Ecuador
Photo credit: Tshanti Photography
Artist Statement:
I hold steadfast to a belief that artists can serve as the conscience of our times. I’m an Ecuadorian-born interdisciplinary artist of color dedicated to social justice and inspired by public protest of immigrant day laborers. The painting I have contributed to the Latine Arts Show serves to chronicle the many acts of resistance by immigrant workers in a culture that thrives on amnesia and looks to erase my people and our recent history here
My paintings and drawings exemplify a divine fusion between figurative pictorial narratives and socially conscious content. I cannot bask in a privilege that I'm not afforded to make art for art's sake when the attacks on my Brown body and my immigrant community are far from abstract. My art-making practices are driven by a love for the heroic human figure, and I create colorful and expressionistic paintings with dynamic figurative compositions influenced by Latin American and German Expressionists such as José Clemente Orozco and Max Beckman. My Ogden Museum series served as a visual history project with contemporary versions of 18th and 19th century Creoles of color who fought against the racial injustices of their times.
This new 2021 large acrylics on canvas painting measures 6’ x 4’n and it is a pictorial chronicle that immigrants have aided the rebirth of the “new” New Orleans. It challenges the brutal cultural deportation exacted by the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) in their celebrated Tri-centennial Anthology titled New Orleans in & the World 1718 – 2018.
Published by a state arts agency, this book has disappeared our Latin American immigrant community from local current history—as if we did not even exist. Their post-Katrina Chapter titled “Renewal” does not have one sentence about the vital contributions Latin reconstruction workers have made to our epic rebirth in the 16 years post-Katrina. In this era of social reckoning, it’s traumatic to bear witness to white scholars having the power to disappear Latin immigrants, and expect not to be held accountable.
As a journalist, I contributed post-Katrina commentaries to NPR's Latino USA from 2006 - 2011 and exposed the myriad human rights violations Latin American immigrant reconstruction workers have endured while heroically contributing their sweat, labor, and love to resurrect the flooded port city of New Orleans from its critical deathbed. My forthcoming book Hard Living in the Big Easy: Immigrants & Photography of Post-Katrina Protests 2010-2019 has received a 2020 Jazz & Heritage Foundation award for its development, and this painting is featured in it.
With this painting, I honor and remember our immigrant workers, and hold accountable the LEH for their egregious crime to disappear our undocumented people—throwing them to the trash bin of history where the most vulnerable are forgotten.
I dare to remember in the United States of Amnesia, and my painting is entitled DETENTION = DEATH / NO MAS MUERTE. It chronicles the public protests of the Congress of Day Laborers—demanding a stop to brutal detention exacted by local inhumane ICE Agents.
This is what I paint because this is what I see and bear witness to. I am grateful that this exhibition offers me a platform to debut this piece created at the Joan Mitchell Center artist-in-residency program. It’s my first painting in two decades, and it’s dedicated to the memory of the Congress of Day Laborers known as El Congreso.
At a time when history books by white scholars are making our immigrant people invisible, this exhibition makes us visible to rightfully claim our space here in New Orleans.
Ashé y Adelante!
José Torres-Tama
BIO
Ecuadorian-born, José Torres-Tama is an interdisciplinary troublemaker, and he speaks truth to the perverse abuse of power in GrinGoLandia. He is a performance and visual artist, published poet and playwright, photographer and journalist, cultural arts activist and director of ArteFuturo Productions in New Orleans.
He chronicles the raging anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the nation. In February of 2021, he finished a four-month arts residency program with the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans that began in October of 2020, and continued his series of works-on-paper and new paintings exploring the Immigration crisis and traumatic experiences of Latin American immigrants. Undocumented immigrants have reconstructed New Orleans while experiencing a myriad of human rights violations in the 16 years post-Katrina.
This series is called New Works Exploring an Era of Anti-Immigrant Hysteria, and in 2020, Torres-Tama received a Creative Communities League Award for these works. Five works were part of an online exhibition hosted by LeMieux Galleries on Julia Street.
The Joan Mitchell Foundation in New York awarded him and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans publication funds for his art book New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy. The book was published by the Ogden in 2009, and documents his contemporary pastel portraits of 18th and 19th century Creoles of color who challenged the institutional prejudices of their times.
http://torrestama.com/free-people-of-color.html
In 2014, the Joan Mitchell Foundation also awarded him funds to remount this exhibition at Le Musée du f.p.c in New Orleans in collaboration with the Ogden and Joan Mitchell Center. The Jazz & Heritage Foundation Community Grant and the Platforms Fund supported his latest solo exhibition Hard Living in the Big Easy: Immigrants & the Rebirth of New Orleans, which opened to two hundred plus people in September 2018 at the UNO Saint Claude Gallery. With the Joan Mitchell Center residency the series has grown, and it will be touring galleries and university museums for the spring of 2022. Space One Eleven in Birmingham exhibited three of the new works created at the JMC residency for an exhibition on social justice that ran from April 16 to May 28, 2021.
Solo exhibitions include New Orleans Free People of Color & Their Legacy at the Ogden Museum (January – April 2008) and selection of ten drawings from this series at the Ogden (October-November 2009). Also, the show was at Dillard University in New Orleans (November 2008), and the Alexandria Museum of Art in Alexandria, LA (Jan-March 2010).
From 2006 to 2011, Torres-Tama contributed post-Katrina commentaries that aired on NPR's Latino USA and exposed a variety of atrocities against immigrant workers. His forthcoming book Hard Living in the Big Easy: Immigrants & Photography of Post Katrina Protests 2010 to 2019 received a 2020 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Foundation Documentation Grant for its development. This decade-long project chronicles “Live Art” public protests Torres-Tama captured of immigrant workers and their heroic acts of resistance to labor abuse, wage theft, and random deportations by inhumane ICE Agents.