Blog

Artists and Dreams in Common: Interviews at La Galería

One of our missions at IBA is to give opportunities to individuals to fulfill their dreams. This is precisely what our current exhibition at La Galeria is about, “Emerging Latino Artists” features 13 talented artists that have just started to make their mark in the industry. We wanted to give their audience a chance to find out more about their craft and about themselves, so like we do with every exhibition, we held an artist talk in which six of them came to speak and answer questions. But, if you didn’t get a chance to go or want more in depth information, we had one-on-one interviews with three of them and got insightful details about their artistic lives. Juan Escobedo: Representing Memory Juan Escobedo, from El Paso, Texas, considers himself a painter, although his pieces don’t look much like paintings. His piece currently at La Galeria, El Chaparral, is a three dimensional rendition of the house he used to live in when he was younger. “People call them sculptures, I call them paintings,” he said. “The pieces of cardboard or lines, I can easily see myself making that with a brush, it just happens to be a physical thing.” His pieces deal with memories, with the notion that “As the years pass by, because there’s all these intersecting events that you associate with that one original event, the original memory becomes misconstrued or extremely different than what it was,” he explained. El Chaparral was the installation that sparked it all, the first time he made the leap from a two dimensional painting to a physical one. Thomas Acevedo: the Human Form Thomas Acevedo moved to Boston from Long Island when he was 18 years old. He studied in MassArt majoring in illustration, but in the back of his mind he always knew he was more interested in painting. After three years he decided to leave school and started a career as a decorative painter and eventually started to paint for himself. Nowadays, Thomas focuses on the human figure, but he doesn’t let technique tell his story. “For myself the story is in the concept,” he said. “A figure can tell a big story, my technique does not tell the story.” He explained that a lot of his paintings tell a story of struggle and survival, but that if people don’t see that, at least they can enjoy looking at an attractive figure. Sara Oliver: Fine Arts Sara Oliver is from Madrid, Spain, and is currently finishing her studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. She has been receiving painting lessons since she was five years old, she always knew she wanted to be involved in the arts. However at the Academy of Fine Arts in Madrid, she had to make a decision “I had to choose between history of arts or fine arts” she said. “I decided on fine arts because I was more interested in how the artist viewed the piece, the technique, how it’s done, instead of the history of the piece.” Her paintings are abstract representations of reality in geometric forms and colorful tones. Sara has been an artist all her life, although if you were to ask her she’d say she’s not completely sure. “To use the word artist is kind of a big deal, or at least I have that feeling,” she said. “I don’t know what defines an artist. I consider it my practice and my profession, but that word has a lot of power.” Although, ever since coming to the states she says more and more people recognize her as an artist and she is gaining confidence. That is our mission. We want artists like Sara to gain confidence in their talent and know they are valuable assets to our community. Like Thomas put it “Every ethnicity should have this support,” he said. He explained that a resident family of Villa Victoria came to the artist talk with a little girl, “If that little girl who was there wants to be an artist, that’s just an amazing opportunity, to give the neighborhood something to see that maybe otherwise they wouldn’t be able to.” Juan also brought up a very important point. For him the matter is not only about exposure and recognition, but about educating and enlightening, “Often enough Latin/Hispanic artists are still seen as foreign or exotic even though some of our families have been in the United states for several generations,” he said. “This fetishization blinds people from understanding our experiences as hyphenated Americans.” At La Galeria everyone can come together and learn about our different experiences, but most importantly about what we have in common. The next round of artists from the “Emergent Latino Artists” exhibition will be giving their talk this Friday at 6:00 PM at la Galeria. More details here. Help us keep expanding our culture, inspiring, and giving opportunities to budding artists. A little bit can go a long way. Donate here....