My Chicanocentric Photography Website

For more than half a century, I (Jesús Manuel Mena Garza) have captured photos and shot film (now video) for clients and exhibition. Today, I am still busy creating art. I have attached a link to my Chicanocentric website where you can download photographs. My general website is JMMGarza.com. Feel free to contact me should you have questions, suggestions or comments. Here is the link to my new Chicanocentric website: https://chicanophotographer.myportfolio.com

LATINOPIA.COM: New Latino Website Premiers

[Click header to go to website. Click photo to enlarge.]

Music, recipes, poetry, art, cinema, theater and history make up the rich cornucopia of Latino culture showcased on www.Latinopia.com a new website set for launch March 19, 2011.

The brainchild of veteran Los Angeles television director and documentary filmmaker Jesús Salvador Treviño, the video-driven website is designed as a one-stop web destination for all things Latino.

“As U.S. Latinos enter the digital age, we need a website that can offer videos about all aspects of our history culture and life,” explains Jesús Treviño, whose television credits include programs like Law and Order-Criminal Intent, The Unit, Criminal Minds and Resurrection Blvd and who shot and edited much of the video footage on Latinopia.com.

“We’re starting with five-minute videos in seven subject areas--interviews, music performances, short films, theater plays and authors reading from their works,” Trevino explains. “We are excited that top Latino writers, artists and musicians from around the U.S. have seen the value of Latinopia.com and are enthusiastically sharing their time, stories and creativity.

A click on Latinopia’s Art section will take the visitor to video profiles of Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American artists, painters and muralists such as Gilbert “Magu” Lujan, Ester Hernández, Frank Romero, Yolanda López, César Martínez, Rupert García, José Montoya, Gronk, Judy Baca, Carmen Lomas Garza, Zarco Guerrero as well as print interviews and special features.

The Literature section features a timeline on the emergence of Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban-American literature in the United States in addition to listings of Latino books. Video interviews include such important Latino writers such as Rudolfo Anaya, Pat Mora, Dagoberto Gilb, Judith Ortíz Cofer, Alberto Rios, Denise Chavez and Luis J. Rodríguez. Dramatic re-enactments and additional footage bring their works to life.

The website’s Theater section includes video interviews with Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American playwrights, actors and stage directors and groups like Culture Clash as well as excerpts from plays written performed and directed by Latinos in New York, Los Angeles, San Antonio, Chicago, Miami, Los Angeles and San Francisco; among them Crystal City 1969, Gaytino, Regeneración, and The Silver Dollar.

Interviews with leading Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban musicians are an attraction in the Music section: Los Lobos, Little Joe and La Familia, Flaco Jimenez all discuss their art. There are also performances by such groups as Mitote, Los Pochos, La Santa Cecilia, Olmeca.

In Cinema and Television many of the nation’s leading Latino actresses and actors discuss their work and making their way in Hollywood: Hector Elizondo, Lupe Ontiveros, Jimmy Smits, Edward James Olmos, America Ferrera, Evelina Fernandez and are among those to be featured. Behind the camera talent will also be featured such as writer/producer Dennis Leoni (Resurrection Blvd), Director of Photography Rey Villalobos (Nine to Five, Urban Cowboy) and Director Leon Ichaso (El Cantante).

A visit to the History page will reveal videos of important historical events in Chicano and Latino life along with event timelines, biographies and documents. It includes profiles of important Chicano, Puerto Rican and Cuban American leaders and historical figures such as Jose Marti, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta.

Latinopia Food offers Latinopia’s recommendations on the best places in major cities in the United States to eat Mexican and Latino food along with “how-to” videos on making great Mexican food--enchiladas, guacamole, Spanish rice, salsa-- as well as Puerto Rican and Cuban American cuisine.

“We are launching modestly with a few dozen videos,“ Jesús Treviño explains, “but we add new videos each week and will grow the site into more than hundred videos by the end of the first year. Seeing is believing. Check us out at www.Latinopia.com ”

“Once we establish an audience of regular visitors, we plan to expand beyond short videos into original webisodes and longer form dramas geared to the Latino public. The potential is as rich and limitless as is the life and culture of America’s 47 million Latinos.”

