Artes De Guadalupanos De Atzlan Las Vegas High School Mural

DRIVING THROUGH SANTA Fe, New Mexico, down Canyon Road a blaze of bright colors caught my eye. Right in the eye of brown adobe buildings a house stirred, its two roadside walls completely covered past a multicolored multifigured mural. I say "stirred" considering the colors clashed, and the normal body proportions were distorted. A superhuman arm ran across one wall and onto the other side over an orange red sunrise, stretching into infinity; in another corner, a fist exploded from its bondage. In this stronghold of cowboy and Indian landscape painting, a group of young Spanish-American or Chicano artists had boldly spoken out from the barrio.

Los Artes Guadalupanos De Aztlan was formed in the autumn of 1971 when the Leyba brothers decided to paint a memorial mural to their brother George, expressionless at age twelve from an overdose. It served as a backdrop for Tot-Lot, a neighborhood childrens' playground with swings and sandboxes, provided by the Santa Fe Urban Development Agency. The issue is a lyrical scene of lions, tigers, monkeys, and elephants playing and lazing in the sun. Since and then Los Artes has expanded to include other artists from the barrio and designed and painted over a dozen public murals in and around Santa Fe and Las Vegas, New United mexican states.

"Viva La Raza" written on a book on a wall stares at passing automobiles, dispelling whatever dubiety that the group's piece of work lacks political overtones. The clenched fist, a stake driven into the prone torso of an Indian, a marching skeleton dressed in army fatigues throwing a hand grenade—all represent a piece of the Castilian-American past and nowadays. Members of Los Artes don't call themselves "Spanish-American," a term first used on statistical reports out of Washington D.C. They call back of themselves equally "Chicano," a name not coined past the white customs merely born in the barrio. In all of their murals, the group is concerned with the glorification of the Chicano—from where he came, La Raza today, and his future. The moustached, muscular, and bright-eyed men and women on the walls are the antonym of the Spanish-American stereotype—lazy, conniving, dirty, and infantile. Their enthusiasm in no way associates them with the militant group, the brown berets, an organization like to the Black Panther motility. They are contained thinkers and, near important, artists exercising their special talent.

Although we had many informal discussions, Los Artes refused to grant me a formal interview on the grounds that people from the due east, "Anglos," have been coming for decades to the southwest and exploiting the Chicano and Indian. I tin can remember in the late '60s sitting in country bars wondering whether the local population had in mind running me out of town considering of my long pilus. At present with my hair even so hanging downward I was existence called an "imperialist hog" in place of "hippie radical"—non maliciously, just consciously. I understood what they meant. These Chicanos aren't interested in questions and publicity; they want to paint and exhibit their work on a very personal level—the public mural, not media, not a gallery or museum. The wall of a building is open to view by anyone, anytime. My long list of questions no longer pertinent, I listened.

Nosotros've been busted a thousand times for different things and they'd [Carlo, Albert, and Sammy Leyba] always sit in the cell and draw dissimilar things.

Besides the Leyba brothers, the core members include Geronimo Garduno and Gilberta Guzman. All in their middle twenties or early on thirties with little formal art pedagogy. Sammy Leyba attended a few art classes at Highlands University in Las Vegas, New Mexico earlier dropping out, and Garduno did the same at San Francisco Art Institute. Artistic and spiritual management comes from below the edge. The dancing medicine figures that grace the forepart walls of the La Gente Health Clinic mirror the Meso-american, especially Mixteca, figure drawings that were fresh paint many hundreds of years ago. Los Artes is familiar with the ancient art of fresco painting just lack of time, bad weather, and no money prevent its exercise. Instead the artists use white latex paint, and so a mixture of tinted and untinted shop-bought exterior paints. In the case of the West Las Vegas High Schoolhouse courtyard landscape, lack of time and money eliminated even the white latex first glaze; they were forced to paint direct on the cinderblocks. The necessary experiment worked.

