SCULPTURES TO VIEW AT NMHU
‘Contemporáneos Hispanos’ exhibit captures the sense of fear, anger and urgency engulfing the world
New Mexico Highlands University has acquired several new artworks in the last couple of years.
Many artists live cloistered within a studio, plying their trade sans outside interference. The notion of quarantine is normal.
But as the pandemic roils across the nation, it seeps into those creative spaces, splashing across canvas and carving.
“Contemporáneos Hispanos” gathers works by Nicholas Herrera, Patrick McGrath Muñiz and Thomas Vigil at Santa Fe’s Evoke Contemporary, evokecontemporary.com.
Although each artist worked independently and without a theme, all managed to capture the sense of fear, anger and urgency engulfing them.
Nicholas Herrera is an outsider/folk artist from El Rito. His relatives were among the early settlers who came to New Mexico with Oñate in 1598. He walked a wild and precariously thin line as a young man until a sudden near-death experience, involving a car accident, transformed his trajectory.
He now lives a simple life in pursuit of meaning and metaphor through his art as a modern santero who creates bultos, retablos, and large-scale works, often from recycled metal.
Welded together from recycled antique auto parts, his “La Corona” is the angel of death, complete with scythe and scales.
“She’s not a skeleton,” the artist said. “She’s running around weighing your sins.”
Herrera has collected car parts since childhood and attended an auto body school. At the time, undiagnosed dyslexia prevented him from academics. His work often addresses controversial political and social themes, including the hardships of rural life, the demons of drugs and alcohol, and the horrors of war and terrorism.
The exhibition includes a red, white and blue sacred heart addressing the murder of George Floyd inscribed with “I can’t breathe” and “Black lives matter” surrounding Floyd’s portrait.
“That’s what I’ve done all my life,” Herrera said. “I’m one of the ones who started the contemporary work. I started doing a death cart on a Harley (Davidson) at Spanish Market. I just took it there and they didn’t know what to do.”
Herrera’s art hangs in the Smithsonian Institution and in more than 30 museums.
Houston’s Patrick McGrath Muñiz mixes metaphors borne of ancient Greek and Mayan
mythology to comment on contemporary issues.
He titled his oil on canvas “Kamazotz’ after the Mayan god of the dead. The iconography of the pandemic abounds: unfurling toilet paper rolls, masks and hand sanitizer litter a landscape drowning in global warming.
“As an artist I felt a responsibility to tell ancient myths and fictions in light of current events,” he said.
The bat in the upper right corner of the painting symbolizes the Mayan deity.
“It’s quite interesting in that bats might be the main source (of the coronavirus) because of encroachment of habitat,” Muñiz said.
The cupid wearing the gas mask makes a regular appearance in his work as a reference to Houston’s industrial pollution.
“Clymene’s Children,” in oil and gold leaf on panel, refers to the Greek mother of Prometheus and Epimetheus.
“One saw the future, one saw the past,” McGrath Muñiz said.
Her mask lies tossed behind her as she moves forward into a better future.
“This is a painting of hope,” he said.
Española’s Thomas Vigil uses road signs as his canvas. A spray can is his brush.
His “Our Lady of 2020” features a masked Virgin Mary atop an old plant’s health tips sign.
“Obviously, that’s inspired by current events,” he said.
“People have a sense of entitlement that they don’t have to do certain things. It’s hard for me to even turn on the news. There’s so much hate that’s been created in this country. I try to stay out of politics and send a more hopeful message.”
His “Past, Present and Future” features spray painted templates across a speed sign with images of Frida Kahlo, Andy Warhol and John F. Kennedy, as well as stenciling inspired by the street artist Shepard Fairey, among others.
“It was an exploration for me,” he said .”I was having a really hard time with the pandemic as far as creativity. I had this giant sign and it was basically a way for me to release frustration. It has a lot of my influences: graffiti, stickers and stencils. It was just a way to free myself.”
A former graffiti artist, Vigil finds his signs on eBay, as well as the New Mexico Department of Transportation.