CURATORIAL STATEMENT Customize was a public billboard project by San Francisco artist, Julio C. Morales with San Francisco Art Institute student, Rachel Hewlett and Urban Pioneer High School student, Claudio Michelo. It was developed within Galería's Youth & Media Project. Customize sets out to document the visual icons of globalization within the Mission district through the perspectives of youth and local informal economies. Customize attempts to illustrate the complex "feedback loop" of globalization by documenting the process of Latino migrants who customize "stock" consumer items as a form of economic adaptation and as a sign of social and urban resistance. The photo based illustrations of the billboard include; a flower vender who customizes plastic ten-gallon detergent buckets and re-appropriated Disney characters decals, a vender of oranges and watermelons who utilizes a graffiti infested converted Pacific Bell telephone service van and a custom mobile vehicle for recycling bottles and cans made from Safeway supermarket shopping carts. Customize was part of Galería’s digital mural series Pervasive Forces: Globalization, Private Identities and the Public Sphere. The series is funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts.