Art As Shared Communication with Mike Arcega

In this episode of You Can’t Eat Art, Clara Kamunde is in conversation with interdisciplinary artist Mike Arcega. Mike’s works range from sculpture, drawing, and painting to installations, video and performance. He is also an associate professor at San Francisco State University, where he leads the sculpture and expanded practice area in the School of Art. If anyone can demystify contemporary art for skeptics, it's Mike.

About Michael Arcega: 
Michael Arcega’s creative research is a poetic investigation around power dynamics and marginalized communities. He uses object-metaphors to make sculptures, installations, and activations that critique Historic and political narratives. This work has been exhibited in galleries and museums internationally and have been discussed in academic journals, art publications and a range of media platforms. He is an Associate Professor at San Francisco State University and heads the Sculpture and Expanded Practice area in the School of Art. Arcega holds a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Stanford University. He is a recipient of a Rainin Arts Fellowship, Guggenheim fellowship, Artadia grant, SFAC Artist Grant, Joan Mitchell MFA Award, Murphy Cadogan Fine Arts Fellowship, among others.  For more about Mike Arcega, the  Lucas Artist's Residency webpage here and Michael’s website.
Follow @Mike_Arcega
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About Clara Kamunde:
Clara Kamunde is an Oakland-based, Kenyan-born cultural worker practicing at the intersection of arts education and social justice. Her career began with the Department of Cultural Affairs, City of Los Angeles where, as a grantee for the Artist-In-The-Community program, she collaborated with community organizations to produce and present site-integrated programming in  traditionally under-served communities throughout Greater Los Angeles.  She is a Marcus Curatorial Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center.
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About the Lucas Artists Residency Program:
Established in 1939, Montalvo Arts Center is home to the third oldest residency program in the United States. In 2004, Montalvo re-committed to its support of artists by opening a new, state-of-the-art facility, relaunching as the Sally and Don Lucas Artists Residency Program. The residency is dedicated to providing artists with a flexible and expansive space in which to create, encouraging the creative process, risk taking, collaboration, and cross-disciplinary investigation of contemporary issues. The LAP is a hybrid model that supports uninterrupted time to develop new work, while offering opportunities to share ideas and projects through public programming and partnerships. For more info about the residency, the Lucas Artist's Residency website. Follow the LAP @lucasartres 

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Credits

Michael Arcega: Visual Art
Copyright 2006 KQED San Francisco
Source: SPARK: Michael Arcega

Credits:
“Syndrome” from the album Tide’s Arising Instrumentals (Mashibeats, 2024) used with permission of LAP 2023 CA Fellow Mark de Clive-Lowe; © Mark de Clive-Lowe/Mashibeats  

Podcast cover art created by Olivia Esparza© Montalvo Arts Center, 2025 

Transcript

 Episode 3: Art As Shared Communication With Mike Arcega

​[00:00:00] 
Michael Arcega I'm so thrilled to have you on. You can eat art. Thank you so much for having me. Today's episode is titled Art as Shared Communication from a Statement by Anthony Gormley. And as I was researching your work, I found that you have a lot of intersection with Gormley. You are both sculptors. You both make space and environment integral components of your artwork and thinking about your public works, you both have a participatory approach to art involving community engagement, and you both blur the line between artists, artwork and audience. So I'm especially excited to have you on to talk about. Art as shared communication.

So again, welcome to You [00:01:00] can eat art.
Thank you. That's really kind to pair me with such an amazing artist.
I'd like to start by asking you to make an introduction. Mm-hmm. And the person I'd like to meet is. 10-year-old Mike cega. Where is he? What's he thinking? What's his favorite pastime? Is he dreaming of growing up to be an artist and an academic? Demystifying contemporary art.

Wow. Okay. 10-year-old Mike Arcega. Was a fresh immigrant to the United States. His family was fragmented at the time, and he was staying with his aunt in Highland Park. Everything was new. Coming from an all boys school into a public school in Los Angeles, he noticed an artwork painted on the wall, a mural. It said BOMB. The O was a cartoon bomb with the round black ball that had the wick, and the wick was on fire. And [00:02:00] somehow that caught my 10-year-old attention, and I drew that over and over and over again. I started drawing then and I didn't stop. My classmate at the time, his older cousin was a graffiti artist and kind of our mentor.
I was a graffiti artist through high school until I got turned in and I decided to do fine art. Uh, okay. Back up just a little bit. I've read that as a child you had a fascination with language. Oh yeah. And so first is the word bomb. It's a very active word with that image. The explosive. Yeah. The textual and the graphic captures your attention. Yeah. That leads. To an involvement with graffiti art, right? Yeah.
So I wasn't tagging much. I filled in murals, hung out, and drew a lot. I was more interested in abstracting words and finding fonts. I would only realize the value of that [00:03:00] time. When I went to the San Francisco Art Institute and studied under Carlos Villa, he coined this term street scholarship, finding value in vernacular arts, how that kind of learning is just as valuable as college. I had been interested in punning this whole time and learning at the Art Institute that the abstraction of words in graffiti was very similar to the linguistic abstraction of words. So using the Tagalog Filipino accent that I had to dislodge English. It is contextually the source of my practice. Mm. So, you know, these jokes are "Use this word in a sentence." Mm-hmm. And my favorite one is masturbation. You're meant to imagine whatever you're imagining when using masturbation in a sentence. Using the Tagalog accent, it would be: "A lot of third world countries suffer from mass starvation." And the accent dislodged masturbation and turned it into mass starvation, and [00:04:00] suddenly you're in this twist with a conflicting idea of pleasure and suffering. It has that duality. As a younger artist, a visual abstraction of graffiti and this conceptual auditory play with words was very similar.
You've said, and I quote, 

