[music] -I went to school for graphic design in 2004, and I've been doing design professionally ever since like 2006.

It's been awhile, but I got into it pretty much ever since I was a kid.

I was really into the custom car culture.

I grew up with my dad painting cars.

He sold paint, and then he went off to be a paint instructor at a prison.

-Ernesto's portraits are always amazing.

Again, going back to their simplicity.

He's working in stencils, so there's only so much detail that he can include.

Upon first glance, it can seem pretty simple.

Then you start to notice all of the details that he's got full of recognizable imagery and iconography.

[music] -For me, the biggest influences as a kid, it was Shepard for sure.

Then I eventually ended up working for him, but I was a fan of his work since I was really young.

Rupert Garcia, for sure, Ester Hernandez, Patssi Valdez.

A lot of them are painters, but he created a lot of political work for the UFW, a lot of the art for the United Farm Workers.

Cesar Chavez's brother, Richard Chavez, is the one that created the eagle.

That's probably one of the biggest logos in my life that I've always seen around that I've always been inspired by.

-Ernesto Yerena, to me, is an artist who his work is so heavily researched.

His approach in this reclamation of Indigenous identity is definitely a part of the journey of the Chicano political identity, aesthetic identity.

-Basically, my work is about trying to recover what's been taken, whether it's my own culture, my Indigenous culture, instead of always just referencing traditional Indigenous work.

How does whatever work that I create is still considered Indigenous work because I'm Indigenous.

Trying to figure out how do I add to that legacy of Indigenous artwork that's gone back thousands of years.

One of the things that I've got to learn over the years is that a lot of the colors on this continent prior to contact with Europeans, a lot of those colors didn't exist over there because the dyes came from flowers, came from the natural surroundings.

-Ernestohas a very specific color palette.

It's very deliberate.

He's really working to reclaim and bring forward the color palette that is indigenous to this area, to his own community where he grew up near the border.

It's the kind of detail in his work that you're not going to get necessarily just when you look at it, but it's such an important part of his own artistic identity and vision.

-For me, color has always been about reclaiming.

One of the colors we see through Indigenous people throughout the world is turquoise.

It was also in Mexico, all over the US, all the way down to Central America, South America.

There's a type of whether it's turquoise or it's a jade.

It's either green or bluish stone.

In a lot of my work, there's always turquoise because it represents that.

It's connecting those traditional colors.

I use a lot of browns, obviously, skin tone of people.

For being a brown person, there's-- For most of my life, we never really saw ourselves in TV, or in media, or magazines or anything.

A lot of my work is, if I do a portrait of someone, I try to get their skin tone so that they could feel seen, they can feel represented in the way that-- For me, I think it's also just I like making art.

This is the stuff that makes me happy.

This is my antidepressant.

I can be in there and drawing all day, working on the computer and it's fine and I like it and it's fulfilling, but it's coming out here and doing this is what makes me, fulfills me in a different way.

Keeps me sane.

Me, I think now design is all about accessibility.

Now you can make an image and then have it go viral by tomorrow or in a couple hours.

That's the power of this.

Nowadays, most people have such a short attention span.

They're like, if you don't do a couple of images a month that get a lot of views on it, you're almost extinct.

People forget and take out of sight, out of mind.

-When we're looking at this history of printmaking and social justice, and printmaking as an art form and how that has morphed now into graphic design, and how that lives both in analog and digital.

It's been incredible to see graphic design as a tool become more accessible.

I've absolutely seen that blow up in terms of the artists who are sharing their work on social media channels like Instagram.

Young people are able to create work, sometimes it feels like very quickly as they're learning and navigating using tools.

There's absolutely this connection between graphic design and social justice.

I think that right now we're just seeing such an incredible blow-up of people's use of that tool and to be in the moment, responsive in real time.

I think it's an incredibly empowering experience to see.

That connection is, I think, in evolution, and it's amazing to see where it is right now.

[music] -This program was made possible in part by City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, LA County Department of Arts and Culture, and the California Arts Council.