I first met Sergio Gómez Zuluaga when we both lived in Rochester, New York. He was working on an MFA in photography and I was finishing my PhD in Visual and Cultural Studies. Sergio’s work then was about both encounter and abstraction, or perhaps, the abstraction of encounter. There is still that sensibility in this
Alicia Inez Guzmán: Can you say a few words about yourself and how you “came out” as an artist? Jay Critchley: I was thirty-three years old when I had a rebirth and found my unadulterated self as an artist. I’m a “born again artist.” I had come out as a gay man four years earlier
In a 2015 Artforum interview, the artists described the artwork not as an act of appropriation, but of recontextualization: In order to get to Puerto Rican Light (Cueva Vientos), one has to drive along the southwest coast of the island and pass a large petrochemical complex that has been abandoned since the 1970s. It now
Red, yellow and pink fluorescent light beamed out of an all but dark crevice. You might not know that though. At least I didn’t, not from my particular vantage point looking up into Cueva Vientos. I had to really focus to find the subject, the artificial light I had been hiking toward through a
As I scrolled through Instagram, I began to see a project take shape, literally from the ground up. Adobes bricked formed a curved wall that stepped upward toward the apex. Joanna Keane Lopez painted the the brown adobe with whitewash made of lime on the concave side. The convex side was left it’s natural adobe
Figure Ground: Beyond the White Field suggests what brown identity might stand for without essentializing it into one trait. In a review of the exhibition that came out in this month’s issue of THE Magazine, I described the work’s suggestive power in the following terms: The question that arises: What makes brown identity? The installation doesn’t
In northern New Mexico, adobe is a fact; homes made of sun-dried bricks pepper the high desert landscape. I grew up in an adobe home. It belonged to my great-grandmother, Juanita, and her husband, Rosenaldo. The walls were over twelve inches thick, bulbous and uneven, finished on the interior and white washed. So thick were
The building where artist Ruben Ochoa works in East Los Angeles is next to a restaurant named Teresita’s. Before meeting up, I went there first on his suggestion, where I was greeted with a generous slice of pistachio cake and a cup of black coffee. An elderly man walked in selling leather wallets and, when
Just before entering Tierra Amarilla, a small town in northern New Mexico located along the Chama River, drivers are greeted by a handmade billboard proclaiming Tierra o Muerte. Perhaps greet is the wrong word. It might be better to say that the phrase is thrust into one’s awareness. It cuts: land or death. Scrawled in thick capital letters, the
