“I’m just another person, just making my work.” Maria de Los Angeles and her journey
Maria de Los Angeles piece "The Muses" located at the Luther Burbank Center (The Puma Prensa / Miguel Ramirez)
By Miguel Ramirez, Staff Writer
Beginning with traditional Mexican embroidery to making 19 feet tall murals, Maria de Los Angeles has left her mark on Santa Rosa and the Latin American community. Primarily known for her abstract and detailed art style reminiscent of Marc Chagall, de Los Angeles is a Mexican-American immigrant who started her career in Santa Rosa and now is a Critic and Assistant Director of Painting and Printmaking at the Yale School of Art.
De Los Angeles moved to the United States in the summer of 1999 from Tabasco, Mexico. She came from a small town with her two parents and was the oldest of eight younger siblings. She was 11 years old and only had a second grade level education as her parents were small farmers and weren't able to give her a proper education as they continuously moved around. Her exposure to art began with her mother demonstrating art with their embroidery.
“Looking back I think my mom always liked art. My mom was always into embroidery and things like that, so essentially [she was] an artist but not professionally. I was exposed through visual art or aesthetics with her knowing what it was.”
As a child she lived in the Roseland neighborhood of Santa Rosa and enrolled in the seventh grade at Lawrence Cook Middle School. She came to the United States not knowing much English and had to become literate in both English and Spanish. Yet she furthered her passion in art and fully embraced it. She gained citizenship later through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (D.A.C.A) or “The Dream Act.” The act "allows certain undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children to receive a renewable, two-year period of deferred action from deportation and eligibility for work permits.” This opportunity allowed her to come to the country and become the artist she is today.
Later on she enrolled into the Santa Rosa Junior College in 2006, working all throughout college to pay for her tuition, housing, and art supplies. She took ESL classes at the Junior College to further improve her skills.Later on she joined the art department and impressed her professors with her profound works. Additionally, she began to display her art around Sonoma County in both private and public collections as well as in fine art centers.
Due to her status as an immigrant, she was ineligible for many schools that didn't accept international or undocumented students. Nonetheless The Pratt Institute, located in Brooklyn, New York, offered her a full scholarship in 2013. After graduating from the Junior College with a bachelor's degree in fine arts, she went to Yale University for a masters in painting and print making one of the best in the United States.
Later she became a teacher at the Yale School of Art in New Haven, Connecticut. She worked as a critic and the Interim Director of the Painting and Printmaking program teaching what she once came to learn. She additionally started the One City arts program in Santa Rosa giving art lessons to those who are underprivileged.
She believes that art is “in all our lives, when we look at even traditions cultural celebrations that we partake in, those all have aesthetics in them,” and she believes that art for her was "maybe not necessarily a job.”
She wasn't even sure that she “would make money from it and didn't even realize that if you could study art you could go to university and have a masters degree and then you could become a teacher... Nobody [had ever] talked to [her] about that. ”
Her art as a result became a burning focus on Mexican tradition, culture, immigration, racism, and the Latin American community. She has public art murals all over, from the “Valley of Dreams” mural in Glenn Elen to the “Spectrum of Hope" on the University of Oregon campus. Her art is varied from painted dresses and drawings on paper to astoundingly big murals like that of her piece "The Muses” in front of the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts; this piece has intricate details that are small and subtle but somehow add to a bigger overall picture, driving a sense of community. When asked about the origin of her style, de Los Angeles described herself as “being a loose drawer” from when she was younger and “wanted to break beyond the form that [she] was drawing, having more of a gestural type of drawing.” One of her main inspirations was Marc Chagall, as she likes that “his figures [are] kind of semi-dream like type of depictions.” She also likes the way “his figures float in space,” and the "allegories and the color and symbolism” in his work.
Some of the surreal subtle lines can be seen in her work “The Four Seasons”; her goal was that at first when somebody looks at it from afar, “it looks very abstract… very loose,” just painting of green and blues with some yellow and hints of red not being able to ” see any figures or anything “not being able to see the small details like a man playing the guitar, a mother helping her child, and an abundance of flowers. She wanted to do it so that she could “ slow down people” to contrast from the “the technology and online content that is flying at us from every angle.” to make something that people see all the time and they don't have, they haven't really seen it .. they've discovered something over and over again.”The work envelops a whole community, showing unity and displaying her messages of immigration, the people, the diversity, and what they bring to their communities they have established. It was painted in her “studio in Jersey City" She recalls that ”on the floor [she would] look at and more or less see what was happening.” She could only “get a sense of it by looking down on the floor and seeing what was happening.”
One of her other works, a “Prayer for Hope and Freedom,” The work at first seems like a collection of flowers in some form of a zentangle but when looking closely it includes a woman made of those roses with her beliefs and experiences inside. Inside the figure there are religious imagery like La Guadalupana and her values of hard work are represented in the strands of her hair with a picture of other women gardening are all included within an eye set in her heart and a variety of plants in her making an ecosystem of sorts. Demonstrating her ties to her religion and the desire for freedom in the form of the stars on La Guadalupana’s dress.
She says art to her is necessary as she thinks that “you do have to find something that takes you away from all that destruction.. chaos [something] that centers you.”
Maria de Los Angeles’ mark has been made in Sonoma County and has stretched all the way to Oregon and New York. She's invested in helping her community and has made a name not only for herself but for Mexican immigrants as a whole, with her journey of trials and tribulation ending in triumph through her own hard work.