Saturday, August 9, 2014

‘Waiting for the Rain…’ An interview with Artist Linda Vallejo, COLA FELLOWSHIP Recipient 2013-2014. PhotoJournal by Ginger Van Hook.







 July 19, 2014
I traveled along Pacific Coast Highway and turned right onto Topanga Canyon Road when I encountered an area of Los Angeles County where I’ve never been.I was welcomed with the winding roads and thick rich brush of trees all the way up the Canyon walls until I arrived at Linda Vallejo’s studio, nestled on the precipice of California’s most coveted mountain tops. 
The area of Topanga Canyon Skyline…















 
                Walking carefully down the steps to her doorway, I was welcomed by the soothing sounds of wind chimes, instantly giving me a sense of the meditative, quiet, soothing space where an art muse inspires.


Linda welcomed me with a mini tour of her home and studio then took me to the patio where she insisted it would be really beautiful overlooking her garden.

“You’ve caught me between projects…” Linda said with a nervous giggle.  “Lately I’ve either been working at creating something or I’ve been in the midst of showing a big collection of work I’ve created…so this is the very first moment I’ve had to take a breath…” And as she walked over to the railing overlooking her property, she indeed took a deep breath. She looked liked she was waiting for something. I speculated to myself… Was she waiting for her muse to come to her? Or simply, was she waiting for the rain; the rain to water the seeds she had planted?

Our conversation started on the very subject of the seed; A very tiny speck of confidence, a humble, hard to see mustard seed to be planted in the earth, Linda continued her thought “First, the seed is hard to find, then you must plant it into the earth that is ready for it. One sometimes has to allow the earth be fallow to replenish the nutrients required for further creativity.”

So Linda Vallejo is WAITING... She had just completed a very intense period of creation from having been awarded the COLA Fellowship and her recent exhibition at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall had just concluded. For Linda, this aftermath of time needed to be meditative. 
It was this special period of anticipation before the first growth of the stalk…the time where the planning takes place that Linda Vallejo and I shared a conversation overlooking the Topanga Skyline. Linda had planted the seeds and she was waiting for the rain to nourish her ideas, her new plants, her hearts desires … this was the time before the rains came and yet right after the seeds were protected by the earth, being warmed by the sun above. We were in a drought, Linda explained, so she would stand close to the edge of her balcony overlooking the hills and she would meditate, praying for the rain to nourish our communities and nourish our souls. 
 Linda Vallejo’s artist statement is provided below as well as a brief view of her accomplishments, exhibitions and list of collections.
For information about the PhotoJournalist writer, Ginger Van Hook, please visit www.gingervanhook.com --- 
For more information about Linda Vallejo you may visit her website. www.lindavallejo.com




















































 Upcoming exhibitions begin in September:

Lancaster Museum of Art and History
Lancaster, California
September 13 – November 9, 2014
 Linda Vallejo’s artist statement is provided below as well as a brief view of her accomplishments, exhibitions and list of collections. For more information about Linda Vallejo you may visit her website. www.lindavallejo.com

The Electrics
featured in
“Tapping the Third Realm”
Otis College of Art and Design
Ben Maltz Gallery

Loyola Marymount University
Laband Art Gallery
Exhibition Dates:

September 22 - December 8, 2013
Opening Reception: Sunday, September 22
OTIS Ben Maltz Gallery, 3 – 5 pm
LMU Laband Art Gallery, 4 – 6 pm






LINDA VALLEJO 
vallejo@earthlink.net www.lindavallejo.com 
RESUME 
Born: December 2, 1951 in Los Angeles, CA 
GALLERY REPRESENTATION 
George Lawson Gallery, Culver City, California 
EDUCATION 
Master of Fine Arts Degree, Printmaking, Cal State University Long Beach, California, 1975-1978 
Undergraduate work at the University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain, Lithography, 1975-1976 
Bachelor of Fine Arts, Whittier College, California, 1969-1973 
Undergraduate studies in independent theater arts, London, England, 1971 
Graduated from Madrid High School, Madrid, Spain, 1967-1969 
AWARDS 
COLA Individual Artist Fellowship, Los Angeles City Cultural Affairs, 2014 
CCF Brody Emerging Artist Fellowship, California Community Foundation, 1985 
PERMANENT COLLECTIONS MUSEUMS AND INSTITUTION 
The National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Ill 
Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, CA from a gift provided through the Peter Norton Collection 
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Print Department, Los Angeles, CA 
The Latino Art Museum, Pomona, California 
University of California, Santa Barbara, (CEMA), California Multicultural and Ethnic Archives 
University of California, Los Angeles, (UCLA) Chicano Study Research Center 
Stanford University Chicana Art Multimedia Database 
EXHIBITION HISTORY 
SOLO EXHIBITIONS 
2014 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, Abrazo Interno Gallery, Clemente Soto Velez Cultural and Education Center, New York, New York 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, Lancaster Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, California 
2013 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, New Mexico State University Art Gallery, Las Cruces, New Mexico 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, The George Lawson Gallery, Culver City, CA 2 

