www.montereycountyweekly.com april 11-17, 2024 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 13 Most of the Gonzales High School art and yearbook students who visited the Monterey Museum of Art on Tuesday, April 9, had never before set foot in the museum. But Executive Director Corey Madden had a clear message to share with them: “We really want you to feel at home and comfortable in the museum.” That was perhaps made easier thanks to the reliability of photographer Joe Ramos, who was raised in the Harden Labor Camp south of Soledad. He studied photojournalism at Hartnell College, then got into fine art photography as a student at the San Francisco Art Institute. The exhibit of his black-and-white photographs now showing at MMA features faces and places of significance to him over the past 56 years. It was fitting that yearbook students joined him, given the scrapbook-like nature of this collection. There’s the Martinez family from his youth, notable for their garden in an otherwise muted labor camp. There’s a Salinas Valley lettuce field during the strike in 1971 (“I was probably out there with my parents,” GHS art teacher Jesús Velásquez says). There are portraits of Ramos’ own family—his Filipino father and Mexican mother and their relatives, Ramos’ son and his Black wife and their children. “We are all mixed,” Ramos said. The name of the exhibit is Mixed Up—Connected. It’s part of a series of exhibits now on display at MMA, this one until April 21. The series, taken together, is an immersion in farmworker life and Latino culture and heritage. Upstairs, photographs by Dorothea Lange document the humanity of people during the Dust Bowl, with unspoken suffering communicated through their eyes, as well as ramshackle homes and vehicles beside them. Ramos’ work is perhaps the most approachable—family portraits are as relatable as it gets— but the tone echoes Madden’s sentiment: This is your home, too. That is explicit in the gallery next door, where Seeing Chicanx: The Durón Family Collection is on display until April 21. This is the first-ever museum collection to display a significant portion of the family art collection of Armando and Mary Salinas Durón of Montebello in Southern California. The Duróns are not artists— he is a court commissioner, she works for the FDIC. In 1981, they began acquiring artwork by Chicano artists, with a big vision in mind. “I decided, as a Chicano, I needed to be engaged in the acquiring of our people’s patrimony,” Armando Durón says. “I realized that the only thing that lasts of any people is their art. That’s how we know the Greeks, the Mayans, a lot of peoples. What survives and who collects that and who interprets that is very important in how a people are perceived.” The Duróns have since amassed nearly 700 works of art in different mediums and more than 3,000 pieces of ephemera— invitations to art shows, brochures and the like. They change what’s displayed on the walls of their home roughly every two years, with a lot in storage at any given time. There are 92 works on display at MMA, and those works give a sense of the depth and breadth of “Chicano art”—it is as varied as the people who conceive of and create it, in both message and style. The Duróns set out to establish a narrative and show what Chicano art could be and what it could look like, from a Chicano perspective. Of course, this narrative is already part of the art world. The fourth exhibit of the season, on display until April 14, is titled Harvesting California: From the WPA Era to the Present, featuring works from MMA’s permanent collection featuring farms and farmworkers. As Weekly staff writer Agata Popeda has written, the collective effect is to reveal the connection between art and agriculture. And back on Ramos’ student tour, that link becomes obvious. A striking landscape shows a view of the Gabilan Mountains, farmworkers in the foreground, perhaps thinning lettuce. Another farm landscape includes chemical tanks. “At first I was kind of upset the tanks are there, but that’s part of the scene in the Salinas Valley now,” he said. Ramos turned his childhood home into fine art. Right nearby at Gonzales High School, he and MMA staff recently led a fine art photography workshop (using smartphones), capped by the museum tour. Sara Rubin is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com. Art of the People Monterey Museum of Art exhibits invite us to rethink who art is by and for. By Sara Rubin Blame game…In Squid years, it’s practically half a lifetime ago that Salinas City Council voted in October to fire former city manager Steve Carrigan. They’ve since awarded a contract to a new incoming city manager, René Mendez. Meanwhile, San Bernardino in Southern California hired a new city manager, Charles Montoya, formerly of Watsonville. What do these things have to do with each other? According to a claim Carrigan filed last Nov. 28 against the City of San Bernardino, everything. He was a finalist there for the position, and he contends it was only an illegal leak that made that into public information—and that because of his leak, Salinas fired him (he claims San Bernardino owes him $731, 250 for the remaining two-plus years that were on his Salinas contract). He also alleges the leak cost him the job in San Bernardino, specifically based on his race (white), and that it was strategically meant to motivate the public to oppose his hiring “because Carrigan is not the correct, favored race (Black).” Yikes. Carrigan pegs damages to his future employment prospects and reputation at $1.5 million. These old grievances resurfaced because on April 3, San Bernardino City Council discussed Carrigan’s claim in a closed-session meeting and voted 4-2 to release portions of a city investigation into Carrigan’s claim. Squid’s colleague has requested that investigation, and Squid is waiting with shrimp-flavored popcorn within a tentacle’s reach to see how the next chapter in this drama unfolds. STOP and GO…Squid drove the jalopy down Highway 68 to the Monterey Peninsula on Tuesday, April 2, admiring the sunshine and the light traffic. But Squid’s mood quickly changed when traffic sputtered to a stop at the intersection with Highway 218. Turns out, Squid hit the tail end of traffic caused by major roadwork on Lighthouse Avenue in Monterey—about six miles away. Work began on Monday, April 1 to reconstruct areas of the road during the daytime. Pick nearly any other day outside of tourist season, and such roadwork probably would’ve caused only a minor inconvenience. But it’s been anything but normal on the roadways recently, which prompted Monterey City Manager Hans Uslar to issue an apology via YouTube video the next day. Uslar said the combination of Highway 1 closed in Big Sur, coupled with extended spring breakers, exacerbated traffic. Numerous side streets were also clogged, turning the Monterey Peninsula into a traffic nightmare typically seen in Los Angeles. The next day, city officials announced work would shift to night for the week of April 8-12. Squid expects the City of Monterey will now hear a different type of complaint, since the work is within earshot of Pacific Grove. the local spin SQUID FRY THE MISSION OF MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY IS TO INSPIRE INDEPENDENT THINKING AND CONSCIOUS ACTION, ETC. “The only thing that lasts of any people is their art.” Send Squid a tip: squid@mcweekly.com
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjAzNjQ1NQ==