met, and California poppies, representing his daughter, and his dog Milky in the foreground.

How did you get started photographing garages?

I started taking walks with my dog around the neighborhood and up in the hills and I would kind of just get, you know, I hate to say it, but bored, you know? So I started to look at how I could entertain myself. Around 2016 I just started taking photos of garages for some reason. I put them on Instagram, then some friends said, you know, that look so Berkeley! You should keep this up. It’s a niche and boring thing for a lot of people.

I think niche and boring perfectly encapsulates what I often like in photography.

There’s definitely a market for niche and boring. But some people follow me, I’ll put up a garage picture, and then they unfollow me. “Well, this is boring.” I’m like, well, okay, it’s not for everybody. But it’s fun.

It’s interesting, because I think the garage, especially in Berkeley, is one way people can express themselves in a way they wouldn’t with the rest of their house. It’s kind of a thumbprint of Berkeley and what people are thinking.

My wife’s family are up in North Bay, Santa Rosa, Petaluma. I’ll spend the whole day trying to walk around and find something. San Ramon, Pleasanton, you know, all these big suburbs, there’s just not as much of this. People just leave their stuff alone. They don’t want to ruin the value of their home maybe.

Have you noticed differences in the way people decorate their garages from one part of Berkeley to another, from the wealthier areas in the hills to the outer flats?

That’s interesting question. Up in the hills every now and then you do see a really nice, really exquisitely painted garage. Actually, every neighborhood has got them. I expect to see more around campus, honestly. With all the students and young people, and there’s some, don’t get me wrong. I kind of expected it to be like the Mission District in SF, where you can’t really walk more than five minutes without seeing some sort of street art. And maybe that’s just because students are renting and they don’t feel empowered to do it.

When I’m taking pictures I don’t really know the demographics of who’s living in these houses. But it may not be a priority for someone who’s working two or three jobs or have kids in school.

Taking photos of people’s home or garage can be tricky. I assume there have been some interesting places that, for one reason or another, you had to pass up?

Once time around Gilman Street, near the beer garden, I walked down and saw a garage that just had an old diamond on it, it wasn’t even like a mural. And I was like, I’ll just go down as far as I can and take a picture and then some dude ran out of a house. I guess he was like, a landlord at an apartment or a duplex or something like that. And he yelled at me. And I was like, I’m just taking photos. But yeah, I guess if I looked out the window and saw, you know, people trying to take photos of my house, I’d probably be like, what are you doing?

Sometimes I’ll knock on a door and say, Hey, I’ve been looking at your garage, but it’s just behind the fence. Do you mind if I walked down your driveway to take a picture through the cracks? I give them my business card and they look at it and look at me for a long time. “What do you do?” And I tell them it’s just a hobby. They’re just not used to strangers taking pictures of their garage. But I’ve never been told no, you can’t. So it always works out.

Rosemary Mucklow moved from Edinburgh, Scotland to the United States in 1959 with her father, and later settled into Berkeley. She worked for 55 years in the U.S. meat industry, and served as the Executive Director of the National Meat Association from 1982 to 2007. Rosemary’s cottage-like home on Terrace Walk, where she has lived for 60 years, is a stopping point along the path for many Berkeley friends, neighbors, and wanderers. She turned 90 in 2022.

What first brought you to Berkeley?

My sister and her husband, who lived in Berkeley, were expecting their first child. I was 26. I had just done five years as a nanny to a family in the British Foreign Service. So I thought I knew something about children.

They used to come to this house every weekend for dinner, and he came for years after she died. The house was built as a single story in 1933, but I had a top floor added on so that my mother could live with me.

What kind of work did you do later?

I began working in the U.S. meat industry in 1961. I developed an organization representing meat processors. In public affairs, union activities, rulemaking issues, and so on. I still work a little bit – I’m the chair of a trust fund that administers pension benefits, and a chair of another that administers health benefits for union workers. So I’m very glad that I have an active mind.

I knit all the time and earlier this year made a nice, pink beanie and sent it to the Queen, and told her how much I respected her family. Thanked her for the leadership they provided over many, many years. And I hope when she was walking her corgis on the Scottish Moors, she put a little beanie hat over her ears.

You do what you can, and what the spirit moves you to do. My whole life has been bringing people together in organizations. And what is missing in our society today, especially in Washington, is bringing people together. To make them find the common ground. I used to hate the unions. I learned to get along with them. I learned how to find common ground with them. You know, they’ll never be my brother, or sister. But we can find common ground to work from. And that’s what’s so important. Issues that we share together.

