Victor Cartagena likens the act of remembering to that of crossing a bridge. In his artist’s talk at the Richmond Art Center, he described how he was forced to leave his home country of El Salvador in 1985 due to civil war, and sought refuge in California. Since being displaced, he has relied on this imagined bridge as recourse to a sense of identity and belonging. But it has been decades since he left his home, and much of what he wishes to return to no longer exists. Such tensions around identity and politics are the subject of the Bay Area artist’s installation Sites/Sights of Intervention, which is now on view at the Richmond Art Center.
The installation consists of various pieces that are meant to be experienced as a visual and spatial dialogue within which the viewer is centered. The gallery is dimly lit, and entering it is like wandering into Cartagena’s memory — a negative space of placelessness. “I heard the other day that memory is such a place that those who have memory leave the present …. and that makes me feel that I am not alone because being part of this group of immigrants, who live all over the world, we don’t belong anywhere,” said Cartagena. “We have our own territory, our own country — the immigrant country.”
Victor Cartagena’s “Bang, Bang Toy Gun.”
One of the most affecting pieces in the show is the series “Tattoos of Memory,” for which Cartagena superimposed faces onto diagrams from American-made manuals describing how to torture El Salvadorian prisoners. Although he was never tortured, Cartagena speaks of this historical episode as a tattoo upon his cultural memory. In his artist’s talk, he related these tattoos of memory to the actual tattoos on El Salvadorians who were born to refugee parents in the US and then deported back to El Salvador after the war. These people often became homeless and, as a result, got involved in violent gangs, whose members covered their bodies in tattoos. “We all have las maras [gang tattoos], because we’re immigrants,” said Cartagena. “I have my own tattoos on me and I call them tattoos of memory, and they’re all over my face, and I can’t erase those tattoos.”
Cartagena’s immersive and almost surrealist installation also incorporates passport photos from the Eighties that he collected from the photographer who took his own passport photo when he emigrated from El Salvador. Although he doesn’t know for sure whether the subjects emigrated, he knows at least that they hoped to.
While many of the symbols Cartagena works with are pulled from personal experience, they speak to broader issues of violence, alienation, and ignorance. In this way the artist opens up both collective and personal wounds with the understanding that the first step in healing is acknowledgement.
Sites/Sights of Intervention runs through May 30 at Richmond Art Center (2540 Barrett Ave., Richmond). 510-620-6772 or TheRAC.org
The more topical political art gets, the sooner it starts to look dated. Victor Cartagena has averted this risk by not tying his “Sites/Sights of Intervention” at the Richmond Art Center too closely to events in his native El Salvador.
Works in his complex ensemble evoke the tragedy of Latin American elites’ corruption, civil war and American anticommunist imperialism, but not too specifically.
In this context, an ostensibly simple object such as “Ante-Ojos/Anti-Eyes” (2014) – a framed pair of crushed glasses – summons thoughts of violent reprisal, the punishment of conscientious witness and the blindness of media complicity.
The work even suggests itself as a distant, underprivileged relation of Jasper Johns‘ satirical relief sculpture of lensless glasses, “The Critic Sees” (1961), in which mouths stand in for eyes, and as symbolic windows to a disfigured soul.
Cartagena’s “La Silla y Identidad Rota/The Chair and Broken Identity” (2014) consists of an overturned, busted-up wooden chair spotlighted on the floor, surrounded with tiny torn photographs of nameless people.
An American flag binds what remains of the chair seat and its unbroken leg, suggestive of both a bandanna and a tourniquet. Cartagena’s background and the work’s bilingual title link it to the use of torture in Central American conflicts and imperialist interventions. The moral nosedive in American interrogation practice and foreign policy since Sept. 11, 2001, gives Cartagena’s piece even wider relevance.
Similarly, revelations about targeted assassinations and “extraordinary rendition” in the so-called war on terror have expanded the reference of Cartagena’s “Materia Prima” and “Transparencias/Transparencies” (2004/2012).