Public murals as a vehicle' of social and political protest came to Los Artes through the work of modern United mexican states'south three great muralists—Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Alfaro Siqueiros. Similar their contemporary counterparts, they envisioned a future devoid of senseless leaders and filled with a sense of brotherhood. Differences between the two groups do exist however. Equally ane member of Los Artes pointed out, the Mexican masters were already accomplished artists when first commissioned to practice public murals, while Los Artes began with murals and is yet evolving a style. And naturally, different the work of Rivera, Orozco, or Siqueiros, the Santa Fe murals are not attributed to an private, simply to a group. Fifty-fifty when a particular landscape is designed and painted by but some members, the project is designated the work of "Los Artes." Looking upward into the peachy dome of the Orphanage in Guadalahara, Mexico, I was stunned by Orozco'due south human being standing in fire outlined by a circle of tormented men. Orozco's imagery effortlessly transcends his immediate subjects, his Mexican countrymen, and comments on all mankind. This sense of universality is apparently absent from the Los Artes murals which deal solely with the by, present, and future of a bronze people. All the same, the murals of Santa Fe and Las Vegas emit much of that same tremendous, internal explosion that is so famous in the Mexican muralists' work.

The Chicanos are praying to the Virgin and the angels for the guys in Vietnam.

Mr. Acuna's elementary explanation of his unfinished Los Artes landscape came hands. He offered the front end of his West San Francisco Street house considering "these guys that do the jobs (the murals) all they need is walls where they can paint and where they tin can evidence them. You lot know . . . like not hide them." The loftier charge per unit of Chicano dead in Southeast Asia weighs heavily on the minds of Los Artes, and other residents of the barrios. The landscape of Mr. Acuna'southward business firm volition exist completed once the pelting stops. At that time, names of some of the Chicanos who died in Vietnam will be written below the madonna, side by side to the door that divides Our Lady of Guadalupe from a coffin borne on the shoulders of 2 skeletons. Vietnam is present in other Los Artes murals too. Mr. J. R. Sanchez, principal of the predominantly Chicano Due west Las Vegas Loftier School, described his school's mural equally representing "the entire history of our culture." At i finish of the two-wall piece strides a purple ancient Mexican god with long serpentlike strands streaming from his headdress. Mr. Via, a teacher at the same schoolhouse, pointed out that that wall concerned aboriginal history while the adjoining wall showed the "modern stuff pertaining to the Chicano." Ii sets of images brand up the "mod" wall. In the first, a Christ-like figure stands with arms outstretched over a seated dark skinned woman with a child under each arm. Iv arms with open palms radiate from behind her, and beneath her is a partially exposed American flag with the words "xv,000 Chicano's muertos [dead] in Vietnam." Adjacent to her is a huge menacing tank tumbling and firing alongside a marching skeleton in regular army uniform. Los Artes' tortured vision of Vietnam is counterbalanced by their optimism of what is to come. The second and final paradigm in the same mural depicts a new army of Chicanos—this i fortified with education. The same sun that rose behind the prancing Aztec rises this time backside the pupil, reflecting off his mighty pencils and rulers and marking a new beginning for the Chicano. Los Artes appears to agree with Mr. Sanchez that Chicano problems can be solved with education.

Los Artes uses murals to make the Chicanos more enlightened of themselves, to explore and encourage the creative free energy that lies dormant in the barrios. The greatest impetus comes from the young men'southward piece of work itself. Plain as solar day fine art came out of the barrio. Eventually they promise to hold free art classes for the neighborhood children. In the Young Citizens For Activeness headquarters at that place are already several mini-murals done by kids inside the organization. They are far less sophisticated, but of a kindred spirit to the Los Artes murals. The Spanish conquistador and Indian maiden staring cheek to cheek over the lush greenish of the pool table are especially appealing. Los Artes would like to link upwards with other Chicano artists effectually the country and hopefully stimulate a Chicano art movement. While photographing W Las Vegas High School I heard about the "other" mural. Several miles east of town on the route to Montezuma in the piffling hamlet of El Llano is a church. On the front of the church are 2 huge gratuitous course doves encircling Christ as he ascends toward heaven with the aid of brightly colored angels. No one in the village seemed to know exactly who painted information technology, but suggested I inquire at nearby Highlands University. Like his fellow Chicano artists, Leroy Gonzales, a graduate of Due west Las Vegas High Schoolhouse and an ex-student at Highlands University, had volunteered his time and talent while local businesses donated materials. Interestingly plenty, though he had been gone from the University only a brusk time the head of the art department could non recall him. The rumor was that Mr. Gonzales was forced to quit school and return to Arizona and the mines to help support his family.

