ARTIST STATEMENT

Major events in the history of my time shaped my identity as an artist, an art critic, a curator, and a visual sociologist. Though it is unorthodox to identify oneself in multiple professions within Fine Arts, I cannot restrict my work to any one endeavor. Since Chicano and Chicana faculty members are highly underrepresented in Fine Arts departments throughout the United States, we--Chicanos-- often do not have the luxury to occupy roles which restrict contributions that we must make. There are literally too few of us to permit such specialization.

Before I could comprehend the world, my identity was shaped by the term "Mexican" typed into the race category on my birth certificate. I remember Texas. It was a place where racial/ethnic identity determined one's place in the world.

I juxtapose this image of "place" with my own family background. We always talked about my grandfather who fought in the Mexican Revolution with Pancho Villa. His letters to my grandmother, written in impeccable Spanish and excellent handwriting, are embedded in memory. I never got to know him because he was lost in The Revolution. However, I remember his letters, the mystique created by his words in fluent Spanish, and his commitment to social change.

The power of "words" continued to intrigue me. While I was at the University of Houston, I wrote poetry and had much of it published. When I went to the State University of New York at Buffalo, Robert Creeley published my poems in a literary magazine which he sponsored. I even took a graduate class in the English Department entitled "Creative Writing: Poetry" from John Logan who also was a poet in residence. Later in my career as a sociologist, I published poetry in an issue of Revista Chicano-Riquena which also included the poems of Sandra Cisneros.

However, my major interest remained in Sociology. I became a sociologist so that I could better understand the complexity of "race relations" in American society. As a Chicano, I saw the need for social change all around me. After 24 years as a faculty member in the Department of Sociology writing about Chicanos, events in my personal history created an opportunity for me to join the Department of Fine Arts. I welcomed this change because I was becoming interested in finding new ways to communicate sociological ideas.

Since I was interested in social problems (with a particular interest in HIV/AIDS at the time that I moved to the Department of Fine Arts), I organized Chicano artists to create work on the theme of HIV/AIDS. I exhibited their work throughout the Southwest. The success of this touring exhibition was followed with an exhibition of Mexican artists from Mexico who also addressed HIV/AIDS in Mexico.

As I gradually became more involved in the visual arts, I developed an interest in the role that Fine Arts could play as a vehicle for social change. Since I had known about the important contributions that Chicano/a artists made during the Chicano Movement, I wanted to make art and position myself among these artists. Thus, I went to study the emerging field of digital art at the Multimedia Center at the Centro Nacional de las Artes in Mexico City.

I now produce digital art and work in this medium exclusively. Though I initially created art referencing the Chicano Movement, my family, and colonization, my present work is exclusively word-based art. This decision evolved from my struggle to find my own voice in Chicano art, and my effort to find a means wherein I could address what Chicanos were doing and thinking today. Thus, I create "ethnograms" which are visual telegrams that deconstruct (and reconstruct) everyday experiences and present-day projected images of Chicanos and Mexicanos, especially those in local and national news. My work is highly influenced by Joseph Kosuth (including Ludwig Wittgenstein), Victor Burgin, Hans Haacke, Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Group Material, Glenn Ligon, Cildo Meireles and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. The work of Marcel Broodthaers was especially relevant to me because he was a poet outside of artistic art movements before he began making word-based art. My work also follows in the social science tradition set by Herve Fisher and the Colectidf d'Art Sociologique in Paris who worked to produce "sociological art," and Kosuth who viewed art as anthropology.

Sociology provides the frame for me to understand the world, and art allows me to visualize ideas. Poetry taught me the power of words. Now words (language) are the basis for my aesthetics.

Therefore, I will continue to create word-based art that references the Chicano experience, but I also will search for better ways to create images that communicate across racial/ethnic/national lines. I will use more Spanish in my word-based art so that I can communicate with Spanish-speaking people in the United States, Mexico, and the Americas. I plan to create word-based art in languages appropriate to host countries whose native language is neither English nor Spanish, like Russia and China, in order to make an effort to erode nationalistic barriers. Given that, "there are many promises to keep and many miles to go before I sleep."