2012 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, Cal State University San Bernardino, Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art, San Bernardino, California 
Make ‘Em All Mexican, Arte Americas in collaboration with the Fresno Art Museum, Fresno, California 
A Prayer for the Earth Eco Installation, The MacNider Museum, Mason, Iowa 
A Prayer for the Earth Eco Installation, The Southwest Museum, Midland, Texas 




























RECENT SHOW AT LAMAG BARNSDALL, Los Angeles, California. 2014
 Photography by Ginger Van Hook©2014 All Rights Reserved













 LINDA VALLEJO 
Make ‘Em All Mexican 
Artist Statement 
An international background and point of view… 
I was born in Boyle Heights and lived in East Los Angeles, just a stone’s throw away from Self Help Graphics until I was three years old. I was very fortunate to have six great grandparents and several great uncles and aunts alive in those early years. My father Adam Vallejo was studying political science at UCLA and my mother Helen worked as a receptionist for a well-known doctor in the heart of the barrio. My family was born of industrious working class immigrants who believed in education. My father’s family was blessed with several musicians, including my paternal grandfather Aniceto, as well as talented singers and dancers. His mother, Elvíra and my maternal grandmother Quica both worked as maids for the Union Pacific Railroad. My great grandparents hailed from Mexico and Texas, migrating to work in the fields of California by the turn of the century. 
When my father graduated from college he entered the Air Force as a commissioned officer and we moved to Germany. As a young girl I didn’t understand the changes I would experience moving from one place to the next. Over the next ten years I lived in Arizona, Missouri, California, and Texas, finally finding myself in middle school in Montgomery, Alabama, in the mid 1960’s. I personally believe that my experiences in Alabama during the fight for equality are the bedrock of my newest series, Make ‘Em All Mexican
During this time my high school, Sidney Lanier, integrated for the first time in history. I was surrounded by two thousand students, with only a handful representing other nationalities, and one hundred “Black” students. The tension was palpable and violence was eminent. The knowledge of myself as a person of color, standing outside the lines of fire, scorched me indelibly. I have memories of White and Colored bathroom stalls and fountains, of the tragic marches from Selma, of burning crosses and lynchings, and of the hopeful speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King. I began to realize that the world did not see me as I saw myself; that color was a defining point in how the world judges you and fixes your place in it. 
In 1967 my family including my brother Tomás and sister Roseann moved to Madrid, Spain. I traveled throughout Europe studying art, architecture, and art history searching for my place in the world. As we traveled I fell in love with European history and culture, and the great classics. I wrote music, designed clothing, and painted searching for a personal language that could express universal equality, acceptance, and appreciation. I imagined an image that could open a dialogue of understanding among all peoples. 
The art work that I created during these early years came from my experiences in El Museo del Prado, from El Greco’s elongated and floating images of the pantheon of heaven, Goya’s gruesome portrayals of humanity’s folly in pain and suffering, and an astounding collection of Hieronymus Bosch with his imagination filled landscapes of the glories of heaven and the humilities of hell. I visited ancient Roman sites falling in love with the ethereal gods and their mythologies, and the history of the great Western cultures. These experiences fed into my desire to create an image that could speak an international language to unite humanity in compassion and respect.

