How this local artist is bringing art to Sonoma County amid the pandemic

Now, more than ever, Martín Zúñiga is determined to bring public art to the community. He just has new challenges to address.

“I have a new partner called coronavirus, a new partner called COVID-19,” said the Santa Rosa sculptor and painter. “The art shows I’ve planned are not going to be the same. It’s not going to work.”

But Zúñiga has overcome obstacles before. They are hurdles to jump, not roadblocks and dead ends. Local stay-at-home orders have been disastrous to the arts, but Zúñiga pushes ahead.

“I want to do more for the community to better this whole thing,” he said. “We need art.”

Zúñiga, a father of four who celebrated his 53rd birthday during the quarantine, is completing two projects while following social distancing rules. He’s making an instructional video on plein-air painting from his backyard for the Museum of Sonoma County and working on a 7-foot-tall mural, extending 300 feet, near the sanctioned units for homeless people at the Los Guilicos campus.

The video project was a response to coronavirus restrictions; the mural effort forged ahead with amended safety protocol. Others of his projects were canceled, postponed or left uncertain. For artists across the county, some grant programs have been paused.

The morning Sonoma County went into quarantine, Zúñiga had packed his art supplies and was ready to drive to Healdsburg High School to begin working with teens on a campus mural project. His wife, Chief Deputy Sonoma County Counsel Alegría De La Cruz, told him of the shutdown as he was leaving.

“The students were upset,” he said. The mural project, along with two others planned at area high schools, are on hold.

Last summer, Zúñiga led another public mural project, in partnership with the Museum of Sonoma County’s Youth+Art Program, Community Action Partnership and Creative Sonoma. He collaborated with nine adolescent girls and young women from the neighborhood on the vibrant mural of a rose at Roseland Elementary School in Santa Rosa. The “Roseland in Motion” mural was empowering for the participants and an example of arts bringing joy and beauty to the community.

But his mural project this year at the Los Guilicos Shelter Village for homeless people has been complicated by the pandemic. At the shelter, Zúñiga and fellow artist Amanalli Lu worked on the “Medicine Wall,” with participation from the temporary residents. The mural features numerous panels that include images like hearts, flowers and cacti. It’s intended to lift spirits and promote mental health.

To abide by social distance rules, Zúñiga and Lu would work in separate shifts, each picking up where the other left off and wearing masks and gloves while creating their art. They also would leave out a basket of art supplies so the shelter residents could add to the mural after the artists had left for the day.

While Zúñiga pursues artwork as much as possible during the shutdown, it’s halted several outdoor projects, including a large-scale sculpture project using repurposed 55-gallon barrels outside Santa Rosa’s Luther Burbank Center for the Arts and a towering 50-foot-long illuminated immigration wall installation outside Rohnert Park’s Green Music Center.

The quarantine also disrupted his work as a part-time teaching artist with the Museum of Sonoma County’s Art4Kids Youth Education Program, an outreach that welcomes students for tours and brings Zúñiga into fifth and sixth grade classrooms for hands-on art lessons.

Now, he can’t meet with students in person. His solution, to keep sharing art with students, is the plein-air video he’s making in his own backyard. In it, he demonstrates, step-by-step, how to paint an outdoors scene.

Art offers numerous therapeutic benefits, Zúñiga said, especially during crises. After the 2017 wildfires, he took mental health training classes and was part of the “From the Fire: A Community Reflects and Rebuilds,” exhibition at the Museum of Sonoma County.

“When you do art, when you talk art, when you see art or experience art you are stimulating the right side of the brain. If you do art, you become a part of everything,” he said.

Zúñiga allows that he’s become a role model for the budding artists he works with through the museum, most of whom are Latino. He was born in Michoacan, Mexico, the oldest of 11 children. He moved to the Central Valley at age 8 and, with help from numerous cousins, learned to speak English in six months.

He had barely arrived in the U.S. when he joined his parents harvesting grapes grown for raisins. By 14, he was a key employee at a cotton farm, working early mornings and after school driving tractors and managing irrigation systems.

He has compassion for those who’ve endured hardships and relates to students facing struggles around ethnicity and academic challenges. “I have to tell them I was there, I was there at one time right where you are,” Zúñiga said. “Then it’s kind of a role model that takes over right then, and I have to be a good one.”

Even as a third grader in his new homeland, Zúñiga was an artist. Dyslexic, he found a way to shine despite his reading difficulties. Claywork and drawings helped him communicate with his teacher. He also was a young entrepreneur, trading drawings for school milk tickets and cash from classmates.

In ways, he said, his learning disability is a gift, giving him a sharp memory and ability to figure things out, attributes useful for an artist. “My art became my third language,” he said.

He honors farmworkers, including family members, through his artwork. “I make it for them. I’m thinking of them,” he said. Through metalwork, “I bring that harshness into my story. I soften it up sometimes with color.”

Lessons from his migrant parents, from a mastery of farm machinery to personal integrity, run through his designs. Zúñiga didn’t pursue art full time until his mid 30s. Every life experience, every job, has become intertwined in his work, from the construction skills he developed after high school to discrimination he has endured.

Before moving to Santa Rosa five years ago, Zúñiga lived in Salinas, where he mentored youth as part of Urban Arts Collaborative. He lived in San Francisco for several years, working for the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. Earlier, he mentored several young Latino artists attending Fresno State University and was a guest lecturer.

Several of his public art sculptures in Salinas and Selma, in the Central Valley, were among the first in those communities. Although Zúñiga has displayed works in galleries and does commissioned pieces, his goal is to bring art to the public for everyone to experience.

“My art has never been mine,” he said. “I’m there as an interpreter.”