My art and teaching practices are symbiotic, consciously evolving to remain relevant in our dynamic cultural landscape. I connect students with artist citizens committed to social justice and ethical cultural production, demystifying the contemporary visual art. Field while inspiring them to explore modalities that enrich both their communities and the broader artistic discourse.

It's a statement made in academic language. Mm-hmm. To a certain extent. So could you code switch and unpack it? Speak to my art skeptic and explain what you mean. [00:05:00] Yeah, there's a lot to unpack. It's a privilege that I'm making art and I feel very lucky that I'm able to teach it. I didn't even think that I would ever be a professor. Carlos was the first one to have mentioned the inclusion of teaching in his art practice that planted the seed. When I was considering where my life was gonna head that was an open door because of him. He taught painting, but he also taught a class called Worlds in Collision, and the idea of culture production being this neutral plane that we all contribute to, it comes from that. He wasn't putting any hierarchies between like street art or gallery art, public art, it's all the same plane, whether it's in food, visual arts, and music. All of that is contributing to our great work as people on this planet.
Your portfolio has a lot of public art. Touch on your thoughts about enriching community [00:06:00] through art. Yeah, public art is a really interesting place to make work. I think all art is to a certain degree public, especially with the internet, the permanent public art that I've done, I really consider the people that live in the area and will engage with it, whether it be a gate, a bench, or a static wall piece. When making public art, there's another layer of responsibility because it needs to be in direct relationship to the people that live there. Whether it's signaling cultural history, a moment in time, or just helps beautify the landscape. Those things are important. That's the difference between the way I make public art and gallery art. The gallery art tends to have more pointed criticism. In the public realm, less political critique.

I wanna segue to gallery art and play some audio that's a response to your first solo exhibition Getting Mid [00:07:00] Evil at the Heather Marks Gallery.
The gallery opening is packed. The humorous, commercial and religious references in the work are not lost on this crowd. It's one thing to go to a gallery and see really conceptual art, and it's another thing to go to a gallery and see. Pieces that are not only funny, are not only relevant, but are just amazing objects in and of themselves.

So there's funny, relevant, amazing. You deal with such heavy topics, colonialism, injustice, the fraught political landscape, cultural identity. Mm-hmm. But your work is still very accessible. Mm-hmm. Thinking about. Accessibility. Talk about play and humor in your work.

Thanks for bringing out that gem. That was such a kind quote. I use humor to disarm the viewer and talk about serious subject matter in a more honest way. Mm-hmm. You make someone smile and it's a dialogue. There's a kind of [00:08:00] trust there, and then you can talk about serious things once you've established that, and also, I really value craft. It's intersecting really well crafted objects with an interesting conceptual premise in the work. That's my art home. I want my work to resonate. Both as an object that the viewer can enjoy just as a thing. Mm-hmm. But then if you really want to dig in and start peeling the layers and go deeper and deeper, then there's a treat there. Maybe that treat is sweet, maybe something salty, and maybe that treat is really spicy. It depends on the issue I'm grappling with in the making of that work.

There's a playfulness in your work. Talk about that.

I love the notion of play. Play is often written off as something light and dismissible like, oh, you're an artist. That's nice that you can have fun in your [00:09:00] studio and play. But I think of play. In an anthropological way, I think of play as a good model for how we create culture. Play has generated all of these different modalities. My collaborators, Rachel Lastimosa and Paolo Ascuncion and I, we have a tricycle and do karaoke in the streets of Chinatown. And then collect stories from immigrant folks expressing grief and loss from migrating with the same artwork. And do it on the sidewalk. The evolution of contemporary art is like that. A lot of folks have this idea of art as being a static thing that hasn't evolved. They think of Picasso, maybe they think of Michelangelo and hundreds of years ago, you know. I love that art isn't fixed, that art is continuing to evolve. Because it's a cultural product, and culture is alive and culture shifts.

So you've evolved from so-called street art. Mm-hmm. Which, um, [00:10:00] to a certain extent is a little pejorative because art is art. Mm-hmm. To creating gallery based. Art. Yeah. And you are also an academic worlds that seem very remote and accessible to a lot of people. Mm-hmm. What I've noticed. About your work is that you are straddling these worlds.

Mm-hmm. Being an immigrant from the Philippines has all of these cultural overlays. I am used to code switching to being around different types of people. There's a lot of slippage between how one would handle themselves in a gallery setting as an artist versus in a public art setting, versus in TNT Tricycle activation. But it's still me all the way through and I don't think I'm necessarily have evolved from street art. Mm-hmm. You know, it's the same continuum. In almost every talk I give, I still talk about graffiti art as core in my work.

I wanna go back to [00:11:00] the Gormley quote and I will read it. 

Art is about one person's expectation and their use of their own freedom to act. Art is optimistic because it makes a statement that one person can change the world even if that world exists. On a tiny piece of paper, five by seven inches. Art as an act of shared communication is in a small way saying, I make the world. I don't simply inherit it. 

And in the context of straddling different worlds, you play with language and cultural symbols and signifiers. Tell me about how you choose what to use to create a narrative or to create surprise. Yeah.

Wow. Thanks for that question. That's a thing that I've been thinking a lot about, but this is kind of the first time I'm gonna hopefully [00:12:00] articulate it. When I'm composing an artwork, I'm composing in mostly three dimensions. Mm-hmm. But I'm also composing in time. I'm also composing with cultural signifiers and political narratives and history. Mm-hmm. One of the early works working with multiple dimensions of composing was a work called Spam Maps. These are maps
made out of spam because if you flip spam, this luncheon meet that the army and the service used as a ration in World War II, you get maps. I grew up with it in the Philippines and many areas in the Pacific have grown, enjoy spam because of that time period. Here's the material that is like a low relief map, slice, spam, that's kind of off the wall. And I'm composing with historical background, the material history, real spam. There's the humor [00:13:00] dimension, what the material signifies to us. And then there's history. And a Filipino made tricycle driving over the Golden Gate Bridge is significant because here is one of the most important American monuments, and here is the small, ubiquitous Filipino object that is rare in the United States and the gesture of going across the bridge with other Filipino writers signal a presence to other immigrants on this landscape. So to one degree we are then composing on a global scale. We are in the Bay Area, but it resonated in the Philippines and went viral in the Philippines. That collaborative project is exploring different modalities. Once you pull that kind of Duchampian move, taking this ready-made and from one context and placing it at another context, mm-hmm. suddenly it's elevated as an artwork. When it was shown at the Asian Art Museum, it literally was on a pedestal. And many [00:14:00] contemporary artists composed this way. Like with social practice, which is composing situations that the public or the audience engages. You have to plan it. Similar to where do I put this triangle on this white surface? Where am I gonna add a touch of blue or red? All of those different decisions the artist needs to make. I've slowly learned to think about composition in that way.

Something about your work, and maybe you can speak to this, if it resonates, there's this element of subtly subversive, Yeah, and transgressive, yet counterintuitively and optimistic pushing against the status quo. Yeah. Is that an intention? 

Yeah. I think the optimism might come from a kind of cultural way. I'm typically optimistic, just in general. Maybe that's the part that comes through a lot of my work has to do with being present and existing and [00:15:00] participating. Whether it's the Tricycle TNT tricycle project - by the way, TNT is a code word, an acronym for "Tago ng Tago” which is Filipino code for someone who's undocumented. So it's not dynamite. But thinking about the optimism of being in a place that has been prohibited. Even though I've been here most of my life in the United States, there are plenty of times when I've felt unwelcome. Joy and play are generative. We're both immigrants, um, and being in a new place, that's how we, we maintain, that's how we keep going. It leads to resilience.

Talk about TNT and the fellowship from the Rainin and Foundation. Yeah. The Tricycle Project is composed of Paolo Asuncion and then Rachel Lastimosa and myself. Getting the Arts Fellowship was a clear signal that we are doing something right. It's [00:16:00] validation, and it's such a huge honor. That project has grown. It started as a sculpture that was meant to exist on the streets, just to be seen and be present, and to signal presence of Filipino American community. We amped up the collective singing part of it, giving light and joy; and then thinking about the other side of that joy, we've been collecting stories about immigration and the grief and the loss around that - we're calling it TNT Side Notes, and it gives opportunity to explore that side of an immigration story.

I love the full circle of starting as a young kid. Mm-hmm. With the word bomb and then coming to TNT. It's a beautiful, oh yeah. Oh my God. I did not connect that. Wow. It's a [00:17:00] really beautiful circle.

Well, Michael, we could talk and talk. Forever. I want to say thank you for infusing this world that you make with humor, joy, and playfulness. It's critical at this time. I so look forward to singing with TNT again. Yes, it would be great to have you back. Thank you so much. Oh, and let's keep the conversation going.
Yeah. Oh my. I'm grateful for this opportunity to talk and share. Yeah. Yeah. And it's been such a pleasure. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.