The former consists of a light table crowded with jars of tinted fluid, each holding a small photo portrait. A projection of larger, fainter human images washes over the wall-mounted light box. The box’s form recalls – perhaps derisively – elements of Donald Judd‘s studiedly nonreferential “stack” wall sculptures.
Cartagena’s “Transparencias” and his other uses of anonymous portrait photos may borrow from French artist Christian Boltanski, who has long used such images to evoke the nameless, unnumbered casualties of war and the Holocaust.
Cartagena’s “Sights/Sites” surprises by its emotionally stirring quality. It taps into our sense of guilty fecklessness as citizens of an empire that has reacted with vicious interventions for decades out of panic at losing its grip on world power.
Victor Cartagena: Sites/Sights of Intervention: Mixed media installation works. Through May 30. Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave. (510) 620-6772. www.therac.org.
This Saturday’s Upcycle event is featured in the SF Chronicle’s 96 Hours section. We sure hope to see you for an afternoon of making, upcycling and music!
Landfills will be a little emptier this weekend, thanks to a fun, kid-friendly program at the Richmond Art Center.
The program, the second annual Upcycle, is a maker festival where families can create, see and learn about the art of “upcycling,” creatively reusing materials otherwise headed for the garbage.
Over the course of the day, visitors will be able to sew bags and quilts from old pieces of clothing, weave small rugs from old T-shirts, use broken plates and tiles to create a colorful mosaic trash can, turn use bicycle inner tubes into jewelry, and experience the magic of fire and metal to fold-form 3-D objects. In many cases, participating families will be able to engage in these activities with the help of local artists, too, taking direction from creative minds who work with upcycled materials every day.
“We learned how to use metal the right way, how to form it, but in a safe way.”
That’s how a middle school student described what he learned in the Metal Arts class at our newest site, DeJean Middle School. Our traveling Art in the Community program continues to expand and we are now at eight unique sites.
This spring, we are set to bring a variety of art-making programs all across Richmond. Instructor Rachel Schaffran will teach two STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) classes at Lincoln Elementary and Helms Middle School.
Students at DeJean Middle School will paint a mural with artists Suzanne Czerny and Nichole Talbott and at Portola Middle School, teens will screen- print with teaching artist Monica Gyulai. Students at Grant Elementary will be making beautiful metal objects with Holly Carter.
At Nevin Community Center, students will learn ceramics from Kiki Rostad, and at Shields-Reid Community Center, they will create mosaic embellishments with instructor Daud Abdullah. At the Richmond Main Public Library kids will listen to works of children’s literature and make art with Irma Vega Bijou.
Constructing a city with recyclable materials at the Richmond Public Library main branch.
This amazing season will conclude with Jessica Regalado leading families through several art-making experiences at two Youth Enrichment Strategies (YES) camps.
If you are interested in bringing our Art in the Community programs to your group or school?
Why Not Just Photograph it? That’s the question that Jeffrey Carlson, Contributing Editor at Fine Art Connoisseur asked John Wehrle the curator for our exhibition The Language of Realism and a California artist best known for his site-specific public artworks. This exhibition features four West Coast realist painters — Michael Beck, Christine Hanlon, Anthony Holdsworth and John Rampley.
I have often been asked the question, ‘Why not just photograph it?’ I have never had a simple answer, either for myself or for others. So, one of the goals of this exhibition was to provide examples of realist painting that, if not providing a definitive solution, at least presented a variety of reasons.” – John Wehrle.
Victor Cartagena, “Sites/Sights of Intervention” at Richmond Art Center
MARCH 28, 2014
Installations and artworks by local artist Victor Cartagena on view at Richmond Art Center in “Sites/Sights of Intervention” act almost as the artist’s autobiography. Appropriating imagery which reflect his own experiences and responses to world events to explore broader socio-political issues, Cartagena in many ways surrenders his private experiences and personal, difficult memories to public view to not only provide healing, but to facilitate meaningful conversation and perpetuate lasting change to the troubling issues and attitudes he has faced and witnessed.