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Chicano inspired artist and others draw on Facebook to connect, or sell their work

By Mary Brophy Marcus, USA TODAY

El Mac's graffiti art — spray-painted on walls across the globe — sometimes stretches multiple stories high and half a city block long. His larger-than-life portraits are inspired by Mexican and Chicano art, religious iconography, local personalities in the neighborhoods where he paints, and the classical artists he has studied since childhood, such as Vermeer and Caravaggio.

Jesus Garza says, "I have included two excellent artist video interviews on my blog, all courtesy of USA Today. There are more interviews on the USA Today website. Click the article header to go there."

But on Facebook, his massive murals look more like postage stamps. Though the Web allows for slightly larger images, seeing his work online can't compare with the real thing. And without the context of a location, his cultural or political message is sometimes diminished or lost.

For the Los Angeles-born artist, now based in Phoenix, figuring out how to best use social media and other virtual platforms has been a conundrum.

"I think I'm still trying to figure it all out," says El Mac, 30, whose real name is Miles MacGregor. "It's got to be a sign of the future, but it's a devilish sort."

El Mac is like a lot of visual artists wondering how much weight a Web presence carries. Artists — like scores of others in less visual fields — are struggling with how to use the potential of the new media for marketing,networking, selling their wares and, for some, making their solitary workday a little less lonely.

Many artists say they value the beauty of Web surfing and discovering a gem of a painting, the pleasure of meeting other creative souls they might otherwise never have known, and debating critics and bloggers. But they also see the limitations of the virtual world and grapple with how much time to spend online away from their studios.

For many visual artists online, one of the biggest hurdles is that the aesthetic experience is lost on the viewer. A picture online doesn't translate size, as El Mac discovered. The thickness of paint, the way sunlight plays on a surface and changes throughout the day, the texture of a sculpture or woven fabric against your hand — diminished or nil.

Some fields, though, such as photography, are less affected. Photographer Marco Di Lauro says he got on Facebook "about two or three years ago without having a specific aim in mind."

"As I was adding people, I realized that most of the photo editors at magazines and newspapers are on Facebook. I have about 3,900 'friends' now — most involved in the photo industry," says Di Lauro, who's based in Rome and shoots for Getty Images around the world.

While jobs come through his agency, Di Lauro uses Facebook to show his photos and network. For instance, last month he posted a link to a photo that earned him an international award. He says colleagues and friends also use Facebook to send him messages now. "Facebook is becoming like an e-mail service, plus a lot of other things," he says.

And while he uses it mostly professionally, Di Lauro admits to a little non-work surftime. "It's fun to look at the women," he says with a laugh.

Soho painter and photographer Laura Levine says she jumped on Facebook a few years ago to reconnect with musicians she hung out with 20-some years ago. Levine, 52, one of New York's prolific rock 'n' roll photographers in the 1980s, shot for Rolling Stone, among others.

'On and off Facebook all day'

"I think there's something about this age, our midlife, when people start to appreciate the friends they had back then," Levine says. "I'm on and off Facebook all day — it's terrible." She also curates a professional page, where she promotes shows and sells her now-vintage rock photo prints, but she keeps a tight leash on who sees her personal page.

Others are more open to the masses. Collage artist Michael Anderson, whose studio is in Harlem, N.Y., has more than 2,800 Facebook friends. He says social media have been great for networking with other artists, but he's concerned that the whole concept of "artist" is getting watered down.

"The arts community is definitely very expanded because of sites like Facebook. There are so many more artists today than there ever were. There is so much more crap out there, too."

He doesn't believe it's the place to sell. "I don't feel that the people who are my real collectors are really looking for my work on Facebook."

Museums are catching on, though, says Tyler Greene, a Washington art blogger. While some contemporary museums such as The Getty, in Malibu, Calif., and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art "get" the importance of social media, many others aren't there yet. "The days of putting out a press release in the local paper to share what they're doing in the community are long gone," he says.

Much of the Phillips Collection in Washington is online, and the museum is on Twitter. "We want people to visit. But when they can't, our goal is to meet people where they live," says Ann Greer, director of communications and marketing.

A recent National Endowment for the Arts study showed that more than half of Americans participate in the arts via electronic media, says Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis. Last fall, NEA published a report based on a 2008 survey of more than 18,000 adults. Last month, it released additional research showing that people aren't just pleasure-viewing art online. They're also using it for educational enrichment and creating art, Iyengar says.

Sheila Pepe, 51, an installation artist and a professor in the School of Art and Design at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, N.Y., says she finds the cult of personality in the Facebook art world fascinating, and notes that some artists and art critics have so many "friends" that they have to reject new requests because they've hit the 5,000-friend limit.