How do you feel about unions beginning to surface again in America?

It’s one of the ways in which hard working, hourly paid workers can be heard. And if they choose to come together in some organization, such as a union, then that strengthens the voice they have. And quite often, those kinds of organizations are not listening to their employees very well. They’re so big. And so overwhelming. And they forget that these people work hard, late at night, early in the morning, because people don’t want their coffee at 11. They want it at eight o’clock in the morning on their way to work.

So I believe unionization has a niche in our society and we have to respect that niche. Sometimes unions forget that they have to represent people in those kinds of niches.

What was it like to survive and grow in an industry that must’ve been dominated by men?

Well, I climbed my way slowly. By proving I could do things that could really help them during a difficult time. In the 1980s I spent a lot of time in Vernon, CA, which was a meat enclave. Regulators became very high handed. I knew the Washington people and could get them to rein in the regulators a little bit to be more sensible. They didn’t have to persecute them quite the way they did. We put it all back together as a national organization, as it had been split up in 1946 when the Western and old Chicago Boys broke it up. So it was a very interesting time to build back the industry together.

Maybe being a woman helped me see it differently, too. I could crawl in and listen. I became very good friends with the chief inspector in Washington. His door was always open to me. He died in 1988.

And a few years later the love of my life died, and I haven’t had a love life since then. But we had a great sex life! He was a mate pilot – he got on the ships when they got inside the Golden Gate and docked them. Docking ships with the high tides on the waterfront was very difficult. And he was very good at that. He was used to taking tremendous risks.

You’re lucky to have settled into such a nice home and neighborhood when you did, and situated along one of Berkley’s walking paths.

I love to sit here and chat with people who walk by. Some days are more quiet than others. There’s a young woman who’s a caregiver for a 12 year old boy who’s fallen in love with my cat, Jackie. He comes about once a month, and picks her up and cuddles her, which she loves. It’s so sweet.

There’s a man who comes for dinner almost every week now. I met him through the Berkeley City Club. His wife died last September, and he misses her greatly. He brings his Newfoundlander named Napoleon which lays down in the kitchen. He’s like having a horse in the kitchen.

I love coming home to my little house. It’s very comfortable. I tell people I want to leave here in a box, feet first.

JC Orton is Berkeley institution as individual. Offering everything from free meals to tax preparation, JC can be found Monday through Saturday from 7:00-9:00 a.m. parked in front of Peet’s Coffee at Shattuck Avenue and Kittredge Street. Sitting at a foldout table in the back of his Volkswagen Vanagon, JC alternates between his phone and an open window, providing granola bars and juice boxes, housing resources, assistance with taxes and applying for Social Security and Medicaid, and bundles of Street Sheets. Then on Sunday mornings he serves breakfast at People’s Park and Civic Center Park, assisted by other local volunteers and members of his nonprofit, Night on the Streets Catholic Worker. JC hopes his legacy will be picked up by other local residents who can volunteer their time.

Lincoln Cushing is an art historian, author, and lecturer whose work focuses on preserving and elevating social movement posters. Though he’s lived in California for most of his life, Lincoln was born in Havana, Cuba, setting the course for his social justice discourse. Among a handful of books is All Of Us Or None: Social Justice Posters of the San Francisco Bay Area which touches on Michael Rossman’s thirty year, 24,000 poster collection. Lincoln’s website, Docs Populi, covers decades of essays and presentations around American, Cuban, and Chinese poster art, written by someone with a duty bound urgency.

You were born in Cuba in 1953?

My father was with the US State Department as a public affairs officer. He’d been a war correspondent during WWII. He always considered himself a journalist and reporter, but then a friend of his recommended the Foreign Service. My dad was freezing in Manchuria, China, and liked the idea of going to South America. By 1951 he was stationed in Chile and later Cuba. It was just one of those accidents of history that was sort of formative for me.

Years later I had an opportunity to go on an artist’s tour in Cuba, which began my introduction to the idea that there’s a need to document revolutionary poster art. There’s a lot of great stuff that’s produced out there, but nobody was really keeping track of it. And I said, Well, I want to do that.

Cuba, I presume, has certainly had a long history of revolutionary art.

Cuba has incredibly rich, potent, amazing work. There hadn’t been a book on Cuba’s human posters since 1970. And this was, you know, the early 2000s. So I did a book which basically launched my career as an art historian.

