Are We Going to Talk About the Chocolate
Yes and the oil and "careers" and curating the shows you want to see and fame
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7702a568-62a2-4cd5-a13b-671390539515_2743x3210.heic)
As artists who run a print shop, Esteban and I turn to making art as a survival tool and a form of resistance. It’s how we affirm our existence and make meaning. It’s how we live in unlivable times.
At the end of every month, we publish an edition of Making Art at the End of the World sharing what we’re thinking about and what’s encouraging us. We hope it encourages you, too. Most of all, we hope you make art, and then more art.
Are we going to talk about the chocolate
One night we watched artist Saul Williams and Abby Martin on Empire Files — we’re also deep in the process of watching Neptune Frost in time for next month’s newsletter (Shit, Neptune Frost is beautiful, the story and the visuals and the music and the people and the vision it projects. Tell us your thoughts on it, hopefully by the time we hear from you we’ll have finished it). To be honest, we didn’t finish the Empire Files interview that night. We did one of those things where we excitedly paused to talk about it and just kept talking, our sudden critical interjection overtaking the feed. Then, we put it on to catch the end again and again, falling asleep with it still playing for us more nights than one.
I would love to have it in my ears all day long — there was a sense of reality in their conversation, a feeling of my prescription being accurate and my perception of where I should put my next footstep more secure. And we felt less alone, too. The part that we cannot stop thinking about and talking about starts at around 7:47 minutes in:
So, Are we going to talk about the chocolate? Are we going to talk about that? Are we going to talk about the car? The road? We do want to talk about the chocolate and the coffee and the sugar and the oil and the rubber and the diamonds and the gold and the cobalt and the uranium and the clothes and and and and and and and and and and and and and
As Imani says, Which genocide?
For me, Saul is asking the questions in my head about how to live — but what do we do with that? We don’t eat the same way, that’s for sure. But we also make art.
A melancholic, ambient hymn
Listening to this song is like going to Wonder Valley in a teleporter with Brian Eno and a slowed down Hank Williams — the desert around you, the sky so big, the questions of the deepest self echoing in the cool, arid air. Put this one on when you need the air to feel full, as full as your heart. If you listened to the entire Ambient Western playlist from last month’s edition, you’ve already heard this one.
Being an artist requires also participating in anti oppression struggles
The meme machine reminded me this month that Ursula K. Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.” After reading this, I looked up from the phone and asked if this was true — Does the change really start with art? The art of words? Is what I’m doing the making of the future?
When we hit this question — one we hit again and again — we turn to this essay by Betty Martin, Christina Sanchez Juarez, and Heather O’Brien from Board of Photography, An Artists’ Guide to Not Being Complicit with Gentrification. (We write this from our fully stratified neighborhood that’s surrounded by hypergentrifying neighborhoods.) “We refuse to accept that pointing at problems is enough. Rather, we look to create a collective analysis, to “act our way into thinking ” — a phrase borrowed from fellow organizer Leonardo Vilchis of Unión de Vecinos.”
In far too many instances, the violence of the status quo is actually protected, guarded, and upheld in smug, self-assured condescension by artists with careers to protect when those who seek to rattle the cage more vigorously violate liberal taboos like “tone” and “unity.” If we get involved in anti-oppression struggles, listen, and are aware of privilege and the differing crises that surround us, it’s difficult to see an individual art career as something worthwhile.
…
What if we see our role as artists as being deeply tied to the health of our neighborhoods?
Are we going to talk about who was living in the houses we live in now before us? Are we going to talk about the art careers? Are we going to talk about those?
When the crowd raps your song back
“I don’t pray cuz I organize” raps Ruby Ibarra and her fan, filling my heart with possibility. May your fans do this for you one day — whatever that looks like in your medium.
Scanning, printing, curating the art you want
Arlan Kor brought in all these amazing scans of his dad’s old slides of rock climbers from the 70s that were published in National Geographic back then. We ran some tests of these rich photos of peoples who lived to rock climb, who didn’t have regular jobs, they made money to climb, then climbed, then made more money so they could go climb. Arlan explained how you can’t really do that in the same way anymore. Printing these photographs had a layer of grief to them — the life pictured here no longer exists.
Keko Jackson who cares about spaces that focus on photography — and there are so few of them — wanted to see a show that he and his friends would be excited to see. So, he told the gallery and the gallery agreed to let him curate a show. And that they’d like for him to curate it. And so he curated that show. And we printed the three 44” x 56” black and white photographs by Sasha Phyars-Burgess. The show is up now at The Fulcrum in LA.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa5385ca7-7f7e-4a81-b058-08f04013a4fd_4032x3024.jpeg)
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_720,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Ff8eb6483-9e39-42f3-882b-e12c7474fcf9_4032x3024.jpeg)
We can make the art we want to see and we can curate the shows we want to go to.
Debuting at 39
The cover and launch date for my debut book was announced this month (April 8, 2025!). People ask, How long did it take? And the question is really, When did the clock start? It was either my whole life or five years. I think this is a universal answer for all things art related — Did the photograph take my whole life, or was the photo shoot just four hours long? Do they want to know how long the paint took to dry?
I am glad I am “debuting” at 39. I’m glad that it took this long for me to launch this part of my art career — in so many ways I learned not to glorify the structure of the industry and instead write what I wanted to write: a novel entirely in the second person, full of drive-thrus and above ground pools and dangerous parents. I learned to stop asking for the industry yeses to be the ones that said yes I get to do this. That yes is mine and no one else ever has to agree.
I am ecstatic about the cover art, which is by Camille Soulat. My reaction to it was visceral. The splash on the face, the imminent submersion, the sound of water around the ears, the peace, the cold of the water, the feeling of wearing a swimsuit, the feeling of the floating hair, what it looks like to see your own hair floating around you, the bubbles underwater, the floating, the floating, the floating. I love how it’s a vector, painted with computer colors, how it says something about being people who are on computers, who look at backlit colors, who see themselves and many things glowing that way.
So, here’s the cover and the book’s page:
And when we went out to our local taco stand to celebrate, a van drove by, a very ordinary old grey passenger van — and on the side written in hand-painted words it said CONGRATS you did it. And whoever it was for or how ever long it had been on that van at that moment on that day it was mine. The next moment, for someone else.
You can be famous
Gatekeeper has been an anthem as well as best friend so many times. Often in the car, alone often reaching the max the speakers can hold. Jessie Reyez says it best on her Spotify profile: “I sing about things I don’t want to talk about. text me” This one is good one for feeling the steel in your spine about making the art you want and letting the career come to you.
We are here making prints as Los Angeles Print Shop. Let us know when you’re ready to make yours. We operate on a sliding scale for artists, and pay-the-list-rate for institutions and those endowed with capital and power — all are welcome and when you’re ready you can reply to this email, or DM us on Instagram.