Meet Bay Area artists, hear their stories at reception Aug. 28 at 500 County Center
Redwood City – Hands with forks reach forward, as if our own. Beyond them, three farmworkers bend low, their hands busy filling buckets with green beans, their bodies curved as if pressed by the weight of the painting’s frame.
In Quién Llena Tu Plato? / Who Fills Your Plate?, Pacifica artist Oscar Lopez, pictured above, wants viewers to see both at once — the meal, and the labor that makes it possible.
“The goal of this piece is to create a link, at least for one second, between the people who work to produce our everyday food and the fertile land,” Lopez said.
“The disfranchisement from our food sources and the people who work it is huge,” he added. “This artwork doesn’t have answers. But if we stop to think about our most essential priorities, maybe we can start to find them as a society.”
Lopez’s painting is among the works by Bay Area artists featured in an exhibition at 500 County Center in downtown Redwood City. He and other artists will share the stories behind their works at a free public reception in the building’s lobby sponsored by the Office of Arts and Culture on Thursday, Aug. 28, from 4 to 5:30 p.m.
His painting grew out of time Lopez spent at Avila Farms in Half Moon Bay, where he watched workers gathering beans in the sun and in the fog.
“It was a beautiful moment to be there,” he recalled, “to eat green beans fresh off the vine and to hear their stories while they kept moving through the rows.”
Lopez, 40, was born in Mexico City and moved to the Bay Area 20 years ago. His grandfather worked under the Bracero program in California’s fields in the late 1940s and early ’50s, and those stories echo through his work.
For Lopez, art has always been about communication. “Art,” he said, “is a way to create a conversation through images without the artist being in the room.”
As a boy, Lopez was restless — until his mother gave him a bowl of popcorn and a piece of paper. He drew comics, faces from magazines, whatever caught his attention. He studied computer engineering after moving to the United States but never stopped drawing. Then a teacher introduced him to the art department, and, as he puts it, “everything switched.”
Now he works mostly in charcoal and muted tones, as he has done in Quién Llena Tu Plato?, a work of oil, charcoal and liquid charcoal on canvas. “Charcoal is literally burned wood that makes a mark,” he said. “It felt right to use it to tell this story.”
That story is about what we value. Farm-to-table has become a familiar phrase, Lopez said, but the laborers who put that food on the table are usually left out of the conversation.
“We don’t complain about the price of an iPhone,” he said. “But we complain about the price of food. I can live without an iPhone. I cannot live without food.”
Lopez’s painting is part of an exhibition that also includes works by Bay Area artists Priyanka Rana, Rayos Magos, Jessica Monette and Mariet Braakman.
“Art is a tool to create bridges and to create questions,” Lopez said. “If one of my drawings plants a single question in someone’s mind about the people who feed us, then I feel I’ve succeeded.”
Art & Storytelling
Thursday, Aug. 28, 2025
4 to 5:30 p.m.
First Floor Lobby of 500 County Center
Remarks will begin at 4:15 PM. Light refreshments will be served.
Aimee Shapiro (she/her)
Executive Director
San Mateo County Office of Arts and Culture
ashapiro@smcgov.org