Nobody had ever done a book on American labor posters. Here we are, we’re a major country – you know, Europeans are much more astute to our labor history than we are. One of my biggest allies in this was a guy named Michael Rossmann who was a veteran of the Free Speech Movement. Just a wonderful guy, and lived nearby here in Berkeley. One of these classic Berkeley fixtures – barefoot, long hair, wild and crazy. He taught me how to roll joints. But he was brilliant in a lot of ways. We conspired to develop an archive of political posters, among other projects.

Were some of these posters based on your personal collections?

I’m not a collector – it’s a whole other skill set. But Michael was an avid collector who would dumpster dive and go to yard sales. When he died, I worked with his family to preserve the collection of mostly California and Bay Area work. His collection really reveals the strength of the Bay Area. I digitized the 24,000 posters in my studio downstairs. Michael would have just been so pleased to see his collection elevated so quickly, and shared so broadly.

There’s a large collection that I’m helping to shepherd right now that it’s going to a museum. It’s a woman that I knew in the 1980s who was avidly collecting Chicana Latina posters, and then all of a sudden she disappeared. Later I found out she died, but her niece had her collection of 4,000 posters sitting in a basement in Oakland. That’s a lot of what I do now. My new job title is archival midwife. I shepherd collections from private to public.

You’re like the opposite of a private art dealer.

Posters should be free, you know? It’s just fun. I mean, it’s my way of giving back. It’s a way for me to pay it back and move it up in the communities to make sure that the stuff gets seen and ideally inspires people to create more work.

How did the artist and educator Sister Mary Corita influence you?

I was walking down the streets of Washington, DC, with some friends, and we stepped into a gallery and saw a rack of posters with really innovative design and hand lettering, but they were also political. Even though I was surrounded by that type of work, I just hadn’t sort of absorbed how posters can be used to explore political stuff. So I was really inspired by her work.

My mother, who had been trained as an artist, taught me how to screen print. My friends and I apprenticed as screen printers in the DC area and learned how to make posters. I’ve designed and printed a lot of posters myself over the years. But ultimately I decided I didn’t want the pressure to be creative to make a living. So while my contribution was not the making of the art, it helped to have that expertise to understand how it fits into the bigger picture.

What makes a strong poster?

There’s a bunch of things. Hand lettering, illustration tied with typography, and you want to have a good balance. Does it work from across the street and standing up close to it? And something to realize is that you can have the most beautiful, powerful poster in the world, but if it’s just sitting on the floor of your shop, it doesn’t do any good. And so with political stuff, being able to align it with a community group that is actually on the ground, doing the activism, policy research, and the people on the street, that is where you can really make sure that your image goes somewhere. It’s a committee process.

I love the posters that are beat up because they were used. Tire tracks, blood on it, tape holes – that shows that a poster really had a life, you know, instead of just being produced, and then sitting in an art curator’s drawer for 40 years.

What were the first US labor movement posters like?

Unions were sort of the first ones to really have the resources to produce posters. There were craft organizations, but they weren’t really doing posters. And a lot of the early union posters were sort of racist – buy our American made product, because they’re not made by Chinese labor. An early example of a political poster, and one commissioned to push a political point, were posters about the slave trade, what they called the legal slave trade, where there were rules about how many enslaved people you could pack aboard a ship.This was to partly minimize the number of deaths. And this British activist said, I want to come up with a graphic to show how you pack slaves aboard a ship, how you legally pack slaves aboard a ship. And these posters were used to shift public opinion. This powerful image of slaves aboard a ship didn’t just come out of the sky. This British activist commissioned it to influence policy.

Goya created art about the horrors of war – people have always used imagery to communicate the horrors of war. But they weren’t really posters, they were prints. And a poster to me is something that’s deliberately meant to be shared with the public and widely distributed free or cheaply. And that separates it from a print. There’s always been wonderful prints about all sorts of social justice issues. But posters have another dimension, because they were meant to be on the street. And that level of public dialogue, which was, is what makes it a different thing than just a wonderful, sophisticated political image on a print. It’s meant to be actually part of the dialogue.

Do you have any government propaganda posters in your collection?

I’ve got a few. The ones that I’m interested in most are the ones that are sort of community based, the ones that are somehow developed as a form of grassroots democratic communication. I love to see wonderful artwork coming out of Chile or South Africa. Almost every country at one point or another has had great political posters.

