Date Farmers’ vision is still bearing fruit
The Coachella Valley artists have a shared aesthetic shaped by working- class roots.
Coachella Valley artists Armando Lerma and Carlos Ramirez, a. k. a. the Date Farmers, survey the installation of their newest work inside the cavernous Ace Gallery in Beverly Hills. Sixand 8- foot- high canvases bathed in bright, poppy colors line thewalls.
A closer look at the paintings reveals social and political messages — commentary on the issues facing blue- collar communities through a blend of pop and assemblage art reminiscent of Mexican revolutionary posters.
“A lot of it has to do with everyday struggle for the working class,” Ramirez says. “I think that’s relevant all around theworld.”
Even in this gallery with the tony ZIP Code.
“All of these paintings,” Lermas ays, “are stories that we’ve seen.”
The Date Farmers have collaborated for more than a decade. Both self- taught artists grew up in the Coachella Valley, where Lerma’s family owned a date farm and where they met in1998.
Their ties to the area — and each other — are deep. Earlier this year, they led an ambitious project that brought together a dozen international artists whose murals raised awareness for the “anonymous” farmworkers east of Palm Springs.
Their new exhibition, which opened Saturday, is their second show at Ace and includes more than 50 pieces that have been in the works for about two years.
The art pieces — many painted on sheets of corrugated metal or large wooden boards— scream with color, meaning and pop- culture references, including Disney characters or advertising symbols, often layered with photographs or stickers, and frequently delivering satirical messages.
The work also is personal, featuring people in the Coachella Valley — migrant farmworkers, abig- boxstore shopper. One painting features a vociferous preacher at his pulpit, gripping a Coca- Cola can as a snake coils around his neck. It was inspired by a tragic incident Lerma witnessed.
“Hewas under this tabernaclestyle tent and showing faith with the rattlesnake,” Lerma says. “But it bit him, and he died. It made me feel like I knew I wasn’t going to live forever.”
The artists, who are prone to finishing each other’s sentences, work so closely together they sometimes work on the same canvas at the same time, painting and drawing on top of each other’s lines, as music blares inside one of their Coachella studios. After 16 years working together, the artists’ aesthetics are totally blended, Ramirez says.
“It’s not so much personal but a shared aesthetic that we have now,” Ramirez says. “It’s a harmonization that we do, that’s the only way to describe it.”
Adds Lerma: “It’s as if we’re pushing forward, toward one goal.”