Museo will be participating again this year – look for our invitation to explore the art of Frank Galuszka on Slow Art Day, Saturday April 8th
Slow Art Day is an international movement to encourage slow looking and conversation. Look for our invitation to get your cell phones out and participate this Saturday – opening at 6am and continuing all day.
Click to preview or read the article in the Wall Street Journal:
On behalf of the collaboration between Young Writers Program, Pajaro Valley Arts and Museo Eduardo Carrillo, we are proud to share this letter of thanks from Michelle and Barack Obama.
They received the educational materials based on Latinx Art which grew from partnership.
The two full color books “The Art of Who I Am” and “Hablamos Juntos: together we speak” exemplify how cross pollination between Latinx art and the significant writing mentor ship provided through the YWP can bring out the deepest feelings and profound reflections in fine writing by our community teens.
We continue. Together.
Yes, We Can.
Memories of the Artist I Knew
Article by Christina Waters in Catamaran Literary Magazine
Even now, almost twenty years after his death, it’s difficult to separate the man from his work. Both burned brightly, bursting with energy. Now only the paintings remain.
I was drawn to Eduardo Carrillo even before I realized that he was an extraordinary painter. Warm and genuinely comfortable in his skin, Ed personified the laid-back spirit of this coastal stretch of California. Although his ances – tral roots were in Baja, he was quite willing to pepper his unpretentious persona with plenty of Los Angeles hipness when the occasion required
Bring the whole family downtown for the first Watsonville Art Walk September 3 – November 3
Download map & brochure
Museo Eduardo Carrillo has received a grant of $10,000 from the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County to fund the First Watsonville Art Walk from September 3- November 3, according to Museo’s Executive Director, Betsy Andersen.
The Art Walk will feature the “Hablamos Juntos: together we speak/ Contemporary Latino Broadsides” series. Artists will be attending. It is a major educational project of Museo Eduardo Carrillo and Pajaro Valley Arts. The banners show Latino art in an array of mediums from artist throughout California. The series will be expanding. Each banner has text in English and Spanish, written by teens in the Young Writers Program.
Reception begins at Pajaro Valley Arts, 37 Sudden St, Watsonville at 6PM on September 16.
The grant from the Foundation gives us the resources to create a self guided walking tour and map in which Latino art is the main feature. This free event allows unlimited access to the art. We’re ecstatic about the support and vote of confidence from the Community Foundation of Santa Cruz County and fiscal sponsorship through Arts Council Santa Cruz County!
Note: (if you are on a mobile device, you may be prompted to download the exhibbit app)
Click the images to view full size. Add your responses below in the comments
Artist: Juan Fuentes“My muscles ache, too. His labor goes unnoticed by many, but not by me.”
—Yesenia Matias Chavez, UCSC Student and Writing Project Assistant
Artist: Ivan Rubio“The picture I picked out reminds me of my Uncle Georgie. My Uncle Georgie is a buff, ‘tall ass foo’ and he’s all tatted up from his neck down to his legs.”
—Chris Rosete, Young Writers Program
Artist: Judithe Hernandez“Maria’s childhood was difficult. She grew up in a neighborhood where guns were like fireworks at night. Houses were falling apart, with broken windows. It was a very lonely neighborhood.”
—Alexis Rangel, Young Writers Program
Artist: Xavier Jiramontes“When my family immigrated to Watsonville from Michoacán, Mexico, they bought a house in a white neighborhood. [Their neighbors] would drive by in their cars and yell out all kinds of racist names like ‘beaner,’ ‘wetback,’ ‘greasers,’ and ‘aliens.’ But despite all that my family stayed on the block.”
—Anthony Garcia, Young Writers Program
Artist: Carmen Leon“The title of this artwork is called “The Portal.” This symbolizes the transformation I made from being a kid to the high school teenager I am today.”
—L.R., Young Writers Program
Artist: Jesus Barraza & Melanie Cervantes“I’m Mexican and I’m proud of that—I wouldn’t change it even if I could.”
—Jose Antonio Ortiz, Young Writers Program
Artist: Hector Mendoza“The barb wires in this picture made me think of a lot of difficult times I’m still going through.”
—Elizabeth Albor, Young Writers Program
The Art Department faculty was pleased to select 21 students as the 2015 Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship recipients. Students were selected from a large pool of junior and senior Art majors in good academic standing, who are receiving financial aid, and working in the areas of painting, drawing, and sculpture. Each applicant submitted work samples, a project proposal, research agenda and an itemized budget for consideration. Their projects ranged from a series of six paintings, related to the cruelty and brutality currently proliferating under the regimes of the Taliban and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) to an investigation of LED light sculpture, to relief and intaglio printmaking techniques that explore social issues of race, class and gender. There is an incredible breadth and depth of talent and interests with this year’s cohort.
