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FWMoA Heats Up with ¡Arte Caliente!

By Jack Cantey

Fort Wayne Reader

2006-11-08

This winter, visitors to the Fort Wayne Museum of Art will have the good fortune to meet dozens of Joe Diaz's best friends. And they've got quite a lot on their minds.

¡Arte Caliente!: Selections from the Joe A. Diaz Collection – an exhibition featuring over 70 works by contemporary Chicano artists – opens Saturday, November 18.

In the 1960s, journalist Rubén Salazar defined Chicano as “a Mexican-American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” This collection of vibrant works by Mexican-American artists (mainly from Texas), however, defies superficial classification. Not only do the media widely vary in this exhibition (paintings, prints, photographs, sculptures, and more), but the pieces themselves address social, political, cultural, religious, and personal issues using a multitude of aesthetic approaches. Viewers expecting a unified vision of “modern Chicano art” will instead be presented with 28 vital and independent voices.

“There's quite a range,” the museum's Curator of Collections Sachi Yanari-Rizzo states. “You've got photography, things that are more conceptual, you have artists who are reminiscent of graffiti artists and pop artists. The works are very multi-dimensional – there are multiple levels to them, depending on how deeply you want to look.”

Diaz is a native Texan and resides in San Antonio. He fell in love with art as a child and began his collection over 20 years ago while living in Houston. Over the past two decades, Diaz has taught himself about art primarily through his extensive travels to galleries and museums and voracious reading habits. His collection – number over 200 total works and growing – features not only the pieces of established Chicano artists from the Southwest, but also creations from artists such as American painter Peter Saul and Australian Aboriginal photographer Tracey Moffett.

In conversation, Diaz often refers to the art that attracts him as “hot” (hence, the exhibition's name). What exactly makes an artwork caliente? “It's a work that is totally different,” Diaz says, “and has a lot of color and a lot of ideas, too. You see so many things that are so mundane... This work will be so different from any show that you've seen there in Fort Wayne.”

He also takes his responsibilities as a collector seriously, especially in regard with the work of Chicano artists.

“[My responsibilities are] very substantial,” Diaz explains. “My duty is to conserve this type of art. There are very few collectors in the United States doing what I'm doing, preserving the culture of the Mexican-American population.”

Four of the Mexican-American artists who Diaz has actively championed are Luis Jiménez, Kathy Vargas, Alex Rubio, and Vincent Valdez.

Luis Jiménez is likely the most respected artist in the exhibition. Until his untimely death earlier this year, Jiménez excelled in three distinct media.

“He's really the definition of a master,” Diaz says. “If you look at his sculptures, he did sculptures that no one else had done. Then, if you look at his drawing, I haven't seen anyone who is as good as a draftsman as he was. He's unbelievable. And then, to top it off, he's an exceptional printmaker.”

Jiménez's lithograph, Tan Lejos de Dios, Tan Cerca de los Estados Unidos (So Far From God, So Near the United States), is one of three of his prints included in the exhibition which address the web of issues surrounding the Mexican-American border. The print (another of its edition is owned by the Museum of Art) ambitiously details a pack of weary immigrants under the eyes of an armed smuggler. Behind them, a body lies slaughtered on the path. Above, both birds of prey and surveillance aircrafts eye the dead and the living.

Kathy Vargas's series of hand-colored photographic diptychs, My Alamo, is about the artist's “(usually) ambiguous relationship to and with the Alamo.” Vargas writes that “living all my life in San Antonio, Texas, and being both Chicana and Tejana, I have negotiated that relationship for what seems like an incredibly long time… Some of my recollections of the Alamo are humorous; some are serious. Most of them have a bite, but it’s a bite that I did not invent.” She contrasts still-life images of a pistol and crown with photo-and-text works that detail family narratives, such as her great-great-grandfather being granted a broom instead of a gun by Santa Anna for battle. Vargas also touches on recent events involving the memorial, including an infamous Ozzy Osbourne restroom break in 1982.

Alex Rubio and Vincent Valdez represent a new generation of Chicano artists in the exhibition. Rubio presents an encounter with a maniacal ex-addict in the intense and colorful acrylic painting, Street Preacher. The heavily tattooed preacher clutches his bible and rosary close to his chest, as confessional fliers swirl away from him. These “Confessions of an ex-tecato” begin with the words, “Yeah, I ripped people off for drugs...”

Valdez – who was mentored by Rubio – introduces us to “El Pollo the Great” in his charcoal drawing, With a Little Luck, Faith, God and a Six-Pack. El Pollo, an evidently below-average boxer, stares at us with his swollen eyes. We notice his taped hands and the word “PAIN” tattooed on his abdomen. Above his mohawked head, four symbols surround a pair of fighting cocks: a six-pack of beer, a sacred heart, a rabbit's foot, and Christ's head. In the background, an anachronistic ring-side scene is detailed.

A preview reception will be held on Friday, November 17. At 6pm, Joe Diaz will join the museum's Executive Director Charles A. Shepard III for ¡Coversación Caliente!, a discussion on the evolution and highlights of Diaz’s expansive and exciting collection.

“I'm trying not to stereotype Mexican-American artists,” Diaz explains. “There's conceptual art, film, and everything else in the exhibit. There's a diversity of Mexican-American population. People try to define it and say, 'This is what it is.' It's so diverse that you can't do that.

“It's all about dialogue and conversation. That's what I love – to get your mind thinking. That's what I think art is about.”

¡Arte Caliente! will be on view through January 21, 2007.