After graduating from high school and spending a year in Madrid studying lithography, I returned to the US to begin my MFA studies in printmaking at Cal State University, Long Beach. I returned to Los Angeles to be close to my family. Many of my grandparents were still alive and I had cousins living in Los Angeles and the surrounding areas. I found my way into a job with Sister Karen Boccalero and Self Help Graphic’s Barrio Mobile Art studio immersing myself in “my own” classical culture, Mesoamerica. My lithographs and etchings focused on the spiritual, an element shared by all peoples regardless of race, creed, or color. It was at this time that I became deeply involved in Chicano Indigena and Native American ceremonial circles. Again, I found myself surrounded by misconceptions and misunderstandings based on color, class, and creed. My experiences in Indigena took me back to the deep South. 
Now, after forty years of search and production I find that Make ‘Em All Mexican accomplishes the task I set for myself so very long ago. By coaxing the viewer into a comfortable space where there is humor and laughter, stories surface about the divisions caused by our differences and the possibility of unity through our similarities. 
The artistic process… 
Several years ago, I made a series of trips that included a visit to China as well as to New York and several other major cities in the U.S. It is my custom to include museums and galleries in my itinerary to get a sense of what is happening in the national and international art scene. 
On these trips I noticed a growing trend from the mundane to the fantastic—sculpture made of pre-produced objects, wildly untamed images created from found objects put to fascinating new uses, photographic collages combining digital work and hand drawn forms, and images that juxtaposed seemingly contrary cultural symbols and icons. 
In New York I encountered the work of Mexican artist Abraham Cruz-Villegas who used wire clothes hangers to create a lyrical floating white sculpture reminiscent of Alexander Calder. Photographer Wang Qing-Song re-purposed Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus using a staged photograph with Chinese models. Ana Mendieta’s solo exhibition at the Hirshhorn in Washington DC thoroughly moved me. I was fascinated by her ability to combine what appeared to be incongruent media to create an expressive whole. 
After seeing these works and hundreds more, my thought and creative processes began to shift. I found myself ruminating, “I’m a person of the world. What would the world of contemporary images look like from my own personal Mexican-American, Chicano lens?” “How would I combine new media or juxtapose incongruous forms to create an image particular to myself and my heritage?” 
In an effort to create a uniquely personal postmodern cultural image, I began taking notes about these ideas of crossing media and culture. I started collecting offbeat items that somehow spoke to me— - newspapers, figurines, postcards, photographs— – and then storing them in odd little cubby-holes. My goal was to place them into the cauldron of my creative mind to see what images would bubble up. 
It occurred to me that I must be the quintessential post-modern American—a woman, Mexican, born of poor immigrant grandparents, raising highly educated children, essentially living the American dream. Yet even as a third generation American, like so many others, I remain invisible in the cultural landscape.

One day, as I was sitting in a restaurant with an artist friend, I found myself blurting out, “I’ve collected all these images, and I just wanna Make ‘Em All Mexican like me!” 
This impassioned yearning came from a realization that visual representations of the American dream somehow did not include me, or my loved ones. It came to me that I had never seen the golden images of Americana with familiar faces—friendly faces, sure, but not familiar ones. I found myself furiously painting directly on antique photographs and figurines to deconstruct iconic images to create an America that included me. I began aimlessly browsing antique malls to find images that I could “call my own. 
My formative years were spent in far flung locations throughout the United States and Europe. During my artistic grounding, I became increasingly immersed in the Chicano/Latino/Mexican-American arts and the indigenous communities – experiences that have informed my cultural perspectives and, by extension, my art practice. 
It has taken my entire artistic career to fuse an image that defines my multicultural experience of the world and my place in it. Like most of my contemporaries I was taught the finer points of the Western classics, art and architecture, but later found myself living and creating in a milieu where symbols of beauty and culture were manifest in a decidedly alternate circumstance. 
The intersection of these two disparate worlds led me to create what my gallerist has called “the work of a lifetime.” My mentor, renowned artist Chuck Arnoldi, said; “Only you could do this work, Linda. It is truly unique.” 
Make ‘Em All Mexican leads you down an ironic path to find yourself confronted by some of the most difficult questions of our time, “Do race, color, and class define our status in the world?” “Is it possible to be a part of and earnestly contribute to multiple cultures simultaneously?” “Does color and class define our understanding and appreciation of culture?” 
To date I have produced over 100 Make ‘Em All Mexican sculptures, handmade books, and mixed media paintings from re-purposed porcelain and plaster figurines, postcards, magazine pages, paintings, and posters found in antique stores, yard sales, and estate sales. I literally take precious images of national and world culture and “make them Mexican” by painting directly on antiques. 
Make ‘Em All Mexican images to date include a “brown” Elvis Presley, Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, Marie Antoinette and Louis August, the Rose Parade Queen and her court, the Queen Mother, and a complete array of the Greek and Roman gods. The most recent of these figures are also decorated with tattoos to “bring them forward” to modern times and other larger sculpture is painted with acrylic car finishes and metal flake bringing in a car-culture subtext. 
Make ‘Em All Mexican carries a strong electric charge… 
To some viewers, the images are hyper-political; for others, they are emotional portals to a past remembered and sometimes forgotten; and for another group, they are just down right hilarious. The series is definitely strange and unfamiliar. Recently on television sculptor Richard Serra stated that the work of the artist is not necessarily to create the unique, but rather “the unfamiliar.” I have re-created a familiar world to create a new unfamiliar image, one that is unfamiliar to everyone that’s not Mexican…

