On a warm day last summer, Hannah Pae stood on the corner of Haste Street and Telegraph Avenue with two Berkeley High School students, gazing up at the People’s Park mural, “A People’s History of Telegraph Avenue.”
Pae, an artist and landscape designer, pointed out how each facet of the mural — from the medium used to the perspective — was intentional and carried a message, helping to inspire Pae as she worked on a new mural for the Berkeley Public Library.
That new mural, titled “Berkeley Is…” was unveiled Saturday at a community celebration to serve as a “visual land acknowledgement.” It was funded by the Berkeley Public Library Foundation and created in collaboration with Café Ohlone, an Indigenous restaurant at the Lawrence Hall of Science.
Pae was working with student interns Ariba Talukder and D’Aryn Brooks Jr. to design the mural for the Berkeley Public Library, serving to connect Berkeley’s Indigenous history with its legacy of political activism.
“The mural is really an opportunity to think about not only the history of Berkeley but also the future of Berkeley,” said Dia Penning, the manager for equity, diversity, inclusion and belonging at the Berkeley Public Library. “The youth were really interested in considering what the landscape might look like if we honored and appreciated the Ohlone people that are still here and really looked at our community and our landscape through the lens of Indigenous folks and how that would be different.”
To design the mural, Pae spent much of the summer leading Talukder and Brooks on field trips around Berkeley: They sketched Sather Gate, studied murals up and down Telegraph Avenue and spent hours in the public library’s own history room.
Talukder and Brooks sketched parts of Berkeley that were especially significant to them — including the public library, Berkeley High School and activists from Berkeley’s various political movements. Pae then compiled their drawings to create a collage in the form of a map of Berkeley, running from the Berkeley Marina to the Berkeley Hills.
On the map, landmarks and political activists sit beside Indigenous ecology: Grizzly bears roam right by sketches of Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina, the owners of Cafe Ohlone; steelhead trout run freely through Strawberry Creek; and native manzanita trees nearly cover the wall.
“In this reimagining that layers the past, the present, the future … this mural is trying to show the diversity of Berkeley, of this land (and) the people,” Pae said.
Talukder, a senior at Berkeley High School, said she joined the project because of her interest in art, but didn’t expect to be allowed to be “this involved.”
But as she studied murals across Berkeley and dug through historical documents, Talukder noted how she learned much more about Berkeley’s history and got to feel like her “ideas mattered.”
“I’ve always admired Berkeley’s diversity and how we’re so openly political, and I think learning more about the history really just proved it,” Talukder said. “I specifically researched Asian contributions to Berkeley … and that was really great because I am Asian, and it was nice to know about how people in my community have shaped Berkeley to be what it is today.”