After my involvement as one of the pioneering founders of the Chicano Movemenet in San Diego by establishing the Centro Cultural de la Raza and the Chicano Park open air museum, I proposed that it wasn’t enough to liberate our barrio but that we needed to apply our cause also to bring together all the artists of San Diego together by creating an arts center in the heart of our county in downtown San Diego. So with the help of my father, Guillermo Acevedo, an already affluent local artist, who participated in support of Chicano Artists, with his political connections and finance, opened the first art gallery ever downtown off eight and Broadway the Acevedo Art Gallery International in 1976′ as Celebration of the country’s Bicentennial Year. That space within a year grew to become the first multicultural community arts center in SD we called the Community Arts Center, launching then the Gaslamp Arts District. Our arts center was the first step in the diversifying of what had been separate segregated racial communities and the artists of all colors came together for the first time since the colonial times, this first episode lasted from 1976 to 1982 when the city destroyed the arts center building at 3rd and ‘E’ Streets and with the disbanding of our center also went the many art lofts and galleries as the Gaslamp development raised the rents and artists had to flee east towards our new settlement that became the East Village Arts District with the Reincarnation Building as our new arts center. Almost ten years after our first exodus from the Gaslamp, we artivists, reestablished our selves around the old abandoned Carnation Building led by visionary architect, Wayne Buss who had been a witness and participant in the Community Art Building and he approached me to ask me to partner with his idea of rebuilding the arts center and for me to lead a community arts regrouping at this site that we called the ReinCarnation Arts Center. Wayne began the process of purchasing the historical building in 1990 and we couldn’t wait to replace the ‘Eyes of Picasso’ which were painted on the first arts center and destroyed in 1982. So I painted the ‘Eyes’ three times and twice the owner bank painted them out. The third version of 1992 remained on the building and it became the artist’s ‘ICON’ Till its destruction in 2004 by the Petco development and the East Village Arts District became no more. The artists dispersed further east to Golden Hills and Barrio Logan. I repainted the ‘Eyes’ on Logan Avenue in 2009 and now that area has become the Barrio Arts District, as we artivists continue with our dream to get back to downtown to reestablished once and for Lara the San Diego’s Arts District, which we have been calling the BarrioLogan/EastVillage Arts District, or the BELIEVE Project.