At 19 Cartagena left his native El Salvador in 1985 and came alone to San Francisco to flee his country’s civil war. His early work drew upon these experiences, boldly exploring memories of that difficult time. Some of the most pressing themes his work expresses are the challenges and discriminations immigrants like himself endure in America. Since the beginning of the civil war, between 500,000 and one million El Salvadorans have come to America. Thus in many ways the artist tells their story while also making a powerful statement about all immigrant experience through his work. Passport portraits, strung together hanging from the ceiling and projected in grand scale in installations like “Transparencias” at the Center act as a combined symbol of travel and identity, but stripped from original intention, these floating and dislocated images of now anonymous persons are often interpreted with ominous undertones and solemn connotations.
Now living in San Francisco, Cartagena and his artwork are also influenced and informed by local struggles, and community concerns. Many of the artist’s works interpret and respond to pervasive issues in the region, like gang warfare. “Bang Bang Toy Gun,” an installation composed of several toy guns suspended from the ceiling, while a video image of one in a white hoodie that masks his face makes a panorama of the gallery space with a gun clutched tightly in his hands and pointed directly at the camera. It creates a foreboding and intimidating environment that speaks to a culture of violence and suspicion in America that has now seemed to trickle down even to the very young. Drawing parallels between “play” violence and real violence, Cartagena may be questioning how or whether one contributes to the other, or indeed simply if perpetrators of violence are able to comprehend the reality and severity of the situation.
“I go into a place of frustration ” says Cartagena, “and the only way I can do something, is just doing my art.” His work thus is both a kind of catharsis to heal and relinquish the affectations of the memory and also to relive in order to learn from it. Cartagena’s artwork has much to reveal about the world, and audiences have much to experience, and learn.
“Victor Cartagena: Sites/Sights of Intervention”will be at Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Avenue through May 30, 2014
Kristin Farr from KQED stopped by to view our latest exhibition, The American Teenager Project, a collection of photographs and audio recordings completed by 20 local teenagers.
Robin Bowman is a photojournalist who traveled the country interviewing teenagers about their lives in the early 2000s. She took their portraits to illustrate the interviews, and later published them in a book. Bowman’s portraits prove that a picture is worth many words. She skillfully captures moments and complex stories in single, black-and-white images. The project grew when Bowman began working with teens on another level, training them to conduct their own interviews and shoot portraits of their peers. The group of students currently working on the project are in Richmond where many of the portraits are on view in the bustling back hallway of the Richmond Art Center.
The SF Chronicle 96 Hours cover story featured our exhibition The Art of Living Black. Writer Kimberly Chun stopped by the Richmond Art Center for a preview of the exhibition and spoke to some of the 50 artists who will be showing their work. We’re thrilled that our work hosting this long-running exhibition of established and emerging artists has received this major coverage!
It’s unique — there’s nothing else like this in Northern California. There’s no other place you can go every year and see a cross section of the area’s black artists.” — Oakland artist Ajuan Mance.
An annual exhibition that showcases artwork from emerging and established African American artists will soon be on display at the Richmond Art Center.
Now in its 18th year, the Art of Living Black returns to Richmond Jan. 11 and will feature the work of more than 50 artists. The event aims to give African American artists a voice and venue to showcase their work.
“It’s a unique experience to see all African American art from some artists that probably wouldn’t be shown anyplace else,” said Stephen Hopkins, one of the exhibition’s organizers.
The Art of Living Black is the only annual open exhibition and self guided art tour in the Bay Area to exclusively feature regional artists of African descent, according to the event’s organizers.
The artwork that has debuted at the event since its 1996 founding ranges from paintings and photographs to a variety of sculptures, all with common roots in African American history and experience.
But this year’s exhibit will be missing a familiar face. Melba Lazenby, an organizer described by colleagues as the event’s guiding force, died just days ago at age 62 after a five year battle with cancer.
