Prototype Issue
Pato Rising
By Omayra Cruz
(page 1 of 1)Patrick “Pato” Hebert is a “culture producer.” He won a 2005 Rockefeller Humanities Residency Fellowship. His work can be seen on gallery walls and in published form.
Over the past decade Pato’s cultural output has surfaced in a variety of spaces with strong ties to community and transformative political agendas, including LA’s Self-Help Graphics, Voz Alta in San Diego and Galería de la Raza in San Francisco as well as such international venues as Centro Nacional de las Artes and Museo de las Artes in Mexico. He’s also been featured in published form in Queer Latinidad and the Journal of Visual Culture.
As art director for the Hate Crime Prevention Media Campaign sponsored by the LA County Commission on Human Relations from 2000 to 2002, Pato created “No Haters Here,” a bus bench, poster and movie slide campaign targeted at defusing a notable rise in hate crimes among young people. He is also associate director of education and prevention for AIDS Project Los Angeles, and teaches in the Photography and Imaging Department at Art Center College of Design.
I spoke with him in a bustling Silver Lake restaurant. Over a mean omelet, we dove into the intricacies of his person and his past. He extolled “the joyous life”—the touchstone, he argues, from which to build a fully lived socially engaged life and a sound political vision.
I know your residency in Silver Lake had an important influence on your politics. Can you talk about that? I came in ’99, and Silver Lake had already changed considerably by then. It shifted from what I would’ve called an art, intellectual hipsterness to a Hollywood set hipster, and so there’s literally been more shoots in Silver Lake each year. It feels like it’s been infested with industry types. I saw more and more working-class Latino families getting pushed out. I saw mom-and-pop businesses on Sunset getting pushed out. So that tension made it an interesting space to be in. It was also disturbing and sad. I think that it’s happening all over LA and in a lot of big cities right now.
How did you as an activist, a citizen, and an artist position yourself within Silver Lake? Where did you come in? I wanted to live in a place that was very queer and that also felt Latino. Silver Lake did that best. The first time I went to Sunset Junction I was shocked because there were so many working-class Latino families, all kinds of beautiful brown people everywhere, and then all kinds of parades of queer people. Even though I know the history of that affair has been tense at times, the coexistence was really attractive to me, quite beautiful. I could be in a place where I could get cheap good food, I could go thrift store shopping. Silver Lake felt like one of the few places where people actually walk, were living a street life, having a kind of social interaction. Which, coming from San Francisco, I was drawn to.
In terms of being responsible to the neighborhood and understanding the neighborhood in relationship to other parts of LA, I did a lot of things. I did a workshop at Marshall High, talking about inner-group conflict and hate crimes with the kids. Some of the benches that we designed together went up all over Silver Lake, in the Vermont corridor and up and down Sunset, pushing into Los Feliz. It was really beautiful to see the kids and their ideas pushed out into the street like a claiming of that space. We’ve also been able to do some HIV-prevention campaigns.
About a year and a half after I moved in, there was a rash of car robberies, break-ins and also a couple of automobile thefts on my street, so most of the middle-class neighbors on that street gathered together and said, “Well, I like Silver Lake but I didn’t sign up for this.” I heard a neighbor say, “Oh, it’s pretty good up here once you get away from Sunset.” It was very clear that she was speaking this racially coded classed language. Those are the ways Angelinos try to make peace with coexistence; yet that doesn’t necessarily add up to community.
How do you understand the relationship between community and intimacy? I love that song by Otis Redding, “Try a Little Tenderness.” I’ve been intrigued about what it would mean to conceptualize tenderness within the political arena and also in the politics of how we interact with each other. I’m very intrigued by the number of people who can’t talk to folks at the bus stop or people in the crosswalk and the notion that people are getting in your way. So there’s this disconnect. I think tenderness and intimacy in a neighborhood emerge in very small but significant ways.
How do you talk to somebody at the Laundromat? How do you talk to somebody who’s giving you your food? How do you interact with your customers? Daily interactions are part of the thing that drive me crazy in cities and yet part of the thing that gives me so much hope, because I love the way strangers make a world together, the way they treat each other passing on sidewalks. Are you competing for that lane or do you slow down and let somebody in? Very simple gestures that actually make the difference between a harried day of feeling ignored or isolated or dispossessed versus feeling like we’re sharing this road. We’re isolated in our big metal hulking machines, so why not create a space together rather than compete for it?
