The Art Avenue is the avenue to challenge what have become the routine, the norm, and the traditional within Arts, Culture, and Urbanism around the border
The Art Avenue Art Market at the Camino Real Hotel was a big success for local artists. More than 25 painters and designers exhibited their works in Downtown El Paso. Guests were tantalized by the music of jazz musician Daniel Rivera and enjoyed the live art of Alejandro Lomeli. Art supporters viewed works from new vendors like Pop-Artist Reggie Watterson, henna artist Lu E-Fresh and Meiko and print maker Alexis Ruiz. Make sure to attend The Art Avenue Art Market on June 26 in union with the Last Thursdays art walk.
An El Pasoan, a Texan, a Soldier, an Expat, a Student, an Immigrant, Chicano, Hispanic, American or Latino? How do you define yourself and who or with what do you identify? These may seem like straightforward questions, but when you actually try to answer them, what do you come up with?
I remember my first year in El Paso, fresh from the concrete jungle of New York City (which after living in the desert seems greener than I once thought). One evening while strolling with new friends after a lovely meal, a couple came up to my group asking for directions. They asked if we were from El Paso and I quickly (and probably a little too loudly) said, “NO, I’M FROM NEW YORK CITY.” I still think of myself as a New Yorker and admittedly feel cool just saying it, proud even. But after nearly six years in El Paso, can I still wear that badge of honor? If I stake my claim as an El Pasoan, do I lose my cool card? Maybe saying I’m a Texan is better…or, maybe not depending on how you perceive of Texas. But I must admit that as of late I have become staunchly proud of my newly adopted home and quite protective of El Paso. Our newest slogan “It’s All Good” sums it up quite nicely.
When we think about who we are and where we come from it leads us to a path where we may encounter multiple forks in the road. The stories we can tell about the lives we lead—are these stories ours? Or are we living the lives of a past identity, our mother’s and father’s and generations before us? Are we forging ahead creating our own identities? How much does it cost us to step out of our old skin and into something new? Frontera Rep’s spring production HIGHWAY 47 explores these questions and more. Questions about land and ownership, politics and capitalism, family and friendship.
Think about it–what neighborhood do you live in and how does it define who you are—just what does it say about you? Is there a difference between living in Kern and living in Sunset Heights or possibly the Northeast or East Side versus the West Side versus the Upper Valley or Central? Neighborhoods change, people change, relationships change, identities change, and the list goes on. What is constant? When we are all gone, what will remain?
HIGHWAY 47 opens May 9 at the Philanthropy theatre in Downtown El Paso. Tickets are $15 – $35 and are available at the box office located at 125 Pioneer Plaza. Ticket may also be purchased online at www.ticketmaster.com. For more information, visit www.fronterarep.org.
Kathryn Smith-McGlynn, MFA, MPA; is Director of the upcoming Frontera Rep production HIGHWAY 47. She is an El Paso based actress, scholar, writer, Co-Founding Artistic Director/Executive Producer at Frontera Repertory Theatre Company and Visiting Professor at UTEP teaching acting, theatre history and performance studies.
Some of the most noteworthy Southwestern artists and their work can be found in El Paso, and students dashing back and forth across campus may not realize how many of these artistic gems are hidden in plain sight on the campus of The University of Texas at El Paso.
In order to provide a treasure map to some of UTEP’s key and iconic pieces, Stacy E. Schultz, Ph.D., assistant professor of art, created the “Arts on Campus” walking tour, which is offered by the Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens during the month of May.
Working in conjunction with the Centennial Museum and the University Library’s C.L. Sonnichsen Special Collections Department, Schultz selected eight pieces that showcase UTEP’s role as a destination for thought-provoking artwork and artists.
Prayer Wheel
One feature on the 60- to 90-minute tour goes against the typical notion of art interaction, as people are encouraged to touch and turn the Bhutanese prayer wheel—a gift from the people of Bhutan to the University—located outside the Centennial Museum. The protective housing, built by El Paso architect and master carpenter Bruce Thacker, uses hidden oak pegs rather than nails to honor Bhutanese construction techniques.
Aside from the University’s connection to Bhutan, there is also a strong tie to the Southwest and homegrown artists. One of the earliest pieces on the campus is a decorative architectural detail—known as a lintel—above the Centennial Museum. Designed by Tom Lea in 1936, the lintel depicts Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca. Lea selected this conquistador because Cabeza de Vaca’s travels took him through what is now El Paso, Texas.
Drawing on the rich history of the Southwest, José Cisneros’ sketches of nineteenth century horsemen line the fourth floor of the University Library. Based on historical records, each of the 100 drawings illustrates Cisneros’ detailed and precise cross-hatching technique.