One of my most proud moments was being sent to Chile in the middle of the 1980s, under the Chilean dictatorship, to set up a six screen studio at this small cultural center in Santiago. And it was terrifying for me. I’ve traveled all over the world, and I was never more scared than traveling to Chile, under the dictatorship, where you’ve got these soldiers with machine guns walking around the neighborhood. I mean, it’s like, genuinely scary. You start thinking…I have this suitcase full of silk screen supplies. They’re gonna throw me in jail. You know, this was not easy to do. But it was so wonderful for me to see a place where they are really struggling with the ultimate heavy hand of a dictatorship and the the spirit of the people with no resources, but with lots of spirit, doing wonderful street theater and graffiti and posters and poetry. And I was able to help them in my own small way to set up a silkscreen studio. That to me is the wonderful intersection of how allies can help people doing the work on the ground.

What do you think about AI’s impact on art? You’ve said that all art is derivative.

You see something, and five minutes later, or 50 years later, it cycles back in your brain. And I think there’s no shame in that. I think we’re all influenced by what we see and hear. This idea that artists somehow go off into some room and they’re magically creative. I think that’s bullshit, and in some ways that sort of perpetuates this idea that art is this special thing that only a few magicians can understand and interpret. When art got separated from craft… You look at most preliterate societies, you see incredibly beautifully woven baskets, or pottery. Well, you know, is that art or is that craft? When modern society separated art as this thing, it was because it was sponsored by rich people and had to have a separate track.

The thing about AI that I think is going to be really powerful is being able to ask, where did I first see this image? Very advanced image recognition technology can play a fantastic role in art history. That’s just one angle of it. But when you look at art created by a computer, the weak link in AI is crediting the source. And that’s going to require a lot of thought.

Four day work week?

Last year I went to France, and I was really impressed with seeing a society that has a much better life work balance. Americans, and capitalism in general, but Americans, we don’t have a good life work balance. Countries like Argentina, France, people are able to devote much more time with their families. It’s just a different world. I think that a shorter work week is essential in having more personal time and a creative life.

Karen Roze, tattoo artist and owner of Sacred Rose Tattoo in Berkeley, has been in the tattoo business for 25 years. I first met Karen in the early 2000s at her San Francisco shop and remember the relaxed atmosphere and good music. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Karen studied at California College of the Arts in Oakland, and then emerged from six years at Picture Machine in San Francisco to form her own shop in 1998.

Do you remember the sleeve you created for me?

I love this. I remember it very clearly, because you have interesting skin. I have maybe three clients in my entire career who have the same kind of healing skin as you. And I remember thinking of this tattoo fondly, because I really love the Hans Christian Andersen imagery and all the kooky stuff you picked.

How long did you have your San Francisco shop?

Ten years. I was a single parent with a five year old and a baby. So I was like, no more San Francisco commuting. I couldn’t deal. I had both shops going at the same time for about a year and a half. My impression of the San Francisco shop was that it ran itself and it was a moneymaker and it was awesome. And I was wrong. Because when I took my energy out of the shop, it freakin fell apart. Because artists are not business people. It’s rare to have both.

You later moved to University Street in Berkeley, and then San Pablo Ave just before COVID hit?

We moved in here on October 2019 and we closed in March 2020. And we were closed for 14 months. And the landlord insisted on full rent the whole time we were closed. So we dug ourselves a nice $70,000 hole. And I’m finally climbing out of it now. No relief from the landlord at all. Just awful.

My landlord on University was great. He’s like, I’m in the Lions Club and you should do it, and so we became friends. And now we do altruistic Berkeley things. I was the president of Berkley Lions last year. I was like, All right, let’s give backpacks for all the homeless kids who go to school in Berkeley. We did. Let’s get hoodies for all the homeless kids who go to school in Berkeley. I’m working on that now. My goal is to get 300 new hoodies to the kids in a month. As a 55 year old business owner, I feel like it’s my responsibility to give back.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Danville and I escaped. It was a very rural close knit community. I think there were 10,000 people not incorporated. And then by the mid 1980s, it was sprawling and they had Black Hawk and all of the housing developments down in the flats. We lived up on the top of the mountain opposite Mount Diablo. It was gorgeous. It still breaks my heart to think that I don’t have that house.

But it was a great childhood and really carefree and safe. But a pretty homogenous racial mix and a very homogenous middle class. It was the 1970s. Everybody was in the union. My dad worked for the government. Mom stayed home. And then my father died very suddenly when I was 15, and instantly we became one of those families that had a microwave, we each had keys, and everybody went to work. That was a shift for me. And at that shift, I sort of became liberated in a way – trauma can liberate you sometimes. And so instead of being a church girl who was in Danville and being really good and everything, I immediately just turned on to punk. Went full throttle. All my old friends started hanging out with the bad kids at the other school. But it made me blossom. It made me strong, and it made me independent. I made my own money since I was 15 and didn’t look back.

