In these public artworks, on view in downtown San Jose from 2007-2009, JD Beltran and collaborator Scott Minneman developed constantly changing portraiture content from the public itself to create a “portrait” of the downtown San Jose corridor.  For this project, JD interviewed denizens of the downtown area about their random thoughts, asking them, “What makes you smile?  What are you afraid of?  What were you thinking about before you saw me walk up to you?”   She also researched archives and historical documents that revealed the answers to these questions and concerns from prior inhabitants of the area, living the late 1800s to the present.  The answers created a revealing, fascinating, poignant, and sometimes humorous portrait of both the individual interviewed and the demographic of the city.

JD Beltran then collected video footage as well as archival photographs of the downtown area and stylized and juxtaposed this imagery with the text of her collected answers.  The resulting videos were displayed in vacant storefronts along 2nd Street, as well as in the Paseo De San Antonio.