Mercado Juarez by Hal Marcus
The library also has numerous studies and a print of “El Mercado Juarez” by local artist and gallery owner Hal Marcus. Fascinated and inspired by the colors he saw in the Juárez marketplace with his grandmother as a young child, the mural is full of brilliant tones and life-sized goods.
“I never really went to art school,” Marcus said. “All of my colors come from the fruits and vegetables. You say yellow, it’s banana. Red, it’s an apple. That was my training. So colors, to me, taste good.”
The print reproducing Juarez’s vibrancy—including boxes of Zucaritas and sliced melons—came to UTEP under unusual circumstances: a pizzeria wanted a copy and Marcus made two, later donating one to the university. The original is on display at the El Paso Children’s Hospital.
Texas Wedge by James R. MacBeth. Installed in 1986 when the library first opened.
Outside the University Library is a sculpture resembling a pipe organ by James R. MacBeth. Installed in 1986 when the library first opened, “Texas Wedge” changes color to resemble sunrise or sunset, depending on how the daylight falls over it. Like many artists with public art on UTEP’s campus, MacBeth gave his notes and papers to the Special Collections Department. Some of the papers include the materials testing and adhesives behind MacBeth’s finished work.
End of the Trail (with Electric Sunrise) by Luis Jimenez
Although the University Library’s walls are full of artwork, it is not the only building on campus to display unique pieces. In fact, nestled next to a Starbucks on the first floor of the Chemistry and Computer Science Building is a very colorful sculpture by the acclaimed Mexican-American artist and El Paso native, Luis Jimenez. His sculpture “End of the Trail (with Electric Sunrise)” is an array of colorful lightbulbs under a horse and slumped rider.
Jimenez died in 2006 after an accident in his studio, but his importance to the art world was cemented when his sculpture “Vaquero”—a Mexican cowboy riding a bucking, blue horse—became part of the Smithsonian Museum’s collection.
Even the newer buildings on campus have interesting artwork. For instance, underneath a stairwell in the Undergraduate Learning Center is a large, yet delicate piece by trained metalsmith Kim Cridler. She first came to El Paso after receiving an invitation from the art department to participate in a two-person show. Later, Cridler gifted to the university the untitled piece resembling an empty vase made of welded steel with delicate wings or petals covered in animal gut.
Mining Minds by Michael Clapper
On the roundabout near the Sun Bowl Parking Garage is an enormous pickaxe head. Michael Clapper’s towering sculpture titled “Mining Minds” represents UTEP’s past and present, and was installed in 2010. Clapper included binary code on the top and bottom of the pickaxe. The ones and zeros spell out “Believe in yourself and believe in your dreams. Believe in UTEP and its aspirations. Share the dream!” from UTEP President Diana Natalicio’s 2008 convocation speech. On special occasions, “Mining Minds” is lit with blue and orange lights.
The Centennial Museum and Chihuahuan Desert Gardens is open from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Tuesday through Saturday, and closed on university holidays. It is located at the corner of University Avenue and Wiggins Road. Parking in the Centennial Museum lot is free; however, permits can only be obtained from the Museum Offices located inside the Centennial Museum.
Tour brochures in the Centennial Museum Lobby can facilitate self-guided tours, or visitors can make arrangements for a docent-led tour. For a docent-led tour, contact Maribel Villalva at 915-747-6669 or mvillalva2@utep.edu. Admission to the Centennial Museum and “Arts on Campus” walking tour is free.
His recent move from Connecticut and New York and originally from Edinburg, Scotland, Roger Spencer-Jones captures images of El Paso as a photographer completely unacquainted with the unique landscape and architecture of the Borderland. He is free of any preconceived notion of what is considered iconic buildings or familiar areas of town. The Art Avenue asked Spencer-Jones to snap his impression of El Paso.
by Meagan O’Toole-Pitts Photographs courtesy of the artist
El Paso metals virtuoso Criselda Lopez is now bringing plastics into the spotlight with her exhibition La Frontera, on display at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft starting May 30.
Border Cities by Criselda
The contemporary jeweler with a 70s feel breathes new life into mundane objects, giving them a second life as wearable art. Because, why use vinyl to cover the table when you could wear it as jewelry?
How would you describe your work? My work is very abstract. I work a lot in plastics and silver and what I’d like to do is bring plastic up to the level where silver is. What I want is for different materials to be recognized as precious also. So, that’s what I try to do with the plastic. I try to incorporate a lot of detail in it to make it also very interesting by working in multiples. What I mean by multiples is that I combine shapes…the technique of how it’s held together and the way it’s worn—all of the combined shapes become one whole jewelry piece.
Why do you want to represent plastic as precious? Mostly plastic is something that is used and thrown [away], used and forgotten about. I think I see the resemblance in everyday materials, everyday things. Everything for me deserves to be precious, deserves to be taken as something important. So that’s why I’m trying to bring plastic, in this case, to the level of silver, which everybody sees as a precious material. I’m trying to make other common, normal materials a little bit more upscale in that way.”
What inspires you? Everyday life. Everyday jobs. Everyday materials-the way they are interwoven in each piece makes it look beautiful. That’s what I’m trying to do also with my everyday life. How can I make it more beautiful? How can I make it more interesting?’
What is your process? I collect bags from grocery and department stores. I have a lot of them already. I ask friends for bags. What I do is I fuse them with an iron and once they’re fused and they’re a little bit thicker then I cut shapes out of them. The shapes are usually circles. Once I have many, many, many circles then I weave them with knots using monofilament to create necklaces. Another process that I use is I take the materials that are usually used to cover tables—it’s a clear vinyl. I then cut pieces again. Again weave them together with the monofilament and then I dye it to get a little bit of color. I make one whole piece out of many fragments.
You are involved in Jewelry Exchange 2014 Worldwide. Can you tell me about that? The jewelry exchange is an online exhibition with artists from around the world. I have been paired up with another person from Barcelona each of us will make a piece of jewelry. I’m working on a brooch made out of silver and I’ve drilled many, many holes in it and I have also cut pieces out of plastic, which I then will be inserting into the different holes that I have in the dome. So, it’s a domed silver brooch which has many, many drilled circles on it and then I will be inserting plastic pieces into each of the holes.
Echo Bracelet
We will be exchanging the pieces. We will be making a piece for each other and we will be taking professional photographs of the pieces that we are sending. And we are taking professional photographs when we receive the piece, and those photographs are what is going to be exhibited on the exhibition.
You received a grant from the city’s Museum and Cultural Affairs Department (MCAD) to create five large necklaces representative of El Paso landmarks. How will you engage El Pasoans with this project?
Along with the pieces, I intend to make exhibitions in different libraries around the city. So, hopefully that will makes people in El Paso a little bit more interested in contemporary jewelry. I’m also going to be doing small workshops along with the exhibitions. It will also educate the people and hopefully, if possible, bring in some visitors from other towns.
Walking into Tabla between lunch and dinner crowds, the juxtaposition between the tapas restaurant’s luxe style and its owner’s unassuming manner is hard to ignore. Norbert Portillo is wearing jeans and a Tabla t-shirt, talking about his hot-dog culinary adventures in Chicago (he had just landed in El Paso a half an hour before) and remembering when Tabla was but a chimera, a pipe dream he hoped El Paso would embrace one day. But for people who know Norbert, the owner and chef of this now downtown staple restaurant, his unfussy style is nothing new. This is a guy who’s paid his dues and who knows his food.
Norbert Portillo
I met him some ten years ago. With livers that were a decade younger and ambitions big enough to overwhelm conversations, we drunkenly (but passionately) spoke about how El Paso was missing truly masterful, thoughtful cuisine. Though I don’t promise our 20-something blitzed selves were incredibly articulate that time of the night. Still, the sentiment and the zest were there. I don’t remember everything he said, but I remember knowing, even then, that if this guy started a restaurant, he’d change the El Paso food landscape.
He had just moved back from Portland, having worked at Park Kitchen and Simpatica, where as he puts it “I mean, the farmer was the one delivering our food to us. ” And while Tabla is not quite Farm-to-table yet, Portillo dreams of the day El Paso can sustain a place like that .
He did however, forge a new culinary path for El Paso , but it took a while. Starting on salad duty at a local eatery, he wouldn’t have a chance to flex his culinary muscles for some time. “It was one of those jobs that was just monotonous ,” he says over a glass Tabla’s house made sangria.
I didn’t keep much in touch with Norbert over the years, though I would occasionally run into him (once when he was a barista at Starbucks). For a minute, it seemed as though maybe El Paso had no intention of nurturing young talents like his. Then he got his chance with Ripe. With Norbert now at the helm of this Westside eatery, they sparked the brunch craze, transforming it from stale buffet food, to the Sunday ritual we know now: fresh, artful dishes that both families and hungover twenty-somethings deplete before putting the weekend to rest. Norbert played a pivotal role in making brunch a thing in El Paso. Really.
Then three years ago, his vision went from dream to a restaurant that’s both regal and comfortable. When Tabla opened, Portillo delved head first into a concept that never seems to work here: the tapas bar. But while tapas bars come and go, Tabla has the formula down. When I ask him why generally the tapas concept is such a hard sell here in El Paso, he doesn’t understand why it wouldn’t make sense . “It reminds me of how I used to eat growing up. We always ate as a family…my mom would put a bunch of food on the table and we’d all just kinda sit there and eat and interact or whatever .” This is probably true for a great majority of us. Who doesn’t remember conversations with family over an assortment of home-made offerings spread out over the table? Is that really so different from tapas style dining?
