Our guest is Roman LC Martinez
Roman is a professional illustrator and a filmmaker in LA. He's founded the Film Reframed studio, and he's also working with a program called the Unhoused Art Initiative. And we're going to talk about how he's working with this program for people who are experiencing homelessness in LA. And we also want to talk about his work, Roman, we want to talk about your projects and also some of the things that you're working on to support these unhoused artists. So we've got a lot to cover in our short time together, but we're going to get through it all.
Prioritizing work
Roman jokingly thinks having ADHD is a driver for him, when he’s interested in something it's very easy for him to channel a lot of energy and passion towards that particular thing. And seeing that he has a diverse scope of projects and goals like contributing to the world, for him it helps if he hits a wall in one pursuit or maybe there's just a delay in something that he’s working on, for Roman, it’s very easy to shift over to the next one and to the next one. So each goal develops at its own pace.
His passion project: Unhoused Arts Initiative
Roman tells the story of how he started working with the union rescue mission, which is one of the largest missions on skid row in Los Angeles, serving the unhoused population. He tells of how he wanted to help artists who don't have access to supplies or storage for their artwork, create art that communicated some of their experience. And after going without a real expectation of how it was going to go. Roman had an idea to bring gallery-quality supplies into a situation where there may be artists who want to create something, and to give them the space and the time and the attention to do that, then maybe it will yield beautiful results.
Unhoused Arts initiative
Roman thinks that the interesting impact of the initiative frames this space that way because when you give people the opportunity to say what they want to say, you're really just providing an opportunity for them to be listened to. He believes that the unhoused population has so much to say that they're always sharing it with people and that the people that provide services for them sometimes start to tune that out, out of necessity for the volume that they go through. Roman tries to provide his full focused attention and just tries to hear what they had to say.
The mindset, from artist and educator to gallery manager
Roman tells us about the challenges in working with unhoused artists. One of which is you don't have an address to locate them by or a consistent phone number. Roman says they’re not in a state of mind to even remember that they made the art and often times many of them will get up after the session and just walk out into the streets. So some of the artists you will lose complete track of after you've worked with them. Roman explains about being a manager for these artists, how there's really no way to control that force of nature in that situation, that the best that he could do is report everybody's name who came in and record the story they shared with him while they were working on the art. So for Roman, it was about cataloging that information and, and keeping it somewhere safe cause everything just happened in a brief moment.
Roman’s next steps...
Roman goes on to explain that for the Unhoused Arts the next step is to do a personal fundraiser to get a high-quality art book made of the art that was lost so that they can at least show people what there was. Roman explains that it won't be the same tangible experience of seeing it in a gallery. But the importance is that things have meaning. Roman believes that that is the way to help the artwork of the artists and the space they were in at that time live on and continue to make an impact and hopefully create more opportunities for future exhibitions.
As far as Romans’ personal projects go, he explains how he had 10 large-scale oil paintings of the work that he does which he calls the blind portrait series. He goes on to explain that he will sit down with subjects in person, and continue to ask them a question about life or something existential, or even something just very minimal, but he would ask with the intent to listen.
Support the fundraiser
https://charity.gofundme.com/o/en/campaign/little-tokyo-small-business-relief-fund
Learn about Film Reframed online education project
https://www.filmreframed.com/
Visit the Push and Pour Coffee Shop we mentioned
https://www.pushandpour.com/