Melissa Ortiz, BDC 2023, California College of the Arts
Melissa was the winner of the Outstanding Social Critique Prize at BDC Summit 2023
Melissa Ortiz is a Salinas, California-grown artist, educator, and community scientist. Her earliest memories of creating piñatas with her mother continue to fuel her desire to integrate the arts in her teaching and design practice.
Melissa earned her BFA from UC, Santa Barbara and a single-subject teaching credential from San Francisco State University. She later studied graphic design and animation at The Bay Area Video Coalition, UC Berkeley Extensions, and the Florence Institute of Design International. With 5 years of teaching experience at alternative ed high schools across the bay area, Melissa has witnessed the power of play and curiosity in the classroom. As a board member at Xinampa, Melissa is bridging her cultural background with intersections between community, art/design, and science. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Industrial Design at the California College of the Arts in San Francisco.
Colores del Rio in a young scientist’s hands.
Can you describe your project Colores del Rio?
Colores del Rio is a bioregional community engagement tool made of locally sourced agricultural waste. It asks a California agriculture community in the Salinas area to take a closer look at the food systems they are acutely affected by and demonstrates how local landfill-bound food waste can be a viable biomaterial. The project was created in response to local systemic issues involving the monoculture industry, the Salinas River-watershed, and impacted communities.
Made of disposed red cabbage, this environmental justice tool encourages local youth to become stewards of water and land, discovering what pH-colors emerge when we place Colores del Rio in a nearby, potentially contaminated bodies of water. It invites the next generation of youth leadership to actively participate in biodesign, citizen science, and environmental justice, giving local food waste another life that is regenerative and supportive of people and ecosystems.
What wAS A SOURCE of inspiration FOR YOUR PROJECT?
Colores del Rio originated within a CCA Biodesign class and continues as a collaboration with Xinampa (non-profit organization in Salinas), and Mount Toro High School's science department.
Inspiration for the project stems from lived observations in my hometown and within my family. As a high school arts educator in Salinas, I began to pay close attention to emerging research in biomaterials. I had the opportunity to sub for Mrs. Johnson’s science class as her students eagerly engaged in extracting DNA from strawberries. It felt like science integration with art/design could become more possible with real world applications. Additionally, I saw a need for Salinas youth to understand the environmental issues impacting them directly. I designed Colores del Rio with the hope that folks in Salinas, former students, parents, Mrs. Johnson’s class, and the wider community could engage with local issues and together impact change. Personally, as a caretaker for my mother some time ago, I also witnessed her health-decline due to exposure to pesticides from her work picking strawberries in the 80’s and could not permit her story to be untold within the Colores del Rio project presentation at the BDC Summit.
“I want the youth in Salinas to know that science and design are not exclusive to expensive universities or labs. I believe that science and design can be accessible to everyone, inside and outside of the classroom. ”
Melissa at the BDC 2023 Gallery Show. Photo Credit: Valery Rizzo.
Community and your personal story seem to play a large role in your work. Could you talk about how this may have informed your project?
Salinas, CA supports a huge agricultural industry and due to the constant demand of migrant labor to work the fields, youth come from families from Mexico and other regions of Latin America. In Salinas, if a student's native language is different from English, students are designated as English Language Learners, and are tracked into high school until they pass a test that proves that they are English Language Proficient. If the ELPAC (English Language Proficiency Assessment for California) test isn’t passed early, students are kept from taking elective courses and upper division courses, limiting their learning options. This means that a lot of youth in Salinas have limited access to meaningful art/design, science, and environmental-justice related experiences. I’m a product of this educational system and I grew up thinking the sciences were not for me. I want the youth in Salinas to know that science and design are not exclusive to expensive universities or labs. I believe that science and design can be accessible to everyone, inside and outside of the classroom.
My work in the community started as a teacher’s assistant with California Mini-Corps. In this role, I supported third grade migrant students to be at class level and not fall behind as they moved from school to school, following harvesting seasons between Arizona and California. Learning about their families more closely, it was clear that their families also carried plant knowledge from their home countries. The families I worked with knew how to companion farm, increasing harvesting yields through supportive, non-invasive agriculture systems. What we see today in Salinas is a pervasive mono-culture industry utilizing synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides that continue to harm people and ecosystems connected to waterways. We have so much to learn from the migrant families that produce our food.
ARE THERE ANY BOOKS OR MEDIA THAT YOU’ve RECENTLY FOUND INSPIRING, biodesign-adjacent or otherwise?
Here are a few of my favorite books and sources of inspiration for the project:
Radical Matter: Rethinking Materials for a Sustainable Future by Kate Franklin and Caroline Till
Women Who Run with the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés
Heroes and Saints & Other Plays by Cherríe Moraga
Rhetorics of Nepantla, Memory, and the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers: Archival Impulses by Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Intersectional Environmentalist: How to Dismantle Systems of Oppression to Protect People + Planet by Leah Thomas
Autonomous Design and The Emergent Transitional Critical Design Studies Field, from Design Struggles, Intersecting Histories, Pedagogies, and Perspectives section by Arturo Escobar
Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the World We Need by Sasha Costanza-Chock
Process photo: Material exportations.
As a designer, how did you develop the science skills necessary to create your project?
Here are a few science and science-adjacent skills I’ve adopted:
I learned Japanese papermaking techniques while a research assistant at UCSB and in a formal class setting during my undergraduate studies. The intensive process involved breaking down mulberry tree bark in an alkaline (soda ash), extracting pulp from impurities, breaking down long fibers manually with a mallet, and forming sheets one-by-one in a large vat with formation aid derived from the root of a plant.
In CCA’s Future of Biodesign class we were given step-by-step instructions for how to set-up a mini-lab to experiment with various recipes towards testing potential material properties and mold-making techniques.
BSL-1 sterile lab techniques were learned via Xinampa and through Corinne Takara, where I came to understand the importance of working in a sterile environment to prevent unintended mold growth or fungus.
An independent study course via Fungi Academy online additionally supported sterile lab techniques.
William Padilla Brown’s DNA fungal barcoding course online (Mycosymbiotics) was also an independent study course that I participated in.
A student teaching experience at a Westmoor high school ceramics class in Daly City. The Cole Clay that resulted from the Colores del Rio project held materials properties much like the ceramics I worked with to build coil pots, coil hollow forms, and slumped slab forms while in the classroom.
Are there any core values that you prioritize in your design practice? How do they manifest in your projects?
Working closely with young people and their families in my hometown throughout the years has shown me that it isn’t one object or solution that will shift our world ecologically and systemically. It's an incremental collective systems redesign that centers the knowledge and pace of those who are from the communities and are directly impacted by the systems at play. A consistent participation that takes time. First principles design isn’t quite it, but instead moving closer and engaging more deeply to better see where we have blind spots, of which there are many.
Do you have any advice for future BDC participants?
Connecting your project to your lived experience and, if possible, bringing it close to home can ground the work in a community where it can have a real impact. There might also be an opportunity to engage existing civic entities to tie your project to. Most importantly, having fun along the way is a must, and following curiosity to see where it takes you. The enthusiasm to continue probing a research question or a material possibility is where exciting happy accidents can occur.
Process photo: Working with dehydrated cabbage.
Young citizen scientist uses Colores del Rio in their neighborhood.
Photo credits: Melissa Ortiz (unless otherwise noted)