How did you end up in San Francisco?

I went to art school in Oakland at California College of Arts and Crafts and then moved to San Francisco.

I was working at Picture Machine Tattoo. I got fired in 1998 with the rest of the staff. Back in the day, bosses would sometimes fire everybody and get fresh meat if they wanted to make more of a percentage. I was pulling 60% then which is high. And I think he was like I’m not making enough profit. So I’m going to hire a bunch of young kids and give him 40%. So instead of crying about it too long, we all went to a friend’s house and cried about it there. And then the friend loaned me the money to open a shop. I went right to the pink section of the newspaper – which was the real estate section at the time – found an ad for a shop on Guerrero and 17th. And rented it just like that. I had no idea what I was doing. I just did it.

Do you have thoughts of retiring down the road or doing something else?

I want to paint now. My degree is in painting and printmaking. During COVID lockdown when I couldn’t work I painted every day. It was a blessing. I loved it. I’m one of those weirdos. I was like driving in quarantine, no people, no traffic, no time constraints and no responsibilities. It was the best. I mean, I had to pay the rent here. But I just sucked it out of my kids college because he could pay his own tuition. He’s at UC Santa Barbara so it’s affordable, and he works. It’s a good life lesson for him.

I’m blown away that I have contemporaries who are pulling their hair out because they have to pay $70,000 a year in tuition. And I’m like, why? I don’t put a lot of stock into education unless you’re self motivated education. Teach yourself stuff. Find out what you’re interested in. Take courses. Read. Throwing six figures at an institution is totally not in my wheelhouse.

Who did you learn from?

A bunch of people. The manager at Picture Machine, Richard, was my mentor, but he didn’t really teach too much except that he let me watch and eventually work there. I just had to figure it out. So when I teach my apprentices, I really have to stop and think about what I do. It’s coming from a higher place, you know what I mean? It’s coming from a spirit, it’s coming from the subconscious.

After my 9-5 job at Arch Drafting Supply in San Francisco, I would take the bus uptown and volunteer from 6-12 at Picture Machine. I’d bring them coffee, run errands, go to Kinkos to blow up designs. They all thought I worked there. Eventually I told Richard he should hire me because he can’t live without me. I’ve been here for six months. I know how it works. I’ve already got all the phone numbers of your suppliers written down. If you don’t teach me then I’m gonna compete with you. He’s like, Okay, but women don’t belong in this business. And it’s going to be real hard on you. And it was hard. But I just was like, well, whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But Richard was nuts. If any woman today were treated remotely how I was treated, then they would have either quit or killed someone because the young women I deal with now take zero shits, they will take nothing. Totally different world.

In the 1980s and 1990s you could literally be grabbed by the pussy. I was cute and very femme but I was tough. I was like, no one’s gonna push me around. You know, if I want this, I want this. Get out of my fucking way. I’m small and cute and can make you like me without being loud and obnoxious. It was basically getting sexually assaulted constantly for six months, until I proved that it didn’t affect me. And then all of a sudden I’m a bro. Pretty soon I was getting invited to have beers with them. I just had to go through the gauntlet. Still happens today. A recent artist came here to work from a shop in Oakland where she was being sexually harassed.

What kind of work are people asking for these days?

Almost all of my clientele want custom tattoos, because they see my work and they want what I like to do, which is large Japanese bodysuit stuff. Give me at least half your arm. And then I like traditional American, flash off the wall. Love it. Pinup girls, ships, skulls, dragons – give it up! That’s my thing. Give me an outline. Let me color it in. It will look great for the rest of your life. It fades come on back.

The trends do change. And they come no matter what kind of shop you’re in. The trend right now is outline without color. As far as I’m concerned, they look like they’re not finished or you can’t afford a real one. And then no color but soft shading with tiny dots, super soft. And to me, they’re all going to look old, within five years. I’m 55 and I can see how my tattoos have aged. I know what’s going to look like crap later. And it’s very hard to explain that to an 18 year old because they have no idea that one day they’re going to be 50. I remember thinking 30 year olds were old. When I learned to tattoo there was a woman who was maye 10 years my senior. And she was like a hag! She learned to tattoo in the 1980s! And now I’m like, wow, that’s me. Gray hair. OG sitting here in my kingdom.