Color Maíz screening at Eureka Theater sparks talk on accessibility

A free evening at Eureka Theater will turn a film screening into a public test of how Humboldt arts spaces make accessibility real, not just aspirational. Color Maíz is bringing Earthseed to the historic downtown venue on Wednesday, June 10, from 5 to 10 p.m., with a screening, a community discussion and a mixer built around collective care.

The theater’s program splits the night into three parts: Earthseed runs from 5 to 7 p.m., a community discussion titled All That You Change, Changes You follows from 7 to 8 p.m., and a mixer focused on radical hospitality runs from 8 to 10 p.m. The event is free to the public. Color Maíz says the evening is meant to invite Humboldt residents into a conversation about disability, accessibility, community and healing, with June 27 workshops planned as a follow-up.

Denise Villalva, Color Maíz’s founder and co-director, frames the event as an invitation to think about support as ordinary rather than exceptional. She connects the screening to a pilgrimage from Mendocino to Los Angeles and to the idea of being hosted by communities that practice radical hospitality. In that view, tools and accommodations are not signs of weakness but part of everyday life, the same way glasses are. Villalva also ties the conversation to the dignity of immigrant workers and transgender workers, arguing that people should not need outside validation to prove their worth.

Earthseed itself follows a California pilgrimage from present-day Los Angeles to Mendocino Woodlands that People’s Kitchen Collective says took place from March through June 2023. The collective says the project is rooted in Octavia E. Butler’s Parables series, the legacy of the Black Panther Party for Self Defense and a belief that radical hospitality is a survival practice. The work also maps five regions of California and asks what the future of survival looks like.

The setting gives the event added weight. Eureka Theater says it is a 1939 Streamline Moderne venue preserved by the Eureka Concert and Film Center, with a history that includes its opening in March 1939, a closure in 1996 and a later revival as a nonprofit arts space. For Color Maíz, that makes the night more than a screening. It places accessibility, healing and mutual aid inside one of Eureka’s most recognizable public rooms.

Color Maíz has been described locally as a new organization focused on BIPOC communities, intergenerational trauma, art, mental health education and safe creative spaces. It also sits within the broader reach of the Upstate California Creative Corps, which awarded $3.38 million across 19 Northern California counties to 80 grantees, 88 percent of them first-time awardees. The larger program was designed to help artists work on issues such as healthcare, cultural identity, land management, pollution, gentrification and emergency preparedness.