The 2015 Carrillo Scholarship recipients demonstrated a proficiency in a range of techniques and media within their respective disciplines. They were clearly able to imagine, create and resolve their work as indicated in the samples they provided and in the project proposals they submitted. Furthermore, these students communicated a strong familiarity to analyze forms of contemporary art with a clear understanding of historical precedents. On behalf of the entire faculty and staff of UC Santa Cruz’s Art Department, I want to congratulate the 2015 Eduardo Carrillo Scholarship winners and wish them the best of luck on their current and future creative endeavors.
I see my work as an intuitive expression that is transformed into a physical entity. I work with many different subjects, not fixed on any one idea. Many of my subjects incorporate self-identity with the human figure. .For me, art is a journey; a state of being, independent of outcome. It’s about spending time with myself, and through this process, I am awakened. Therefore, my art making process does not include much sketching and recording beforehand. Rather, I like to leave my options open as I work and allow the textures and materials to guide me. Through my artwork, I hope to pass on to the viewer my inspiration to see and recognize the subject, not only to look at the piece.
I am a sculptor and social documentation photographer. I celebrate people and space. Where people live, how people make and use space, and the objects people need and consume are central themes and questions guiding my work.
I use portraiture to honor and tell stories of people who have been historically under or misrepresented; consent and trust-building are essential principles in my photograph making. Imaging the relationship between space, objects, and people help us to see differences in lived experience, which illuminates larger social issues or questions.
My works are obsessively composed and compulsively graphic. Carefully drawn lines mingle to create a visual narrative that emerges and references contemporary underground culture. I am heavily influenced by the reckless and dangerous DIY aesthetic of skate, graffiti, and party culture, in which I draw upon to create antagonistically woeful imagery. Much of the iconography within my drawings and etchings allude to the vivacious lifestyles of youthful expression as I depict condoms, pills, alcohol, drugs, floating alongside graffiti caps and stylized fictional monsters. I create an atmosphere of static dissonance, which resonates, throughout my work, referencing the transition between a careless youth to a responsible adult. Precariously placed figures interlaced with sturdy cityscapes depict a superficial sense of security.
Hailing from Los Angeles, California, a city compacted with large amounts of traffic and advertising, I am constantly being stimulated with a dense amount of visual imagery. I evoke this barrage of stimuli in my work through the repetition of closely packed line work. I come from Mid-City Los Angeles, a community on the edge of two different realities. In a few blocks you go from a poor neighborhood of predominantly black and Latino communities with liquor stores on every corner to an affluent predominantly white neighborhood.
The contemporary art process of idea formation before conceiving the work, holds little relevance to my design based graphic style of making art. I feel restricted by the notion that concept should come before creation. I explore what image making is while producing it, leaving the concept behind in order to freely discover all possibilities of image making. Much like a producer edits a song on the whim of a feeling, I add and subtract forms continuously until there is a harmony within the work.
Heileng Chio specializes in designing and painting in oils and acrylics. She paints in surrealistic style and creates artworks influenced by rooster. The rooster has a familial meaning to Heileng because she, her parents, and her twin sister belong to this Chinese Zodiac. This animal portrays a unique bond shared between her family members; it reminds her of her personal connection to her family.
Holding a forceful instrument of social construction while enthralled with overwhelming yet momentary emotions, I use sculpture and performance to engage observers in interactive art. By participating and contributing to experiences and conversations, help me build an environment that promotes intimate thought, encourages shared knowledge, and redefines our purpose as human beings.
Formerly a manufacturer of heavy artillery, my vessel of a body and penetrating voice now guide fellow humans to divert social activities through a shifted perspective: one that empathizes with all sentient beings, non-animal life included. By tantalizing viewers with irresistible temptations toward action, I focus on the reciprocal relationship between the audience and the performers, blurring lines of obligatory or secluded involvement and satisfactory completion of a work.
When constructing visual works that elude connected performance, a similarly charged energy of life must be present—that is, an interaction must occur between the viewer and the subject that transcends creation and observance and approaches collaboration. This form of sculpture has lead to my most current examination of human influence, spanning from sound-reactive light sculptures to reimagined domesticated animal habitats to two-day long interviews, as I begin to examine physical presence within a monitored space.
I plan to create a series of dog portraits attempting to capture the personality of each dog through color, composition, and brushstroke. My intention is to create large scale portraits harnessing half-realistic and half-abstract in styles to present a new perspective on the dog that would not be seen in a normal portrait. Dogs have been a part of my life since the beginning, with this I believe they possess a love sometimes difficult for fellow human beings to present to one another; I aim to present this series as a representation of said love which allows us to see these animals in a new light.
