Mark Vallen (born 1953) is an American activist with Chicano and other issues, curator, figurative realist painter, and blogger, who runs the Art for a Change web site; he founded The Black Moon web site for Japanese culture. Life and work Mark Vallen was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He studied art at the Otis Parsons Art Institute and was influenced by the African American artist, Charles White, but considers himself largely self-taught, with influences from Goya, Daumier, German Expressionists and Mexican Muralists. By the age of 17, his cartoons had been published in the Los Angeles Free Press and the Black Panther Party newspaper, and he had printed a (pre-Watergate) street poster, proclaiming, "Evict Nixon!". He worked on Slash, and produced art work based on the early punk scene. He participated in Penelope Spheeris' punk rock documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (1981). At the end of the 1970s and into the early 1980s, Vallen was involved in the Los Angeles Punk scene and the civil rights movement. He advocated for the neglected Central American refugee community, and was the first person to distribute on the streets of Los Angeles political posters in support of that community. These posters used his artwork with bilingual text (the latter a practice derived from the 1960 Chicano Arts movement). In 2001 he gave the International Workers' Association the right to use his image and poster Ningun ser Humano es Illegal (No human being is illegal). Paul Von Blum said in the Journal of American Studies of Turkey: Vallen is a figurative realist painter. Much of his work documents California's labor movements, depicting their "dignity and struggle". As a response to racial profiling after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Vallen made a pencil drawing of a Muslim woman, titled I Am Not the Enemy; prompted by the Iraq war, he reproduced the drawing as a poster for wide distribution, with the title at the bottom in bold upper case. He deplored the increase of racial hate crimes following 9/11 and stated, "Moslems, Arabs, and people of Middle Eastern descent are not the enemy. Many people from the Middle East have come to the United States to escape repression, terror, and war. The fact that these innocent people would now be targeted by misguided Americans is a cause for great shame." Vallen's art was in the traveling show