“One of the things that has changed is this younger generation that’s coming back to El Paso… They’re the ones pushing El Paso to change because they have seen things they like in other cities and want that here,” says Portillo, speaking from personal experience. Whatever the reason, the change is evident .”This is the fastest I’ve ever seen this city move” , he says as he brings another round of sangrias. “There’s a lot of really cool things popping up here in El Paso that are independently owned and have great concepts behind them .”
There is only one other topic that makes Portillo light up more than food. It’s food as art. “We’re constantly looking for a balance of flavors, I mean that’s the main thing you know. It’s the only art form that uses all five senses .”
TAA wants to know: where is the best place around the Borderland to take a selfie? Is there an iconic or artsy spot? If so we want to see your selfie in that location. Group and solo selfies welcome. We are offering a $25 gift card to a local eatery for the person whose selfie has the most likes on our Facebook page.
It’s simple: take a selfie, upload your photo to our Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/TheArtAvenue) and have all your friends like your post by April 4 at midnight (MST).
We thought we might start by posting the team’s selfies.
1- Jorge I. Calleja 2- Alejandro Cardona 3- Julio-César Chávez 4- Elena Marinaccio 5- Victoria Molinar 6- Lauren Pinson 7- Kimberly Rene’ Vanecek 8- Brian Wancho
Too often, people who describe themselves as artistic will say they’re intimidated by math and science while many mathematicians and scientists will say they’re not artistically or creatively inclined. This is a common misjudgment that non-profit proprietors Gustavo Arriaga and Cathy Chen want to debunk through El Paso’s very first Fabrication Laboratory.
Fab Lab Executive Director Gustavo Arriaga demonstrates how to use the Gatorgraph, a geometric drawing machine created through Kickstarter.
“I’ve always been a really firm believer that the divide between the sciences and humanities is a really problematic one and that people should have a more comprehensive and interdisciplinary education in order to make them really well rounded and prepared for the future in terms of the job market,” said Chen at the grand opening of the laboratory on March 1. “And also just to become more awesome people and make the world a more fun place to live in.”
Different from the usual maker and hacker spaces that cater to a collegiate crowd, Chen and Arriaga said their non-profit will provide a more user-friendly space to people of all ages with various interests, from novice entrepreneurs who want to sell unique trinkets on Etsy to college and medical school students who need to design models and apparatuses for their research projects. Their goal is to show artists, scientists, engineers and mathematicians that they can find commonality in digital design regardless of educational background.
Kossel Mini 3D Printer
Essential to running a Fab Lab are the machines used to create one’s designs. El Paso’s Fab Lab has a Kossel Mini robot 3D printer, a Shapeoko precision mill, a 45W Full Spectrum laser cutter, a Silhouette Portrait paper cutter and a blackFoot 4-foot-by-8-foot CNC router (a computer operated cutting machine). The CNC router has been used to make all sorts of provisions, from emergency shelters to chicken coops for urban farming.
The concept of a Fab Lab started at MIT through a partnership between the Center for Bits and Atoms and the Grassroots Invention Group with a popular class called “How to Make (Almost) Anything.” With people of all backgrounds learning how to design their own 3D models, circuit boards and different gadgets, non-profit Fab Labs started to emerge all over the world, encouraging many financially underserved and developing communities to think outside their comfort zones and imagine the inventive possibilities.
Fab Lab Cathy Chen Outreach Director poses with their 45W Laser Cutter from Full Spectrum Engineering
“When you think about it, the democratization of technology and design is not really that surprising,” said Chen. “The ultimate goal is to make things more affordable for people so that they can make things themselves without having to pay the surplus cost that becomes a profit for big companies.”
Today, there are over 200 Fab Labs around the world, all serving the purpose of teaching communities that a professional background in engineering and design is not required in order to create prototypes, gizmos or for-the-fun-of-it toys.
Fab Lab will host workshops for both children and adults on subjects such as how to design and print a 3D object, make molds for something as simple as chocolate confections, and create circuit boards.
“We’re really excited to see what people come up with,” said Arriaga. “Especially the kids. If you give them access to technology and new ways to make things, they have the best ideas and come up with all kinds of crazy stuff.”
Fab Lab El Paso 806 Montana Ave. Tuesday-Thursday 12-8 p.m., Saturday-Sunday 10 a.m.-6 p.m. For more information, call 915-209-2656 or visit FabLabElPaso.org or facebook.com/FabLabEP
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