It'south okay. I don't get for those psychedelics . . . a lot of people like information technology.

Mrs. Nashie Ruiz owns a luncheonette down the street from the two-sided mural at Corporation Organizada Para Accion Servidora. Dissimilar Mrs. Ruiz, almost Spanish-Americans are more enthusiastic and proud of the murals that dot their customs. Outside the barrios a Los Artes mural is harder to find. The one on Canyon Road in a predominantly white neighborhood caused quite a stir. Immediately upon completion the Historical Style Committee received angry calls denouncing the rainbow-colored building as destructive of the traditional mood of the expanse and illegal since it was a historical building or at least in a historical zone. What callers really objected to was having a Chicano protestation mural staring the many passing tourists and prospective art buyers in the face up. The Committee found the building neither historical nor in a historical zone, and furthermore felt information technology had no right to pass judgment on fine art, any art. To top it off, Mrs. Purdy, the chairman of the Committee, likes it. Then I head rumors that Mr. George Barela, head of Young Citizens For Action, had reneged on his offer to hang a commissioned Los Artes landscape on the front of the headquarters. Supposedly he took it down when he discovered the central motif was of a "militant" Chicano handshake and feared he would lose his federal funding. The truth was that vandals had tossed rocks at it, and Mr. Barela was having it repaired and hoped to rehang it in a much safer spot, the gym. In fact, he feels the mural successfully depicts family unit unity and community solidarity—what he wanted in the showtime place. Gene Whiting, a teacher at W Las Vegas High Schoolhouse, typified nearly people's opinion of the Los Artes murals when she claimed "I retrieve they're pretty and that'southward all that counts."

It's role of me, merely I mean, I don't really understand information technology then I tin't get myself all the mode into information technology. Information technology'southward beautiful. It'south got lots of meaning to it I know, even though I don't know all information technology means.

Loretta Gonzales, an eleventh grader at Westward Las Vegas High School, was more certain of the meaning of the mural that had tanks, soldiers, and boys with pencils and rulers. In unproblematic terms—"if y'all don't get an education you got to go to Vietnam and get shot." The murals with state of war figures and skeletons strike at a real gimmicky trouble. But almost of the other mural figures and symbols are more abstruse. The faces Los Artes Guadalupanos De Aztlan, murals in Santa Fe, New Mexico. that are identifiable are of pop revolutionary figures—Che Guevara, Father Hidalgo, Pancho Villa and sharing the aforementioned wall, jesus Christ. On the side wall of the COPAS building is a figure nailed to a cross surrounded past soldiers with guns. Jesus Christ up on the Cross? I was immediately informed in no uncertain terms that the image was non Christ. Who the human with a crown of thorns was they would not say. The bigger than life moustached men with glaring eyes and powerful arms are obviously symbols of the new Chicano. The women with long black braids and plain long dresses are Indian. Their imagery is often original. For case, in the Canyon Route mural the artists take interpreted the traditional American Lady of justice as an Indian mother and liberator. She's not blindfolded only her eyes are shut as she blasts the bondage of the Chicano who holds in his left hand the other half of her scale. His half is filled with people, his brothers. As the sign of the place and the times the majority of people in the murals aren't farmers just urban center folk, the hard hat more prevalent than the plow.

The classic New Mexico mosaic of bluish sky, brownish globe, purple mountains, and adobe buildings is now pleasantly arrested here and there by a human being-fabricated spectrum of paint created voluntarily and spontaneously by a group of immature painters from the Santa Fe barrios. Stimulated by centuries of suppression and struggle and the Vietnam War, these murals echo those on tenement walls in the black and Puerto Rican ghettos of Chicago and New York. Forth with its political and social importance the work of Los Artes provides the pleasant experience of finding art where you least expect it.

—Eric Kroll

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/197307/murals-in-new-mexico-36268

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