We Are Sacramento

We Are Sacramento is part of Phil America’s ongoing series of ‘visual poems’. The poems are deconstructed line-by-line across a myriad of different surfaces and in a number of different techniques.

This work is a collaboration between Phil and the Royal Chicano Air Force(RCAF), an art collective from Sacramento founded in the 1970s. The Smithsonian has their work in the permanent collection and has called them one of the most important groups of artists in the Chicano art movement.

Spread across the interior and exterior of a public building in downtown Sacramento, the work uses multiple different artistic tactics to install the poem. Some lines are painted with clear gloss on matte paint that can only be seen when hit with a glare of light while others are painted backwards on windows and only appear at a specific hour of the day when the light hits them and a shadow on the floor or wall appears and reveals the text. Other techniques used by Phil in his career’s practice can be seen as well, such as aerosol spray paint, vinyl lettering, sign painting and sculptures.

Each typeface is chosen specifically for the project as well. One of the lines uses the font created for the local newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, while others are his own handwriting or fonts created by Swiss type designer Aurele Sack which have been used in a number of Phil’s past books and artworks.