A LIFE IN ART.
Born in Sucre, raised in La Paz, and shaped by decades of making art in San Francisco and the Bay Area, Javier Rocabado has built a multidisciplinary practice around memory, identity, public space and community.
BORN
TO MAKE.
Javier Rocabado was born in Sucre, Bolivia, in 1959 and raised in La Paz. Art arrived early. As a child, he made his own toys from clay, and at only twelve years old he was accepted into the School of Fine Arts in La Paz.
He left Bolivia in 1981 and eventually made his way to San Francisco. There, he continued his formal training at the Academy of Art College, now Academy of Art University, graduating in 1990 with two Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees: Painting and Illustration.
That dual foundation — image making as both painter and storyteller — became central to everything that followed. Javier's work would move far beyond canvas, but drawing, composition, the human figure and narrative remained at its core.
“MY HEART
IS STILL THERE.”
Javier on San Francisco's Mission District, Mission Local, 2021.
San Francisco became far more than a place Javier lived. The Mission District became a cultural home and a major source of his artistic language — a neighborhood where public art, immigrant histories, queer culture, activism and ritual existed in the same streets.
During the 1980s, Javier worked with the Mexican Museum in San Francisco. He later worked at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and became a familiar presence in the Mission's cultural arts community.
Día de los Muertos became an especially important part of that relationship. For years, Javier created altar installations for celebrations at the Mission Cultural Center, SOMArts and other exhibitions. His work joined personal remembrance with a larger history of Latinx cultural memory in San Francisco.
In 2006, Javier co-founded and ran Amaru Arts on Valencia Street, a gallery that championed queer and Latin artists alongside Latin American folk art. The gallery remained part of Valencia Street's cultural life through 2008.
“ The Día de los Muertos concept speaks of our ancestors, while the Graduate speaks of the Future.
THE PERSONAL
IS MATERIAL.
Javier's studio practice has never separated aesthetics from lived experience. His work has directly engaged homosexuality, HIV/AIDS, healthcare, racism, military veterans, infant mortality, capitalism, spirituality and identity.
He has transformed materials associated with value, faith, medicine and violence into visual language: gold leaf, currency, jewelry, found objects, maps, inert bullets and even used injectable HIV medication vials.
In 2003, Javier curated Fucking With AIDS / Chingando con SIDA at SOMArts as part of the National Queer Arts Festival. His Santo Niño de Nadie — incorporating acrylic, gold leaf, U.S. currency and used Fuzeon vials — later appeared in the Queer Cultural Center's ReMix exhibition. His work has also been represented through Visual AIDS, including its international 2015 Day With(out) Art project, Radiant Presence.
MAKING ART.
GIVING BACK.
Javier's relationship with community has never stopped at the edge of a mural or exhibition. Throughout his career he has donated artwork to charitable, cultural and community causes, using the work itself to help raise funds and visibility.
That support has included fundraising connected to Juanita MORE! and the movement for marriage equality, as well as LGBTQ+ organizations, HIV/AIDS causes and groups serving communities too often excluded from cultural and institutional resources.
For Javier, this is part of the same philosophy that informs his public commissions: art can hold memory, but it can also participate in the life of a community.
CHILDREN IMAGINED
THE HEROES.
Javier's work with Oakland's Attitudinal Healing Connection — now the Center for ArtEsteem — became one of the defining community collaborations of his public-art career.
The Oakland Super Heroes Mural Project asked local students to imagine themselves, their neighborhoods and their hopes through the language of superheroes. The children's art classes generated characters, powers, stories and visions for a healthier community. Professional artists then helped translate those ideas into monumental paintings beneath the I-580 freeway.
Javier's involvement centered on Murals #2 and #3. He created the design for Mural #2. For Mural #3, the West Street Mural, he served as Lead Artist and worked directly with West Oakland Middle School students, developing their imagined superheroes into a finished large-scale composition.
Javier then led the team that brought the students' vision onto the wall. Every face was hand-painted by Javier — an intimate painterly act inside a work that occupied thousands of square feet of public space.
ATTITUDINAL HEALING CONNECTION
Founded in Oakland in 1989, Attitudinal Healing Connection now works as the Center for ArtEsteem, using art, creativity and education to strengthen communities and interrupt cycles of violence. The Oakland Super Heroes Mural Project remains one of its signature public-art initiatives.
ART AFTER
LOSS.
On September 29, 2015, while the team was working on Super Heroes Mural #3 in West Oakland, Javier's assistant and fellow artist Antonio Ramos was shot and killed at the mural site.
Javier witnessed the shooting. The violence entered a project conceived around precisely the opposite values — imagination, youth, healing, peace and the belief that a neighborhood could envision something better for itself.
Antonio's death deeply affected Javier and everyone connected to the project. But the artists returned to the wall. They completed the mural, incorporated Antonio's image and dedicated the finished work to his memory.
“ He had a future. He was doing a community service in his own community, in his own neighborhood.
Javier Rocabado remembering Antonio Ramos, KQED, 2015.
THE IDEA
CHOOSES THE MATERIAL.
Javier's work moves across oil, watercolor, illustration, murals, sculpture, neon, stained-glass mosaic, hand-painted ceramic tile and mixed-media installation. The medium changes because the story changes.
His public work has included collaborations and commissions in San Francisco, Oakland, Hayward, Antioch, Richmond, Colusa and beyond, alongside work in private, institutional and gallery settings.
Projects have ranged from Hayward's Breaking Walls and urban-beautification programs to the Antioch Veterans Memorial, architectural tile work for Shriners Children's, religious work for Our Lady of Lourdes in Colusa, and installations shown at the de Young Museum.
He has also been selected for San Francisco public-art artist pools and was one of three finalists chosen from nineteen shortlisted artists for the Mission Branch Library public-art commission in 2021.
Javier's career has intersected with the Mexican Museum, SOMArts, Mission Cultural Center, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Visual AIDS, Queer Cultural Center, de Young Museum, San Francisco Arts Commission, Center for ArtEsteem, and municipal arts programs across the Bay Area. His contributions to the arts in California have also received Congressional recognition.
BEYOND
THE FENCE.
Javier's newest major public commission, North Richmond Beyond the Fence, was completed for the newly renovated Shields-Reid Community Center and unveiled as part of the park's 2026 reopening.
The work is a series of four stained-glass mosaic panels built around North Richmond's cultural memory. Music, childhood, migration, neighborhood gathering places and collective care move through the imagery. Children reading evoke the Black Panther Party's Free Breakfast Program; musicians recall the area's blues and soul history.
A chain-link pattern runs across the panels as a memory of boundaries and segregation. Against that structure, the people in the work represent what Javier describes as “creativity, dignity, and hope.”