Viewers begin by chuckling as images of a brown Marilyn Monroe, “Marielena La Fabulosa,” or brown Marie Antoinette and Louie Auguste in all their regal finery and end in a meaty dialogue about our experiences with the politics of color. My catch phrase is, “Laugh to keep from crying.” What would happen if Hollywood was built and governed by Mexicans? What if the world and all its grand historical kingdoms were ruled by Mexican royalty? At first a funny notion, but slowly disconcerting to many, even Mexicans…. 
Curators share that they look forward to exhibiting Make ‘Em All Mexican because of the conversation it evokes. During gallery talks the audience is filled with faces of joy and elation, disbelief and relief, fear and anger. In many cases younger viewers will make suggestions about what other important and famous figures could be “made brown.” People are a-lite with ideas about how funny it is to make them “all” Mexican! “You should make Bush Mexican!” “How about the Arizona mayor and chief of police?” “Hey, what about the Three Stooges or John Wayne?” “I want to be Mexican too! Make me brown!" 
At other times the conversation turns to personal stories of memory, loss and regret. Once a viewer looking at the images of the first presidents, “Our Founders I and II: Abraham and Mary Lincoln and George and Martha Washington,” outfitted in fine clothing with little dashes of Mexican insignia shared a very personal story of a mother that worked as a maquiladora who would save cloth remnants to make dresses and shirts for his brothers and sisters. The image of a country’s leadership dressed in delicately hand stitched clothing with dark brown skin brought forth a very personal story of love, sacrifice, and sorrow. I was astonished at the personal history that was shared. 
Another individual reflected in tears of a very personal story of how they were celebrated as the “little princess” of their family born with light hair and skin but how over time as their skin and hair grew darker and darker they could feel the love of their family “ebbing away.” 
An African American family spoke in hushed tones about “high yella and low black” and wondered if the struggle for class based on “shades of color” would ever change. A Chicano family that adopted a Chinese daughter lamented that she no longer wanted to be Chinese and was angry that she could not be “like the girls in the magazines.” The mother and father were at a loss to help her understand her place in the world. One highly placed individual actually acknowledged that the “light” members of his family do not speak to the “dark ones.” 
Conversations have found their way into gay rights, the struggles of feminism, where anyone who has ever felt like an outsider can openly express their need to be considered a member of the whole and be heard for their feelings, thoughts, knowledge, and accomplishments. 
As funny as it is, Make ‘Em All Mexican appears to be capable of opening doors to a shared reality in a modern world where color still governs possession and power. Make ‘Em All Mexican is only the start to a lengthy process but, change is possible, if we just laugh and work through it together.

Critical Commentary 
“As MEAM gets past the joke, which is essentially a fulcrum, and into the incredibly long lever that is Vallejo’s imagination, the seemingly inexhaustible variations on the theme manifest themselves as a pliant language and a tool for examining the function of art in our culture. Vallejo asks questions about the source of an image’s power, and the role images play in securing and perpetuating social hierarchies.” 
George Lawson, George Lawson Gallery 
“The focus of Vallejo’s newest suite of works titled Make ‘Em All Mexican, is anything but subtle. Conceptually-informed, poignant and ironic, she melds populist cultural conventions and racial politics into an edgy brew, adroitly tapping into that nebulous space between anger and laughter.” 
William Moreno, former director of Mexican Museum, San Francisco 
“Vallejo has used satire and wit to make her point. She has not constricted the works within a purely political prism. Indeed, they exude pathos and irony, commentary and comedy, parody and ridicule. Vallejo shows us how much room there is for all these points to converge within just one image. Viewers will find the other paths that make sense to them. But you will gain a much deeper understanding of the work if you do not over think it.” Armando Duron, Chicano art collector 
“Vallejo re-appropriates Western and American icons recreating the fear of every anti-immigration activist and recoloring the world with brown skin and black hair and eyes. Vallejo performs two critical acts, first she defaces the work that she recolors, and second, she takes the image (and its history, power, and meaning) and changes it for her own purpose.” Karen Mary Davalos, Professor and Chair Chicana/Chicano Studies Department, Loyola Marymount University 
“Amidst the roiling national debate about American identity, veteran California Latina artist Vallejo creates a realm in which US popular culture is overlain with a Mexican-American sensibility. Gleefully raiding the world of classic commercial images of middle class WASP life, Vallejo gives common American icons a new sabor or flavor.” Gordon Fuglie, Director, Central California Museum Association 
“Vallejo’s collisions of race can seem obvious, a bit rehashed, and raising what we’d like to think are passé ’70s concepts: The discomfort they create, and our initial response to dismiss them as old news is part of her point. First, their almost vaudeville ubiquity here only points out the absence of such faces in actual images that culture uses every day, Secondly, subtle things drive home just how deep race still runs. The exaggerated clichés here seem deliberate, designed to remind us that however much myriad identities/realities are marketed both in academia and consumer culture as the new ‘post race’ norm, the ideology of racial dominance continues.” Marlena Donohue, Editor, Ltd. Magazine, Los Angeles 


PHOTOS BELOW: COURTESY OF LINDA VALLEJO.