The show will be dedicated to Lazenby’s memory.
“We were working to keep the Art of Living Black together,” said Hopkins, who is Lazenby’s brother. Hopkins’ wife Rae Louise Hayward co-founded the art show, and following her 2008 death, he and Lazenby took the torch to continue the work.
“Melba put in a lot of hard work and dedication into getting the artists and material ready to go” he said. “She was really dedicated to keeping the program alive.”
Richard Ambrose, executive director of the Richmond Art Center, said many artists were saddened to hear of her death.
“(Lazenby) was the energy and fireplug that kept the organization in tack,” Ambrose said.
Dana King, one of the artists whose work will be featured, says the show offers emerging artists informal mentors, a merging of experience and youth that helps keep each year’s exhibition fresh and creative while cultivating precocious talent.
“I’ve met a lot of people and learned a lot more about the art scene in the Bay Area by being in this show,” she said. “And we support and encourage one another, which to me is the most important thing.”
After 25 years as a broadcast journalist and 15 years with CBS San Francisco, King left her post to pursue her art career.
“We can’t wait for the art world to bestow upon us the mantle of acceptability,” she said. “We have stories to tell and we tell them very well with our art.
“We have to create our own way and that’s exactly what this show does.”
IF YOU GO:
What: The 18th annual Art of Living Black will feature the work of more than 50 African American artists from around the Bay Area.
When: January 11- February 28. Gallery hours are Tuesday- Saturday, 11 a.m. – 5 p.m.
The opening reception is 2-5 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 8 and artist panel discussions will be from noon- 2 p.m. Feb. 8 and 15. A special jazz art workshop will be from 1-3 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 8.
Where: Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave. Richmond
Cost: free
For more information, call 510-620-6772 or visit www.therac.org.
Richmond High senior Francisco Rojas (pictured) became interested in photography at 15, but through his involvement in the American Teenager Project, he fell in love with the storytelling medium.
“This is powerful,” Rojas, 17, said. “As I got trained, I felt this was something that everybody should start doing, even if it’s a small city like Richmond.”
Rojas, along with 18 young photographers in Richmond, was trained by veteran New York-based photojournalist Robin Bowman to go into the community, interview teenagers and photograph them.
More than 100 portraits of the teens and the stories they shared with the budding photojournalists will be on display at the Richmond Art Center from Jan. 11 to March 7.
The exhibition features a two-part event on Feb. 1: a meet and greet reception with the project participants and “Unlock the Talk: The American Teenager Project in Richmond,” a discussion of the themes presented in the exhibition, co-hosted by the RYSE Youth Center. The reception starts at noon, and the discussion begins at 2 p.m. at the art center, located at 2540 Barrett Ave.
Julia Hollinger, executive producer for the American Teenager Project, said the idea was borne after her friend Bowman spent five years traveling across the country documenting the stories of more than 400 teenagers.
“I collaborated with (Bowman) on helping turn that collection into an uncensored book that was published and included all of the teenagers and most of the interviews,” Hollinger said. “After that experience, Robin felt very strongly that she wanted to carry on the tradition.”
Hollinger was a teacher in Richmond at the time and was able to get teens to tell their peers’ stories through workshops at the RYSE Youth Center.
The teens asked 22 questions of their subjects ranging from their opinions on violence to LGBT issues and challenges facing undocumented youth. Each portrait will include a transcribed interview, and 30 portraits will feature an audio interview.
Rojas, who has 16 portraits in the exhibit, said the project fed his passion.
“I kind of did go crazy over it,” he said. “I just liked the whole process. I’m definitely wanting to do photography as a living.”
WHAT: “Unlock the Talk: The American Teenager Project in Richmond”
WHEN: Gallery display, Jan. 11 through March 7 from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Reception and discussion event, Feb. 1 from noon to 5 p.m.
WHERE: Richmond Art Center, 2540 Barrett Ave.
FOR MORE INFORMATION: Richmond Art Center, 510-620-6772, www.therac.org/
