Rebeca Méndez
When Rebeca Méndez was 12, her parents gave her a giant wall in their home to paint what she pleased. “The responsibility I felt was enormous,” she says.
Inspired by Henri Rousseau and Paul Gauguin, she painted a jungle, with jaguars, giraffes and exotic birds. Later, Henri Bergson’s idea of élan vital — described by the French philosopher as “the explosive internal force that life carries within itself ” — fueled her work. As did these words by composer Karlheinz Stockhausen: “We are all transistors, in the literal sense. People always think they are in the world, but they never realize that they are the world.”
Méndez’s father would come to tell her that art was an unrealistic career pursuit, but it was too late. They’d already nurtured her interest.
Born in 1962 and raised in Coyoacán, in southern Mexico City, Méndez spent much of her childhood searching for archaeological sites in the jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula with her family. Her parents, both chemical engineers, cultivated her observations of the world, what she called “that physical, chemical point of view,” thinking often about what things are made of, how they’re organized, and their cycles and rhythms — all concepts found in her work.
When she was 17, she was on Mexico’s gymnastics team, bound for the Olympics, a feat she’d been training for since she was 7. Then the Soviet-Afghan War erupted in 1979, and Mexico boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow.
So instead of the Olympics, she came to the U.S. at age 18, to San Diego State University, where she took science, art and design classes. Her art professors encouraged her to apply to the ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, where she got in but found the curriculum “tight and restrictive.” Still, in 1984 she earned her BFA in graphic design there and landed a gig designing a poster for a Getty fellowship. There, she was given free rein over the museum’s vast collections. One day, she happened upon the Fluxus collection.
“And I went crazy,” she recalls excitedly. “That’s when I thought, ‘I want to be an artist.’” She returned to ArtCenter for an MFA while working full time as the school’s design director. By the time she graduated, her career was booming.
Curious and ever-evolving, Mendez’s interests eventually expanded to other mediums: installation, photography, video and 16 mm film.
Now a UCLA professor of design media arts, the silver-haired Méndez has built a successful career as an artist and designer. Her work has been exhibited from Mexico to Germany, Ecuador to Amsterdam, and has received numerous awards and honors.
When Méndez was approached to design a couple of art pieces for the future Crenshaw/LAX Line, she was thinking about the transit system as a great “equalizer” and about time. About the way people use subways and rails when they are “rushing from one place to another” and how “most of the time, you go into your work and you don’t come out sometimes until it’s dark.”
And she was also looking up to the sky. “I felt that I wanted to show the difference in an understanding of time and the rhythms of the earth versus the rhythms of our working life.”
That became the concept for her massive mosaic, titled “At the Same Time,” for the Expo/Crenshaw station. Over a 24hour period, Méndez photographed L.A.'s sky in 15-minute intervals to capture its various shades of blue.
The result was a mosaic more than 10 feet tall and 92 feet long. Displaying the sky’s circadian hues, it’s a metaphor for the city’s diversity.
Or, as Méndez put it: “No matter who you are, where you live, what is your social strata, you see the same [sky].”