I have chosen art the same way art has chosen me. My purpose as an artist is partly selfish but mostly altruistic; I need art in my life to express my creativity and because it feeds my soul; but I also feel a compulsion to share my perspective through my photography to the public eye.
As a visual and kinesthetic learner, I yearn to use my hands and create tangibly. In this way, my art becomes real to me and I am able to better communicate with my audience what I am expressing.
As an artist, I create images through photographic techniques, printmaking, and mixed media, incorporating painting and drawing into my art images. My themes show my connection to nature and my observations of light and space, often involving ideas of the feminine. Within these themes, moods alter to express human experience, incorporating the beauty, the ugly, and the nitty-gritty.
Creating art makes me feel like I am pushing back on all of the outside information constantly being consumed by my senses. It allows me to de-tangle my thoughts and turn them into something tangible within my physical reality. I am interested in how ideas come to be as well as what connects everything and everyone together. Metal is my favorite medium to work in because I feel like it is permanent and unwavering, countering the uncertainty and constant change of everything else in life.
I use art as a conduit to self-exploration. A common theme I mostly gravitate to express is transcendence and entanglement. I am fascinated by concepts of our existence, the supernatural, the human experience, death, life after death, and the human connection.
The illustrations, photos, and installations that I make explore relationships between people and landscape. I grew up with many ecstatic memories in a semi-wild, coastal environment and discovered how good it feels to be physically connected to nature. Today, I make art in order to restore, build, and deepen relationships with the natural world.
The energy of landscape and its emotional and spiritual vibrations are influential and vital to the decisions I make while producing photos. By manipulating and applying abstraction to landscape photography, I investigate the energy of landscape. Sometimes an image is a poor substitute for the visual, physical, and spiritual experience we have in the natural world. So, I alter colors, textures, and layers of real places to create landscapes that emit energy, emotion, and awaken the imagination. My photos are alcohol transferred onto watercolor paper or wood. These images are characterized by their imperfection. You can tell the photo wasn’t printed by a machine.
When experimenting with installation, performance, and conceptual work, I juxtapose man-made and natural materials to build visual metaphors regarding the power of nature. I incorporate the surrounding environment into my artwork and involve myself and the viewer in a physical way.
Through my art, I create spaces for situations and introduce new ways of interaction.The meaning my work lies in the space between the person and the interface I have created be it electronic or traditional. My electronic installations challenge the passive viewer to have a kinetic relationship with the piece and my traditional work examines life through a critical lens and creates the space for the viewer to consider subjects like homelessness and marginalized people in art.
Leah Stemmann
Torus: This flying disk is meant to remind viewers of the possibility of other intelligent beings and the mysteries beyond our reality. Mystery is important for imagining a reality infinitely different from the one we accept regularly. The piece invites participants to imagine unknown or alien ways of perceiving the universe and our place in it
Moon Clock: A short film about alternate realities and paranoia featuring footage from Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi, monologue from Richard Linklater’s Slacker, and music by the musician Christ. The two-part video shows distorted, layered, and masked moments of daily life, sped up and slowed down dramatically to represent unclear memory and an elusive present that is simultaneously always and never happening. Poorly keyed visual effects portray concepts of reality as kitsch and made-up, but artificial time and space morph into eerie uncertainty.
The intentions behind my artwork are to honor my grandmother and my late grandfather who have sparked my interest in learning more about my ancestral and cultural origins. I utilized a puzzle style painting technique to portray them as pieces that form part of my family tree and depict them in muted and achromatic colors. Through the use of darker and lighter shades of color I am able to capture their emotions and convey their characteristics during a time when they were younger.
2015 Carrillo Scholarship Recipients Gallery
Click to enlarge
Museo Eduardo Carrillo is pleased to present the work of the 2014 Carrillo Scholarship Recipients from University of California, Santa Cruz in our online gallery “On View”. The faculty recognized great promise and commitment in these students’ art and selected them for this honor.
Please linger, add your comments, and follow the artist’s links to see more.
Through depicting the human form, I attempt to catalog the tension and harmony apparent between our bodies and the spaces we inhabit, while also striving to involve my viewers through representational acuteness and ambiguity. I hope in the pursuit of honing my own practice and critical eye, I implicate the eyes of others in a resistance to our modern trend of seeing. From our tendency to personify the natural and synthetic landscapes we each create, destroy and inhabit, I hope to illuminate each viewer’s unique and often contradictory condition– as well as the distance one maintains between themselves and the context they habituate.