In the end, I think of intimacy as the creation of space rather than the taking of space. I feel like this moment in LA, in the big picture, is about what we are going to create together, and can tenderness be part of that?
How do these concepts of interconnectedness infuse recent projects that you’ve worked on? I work with different kinds of populations over a period of time, usually to generate a set of image initiatives. These have taken the form of photo murals at schools, where we ostensibly create public service announcement campaigns, but I think of them as public art. I also engage public entities, county departments who provide funding, and then identify certain community groups where we work together to chew on a set of ideas. Like, what tears LA apart? What brings LA together? What creates risks for HIV infection among gay men and what can gay men do about that? Then out of those conversations I try to reflect back some of the possibilities to the rest of the community through a billboard or through a bus bench. Recently, I’ve begun to do more graphic design and writing as a way to push those ideas out further.
Talk a bit more about your role at the AIDS Project LA and how that role enables you to make these types of interventions. I serve as the associate director of education and I support our HIV prevention efforts. I feel very lucky to have the job. As grueling as it is and as devastating as HIV can be, every day I work with people who fill me with a lot of hope and challenge my thinking about what is possible. The whole point in prevention is to intervene before things become a crisis. Ideally, that means helping folks stay HIV-negative while supporting folks who are HIV-positive to live toward happy, productive, creative, dynamic lives.
What have been your greatest accomplishments and biggest disappointments with APLA? I think that the fiscal climate has been the biggest challenge. Post-9/11, almost across the board, nonprofits have had a really hard time maintaining pre-9/11 funding levels. So we’ve gone through very great growing pains around restructuring and having to let folks go.
There has also been an increasingly conservative push from the federal level, restricting what kinds of programming we can do and what kinds of interventions we can design. My biggest disappointments have been around losing contracts with projects we felt were really innovative and responsive to community needs but weren’t in the eyes of certain funders. So we lost the opportunity to realize those projects.
How did the publication Corpus come to be and where is it headed? Corpus is really the brainchild of George Ayala, who’s Director of Education at AIDS Projects LA. We wanted to find creative ways to keep the conversation about HIV in the forefront. George, along with the editor of the first two issues of Corpus, Jaime Cortez, who’s a writer, an artist and cultural worker, and I sat around talking about the need for a publication that could be edgy, beautiful, and critical.
We’ve published five issues using guest editors. Corpus 6 will launch nationally this May and is co-edited by Jaime Cortez and myself. It focuses on the lives of rural gay men. We felt it was important to look at how HIV, community and homophobia function in rural communities, where HIV is spreading quickly and technology and development are rapidly changing the landscape. Corpus 7 will appear in the summer of 2008 and focus on contributions from around the globe. We will launch the issue at the XVII International AIDS Conference in Mexico City in August, 2008.
Talk about your joy. I was 35 two years ago and I started giving myself permission to enjoy life, that I didn’t have to earn it in some kind of martyr way. That’s the problem with having been a Catholic. I’m discovering that I don’t have to suffer in order to have the right to enjoy something. There’s no quota system that says, suffer ten times and enjoy yourself once. In some basic way I’m giving myself permission to live.
I’m enjoying life when I feel like I’m dipping my feet into the water of freedom. When I feel like going to work is not going to work but it’s going to myself, or it’s going to my communion with people, that’s a great thing, something to be very cherished. And it happens in really small ways—eating good food, listening to music.
I started swimming in the ocean about five years ago and it totally changed my understanding of everything, because all of a sudden there was a way to be connected to nature here beyond that small piece of blue up above the smog. There’s something really primal for me about being in that water. I become so small, and it’s really refreshing, especially as a very large person.
You know, I’m 6’4,” and I won’t say how much I weigh, but I’m a big human and I’ve often had people respond with fear and mistrust and trepidation to my body—they’ll cross the street or get scared; kids will burst into tears. And so to feel like my body is a source of creating space for people rather than taking it up or threatening, is important to me. And to go in the ocean and be nothing is a great feeling. It’s really powerful. That is a source of great pleasure.
To see more of Pato Hebert’s work visit www.uber.com/patohebert.
To support APLA’s HIV prevention efforts, please contact phebert@apla.org.
"What tears LA apart? What brings LA together? What creates risks for HIV infection among gay men and what can gay men do about that? Then out of those conversations I try to reflect back some of the possibilities to the rest of the community through a billboard or through a bus bench."—Patrick “Pato” Hebert
Discussion