My artwork is about metamorphoses of the human spirit. Exploring the parallax of space and time, it expresses a deep understanding of mythological epochs juxtaposed in the foreground of an unattainable post-modernity. My work is concerned with the ancient as much as it is inspired by the possibilities of the future, intending to reach for the future with a sense of gratitude and connection with the past.
The artwork I create has a strong connection to the environment in which I was raised and the difficult struggles that the diverse majority of people still face every day in my hometown of Stockton, California. After Stockton was crowned by Forbes “The Most Miserable City in the United States” twice, my eyes were opened to the obvious misery on every passing face. I am interested in translating all emotions that relate to “misery” into at times easily digestible yet often deeply conceptual mechanical reproductions through any and every print making process, alongside more tactile mixed-media pieces incorporating photography, painting, sculpture, collage, and assemblage.
I feel you can conjure up the plainness of emotion with almost nothing at all. Following intuitive motion, my work has a handmade or sketchy quality. In graphic novel style, I utilize simple lines and shapes to command attention with understated power.
After many years of doing small paintings I was introduced to murals in Gavilan College in 2006.
My interest has changed; I put aside my personal work and now dedicate myself to giving back to my community, and to bringing back arts to schools.
I have always loved drawing; however there is something about printmaking that I have not been able to experience with any other art medium. With printmaking not only am I a printmaker, I am also an illustrator, a sculptor, a painter, an athlete, and even a chemist. It amazes me where I am now and where I have yet to go, and I owe it all to my humble beginnings in drawing.
My interest as an artist is tied in closely with my curiosities of the individual, and the inner and outer working of the Self. In my work I strive to show the person as they truly are, stripped of all social contexts and material objects so that whether they be proud or angry, they are simply seen as human. I have found that my explorations work best in layers, and so my pieces are usually a culmination of many different creations combined into one piece, just as I feel the complex human being is.
I fully immerse myself in the processes of playing, manipulating, accumulating, morphing, deconstructing, and building. I create visually tactile installations and sculptures that are jarringly uncomfortable when finished yet still represent familiar, biomorphic forms. My work incorporates calming, organic forms that have unsettling undertones due to the minuscule details of excess and reverberation throughout the surfaces. Each piece evolves through extensive processes of repetition and experimentation with multiples and found materials of various textures. These processes are representative of the prolonged natural, physical, and chemical processes that our planet and its inhabitants undergo—mutations, formations, death, erosion, evolution, growth, and decay.
I am interested in the mind and body’s markers of lived experience. My mixed-media work portrays my mind and body as merged landscapes processed by my own perceptions of those experiences. It is exciting to know that, when under enough pressure, these bodily tectonics will reveal their limits and potential for growth.
My practice tends to focus on the exploration of color and how it triggers a response to the viewer. Most of my work is about social interaction and exchange while exploring individuality.
My artwork takes a critical look at the constantly deepening relationship between culture and information technology. In order to pose questions about how we understand the world through the framing of technology, I examine concepts related to computation, such as, user-interface design, gamification, big data, and simulation. In recent projects, these themes are explored in interactive, sculptural installations that feature data-shaped tensile structures, constructed using folk building techniques
My fascination with pop art, fashion, and food has such a relationship with each other that can easily be both aesthetically pleasing yet deceptively pointless. I find a lot of humor and light-heartedness in my work and I want my audience to feel the same. With bold colors and patterns, differently textured fabrics, and a whimsical theme of food, my work directs to different eras and evokes the feeling of nostalgia along with a hint of the munchies.
I believe that we humans draw meaning out of a hollow space that surrounds all of us. My abstract paintings often begin with a layer of black gesso to illustrate the process of searching and building that we go through in constructing our own meaning. Some of my work in this vein references the lights of bio-luminescent deep-sea animals, creatures who literally construct their own guiding light in a black and shapeless environment.”
My artwork analyzes the social standards that have been defined for women of today’s society in order to educate them about a lesser-known space using the ideals of a woman of color. I am drawn to the subject of women and their space in society because as a Hispanic woman, I have observed that there is no space to represent me as something other than fetish or sub parity. I explore the themes of fat shaming, fashion bias, and unrealistic depictions of the female body
2014 Carrillo Scholarship Recipients Gallery
Click to enlarge, or view all as slideshow
Mary Holmes and Eduardo Carrillo were joined by a deep love of painting and the exploration and discovery it afforded them.
You will get to know Mary from this fantastic series of events held at the University of California, Santa Cruz. You can learn more about their friendship at museoeduardocarrillo.org
Alison Carrillo on Mary Holmes: Mary Holmes was a gorgeous, long-legged painter, teacher and mother who loved men even more than she loved horses. She was forty five, smarter than most, outspoken, iconoclastic, with a quick eye for what mattered: painting.
Read more of Alison Carrillo on Mary Holmes at our website