Seattle art blogger and painter Joey Veltkamp believes virtual-world popularity comes down to how successful a self-promoter you are. "Social media lets you say, 'Hey look at me,' " he says. If you're good at that, you become a Facebook celeb, which he says annoys those who don't have that skill set. Still, he doesn't think anybody's ever going to reach stardom in the art world by being popular on Facebook.

Connecting with a job

But being a good self-promoter helped Elyce Abrams, a painter from Philadelphia with 1,932 Facebook "friends," land a show in New York last year. "One of my friends on Facebook was showing at their gallery, and he had commented on my work and his gallery saw his comment. That's how we connected," she says.

But even while savvy social media use can help an artist's career, those who seem to sit on Facebook and post all day long may not be taken seriously, says painter Amanda Church of New York."I sometimes think 'Get to work' when I see people posting and commenting a lot."

Artists and critics agree that social media sites have expanded opportunities for artists in smaller fields and unified them.

Typeface designer Chris Lozos of Falls Church, Va., says the font design world consists of about 500 professionals, many based in Europe. He uses Facebook and Twitter daily to keep up with colleagues and clients.

"Most of us are one-person shops and can't afford blitz media. This is the poor man's marketing," he says.

Animators like it for the same reasons. "We are like moles sitting in separate holes," says New York animator Signe Baumane, who shares works in progress on Facebook. "I get to see a lot of very fresh movies."

Artists who move far from home, such as Victor Ekpuk, a Nigerian-born painter who has lived in Washington, D.C., for the past 12 years, says his website and Facebook page help keep his Nigerian family, friends and fellow artists up to date on his blossoming career, including a recent sale to the Smithsonian. It also has helped him reach out to young people.

"There's a group of artists I connected with on Facebook called Take Me to the River. We're collaborating with artists from around the world — professional poets and visual artists — to help at-risk youth who are poets and artists," Ekpuk says.

Social media sites also are spurring vibrant conversations about the arts. The recent Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery controversy over the museum's decision to pull a video excerpt of an ant-covered Jesus on a Crucifix generated a heated debate on Facebook and Twitter, Greene says.

Ironically, those same social media sites sometimes censor art. Earlier this year, Facebook pulled down a drawing of a nude female torso — mistaken for a photo — posted on a page by the New York Academy of Arts.

"It happens on YouTube all the time, too. Classic works of video art have been posted that contain nudity and they've been taken down — these are works by well-known artists who are in museum collections, and they end up getting booted," says Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight.

"Social networking sites create the illusion of being public spaces, but they are corporate and they're owned. Any freedom is an illusion," he says.

Though the free-for-all sharing of art on the Web can draw positive attention and unite artists worldwide, it can work against an artist, too, says Paddy Johnson, a popular New York-based art critic and blogger.

An 'interesting' downside

"It raises a lot of interesting questions," she says. "Sometimes an artist will discover a YouTube video of their work — something someone else shot and posted — and it wouldn't have been something they'd wanted up there. ... All of a sudden you have people evaluating work that you didn't want out there."

How artists define themselves online and how they interact with others can be important in terms of future success, says John Sisson, assistant director of Career Services and Alumni Relations at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, which offered its first social media course this semester.

"You have to be concerned about how you're presenting yourself — although that's open for debate. But things stick around," he says.

El Mac says he wonders whether he should be spending more time honing his professional image and being available online, but "if I spend a couple days just doing computer stuff, I start to feel bad, depressed.

"I have to be painting," he says. "I'm not going to be a happy person when I'm not creating and making art."

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Off target

A new show at the Colorado Springs, Colorado Sangre de Cristo Arts Center unveils the importance of fact-checking ... or not

by Edie Adelstein

Maria Lopez's upcoming exhibit at the Sangre de Cristo Arts & Conference Center features colorful, abstract works depicting Christian scenes. But the most eye-catching aspect of the Pueblo artist's self-titled show came within a press release.

"Her works," the Sangre wrote of Lopez, "are currently in the art collections of celebrities such as: Barack Obama, Dane Cook, Cheech Marin, George Lopez, Carlos Mencia, Chris Rock, David Letterman, Martha Stewart, Conan O'Brein [sic], Wanda Sykes, Tracy Morgan, John Leguizamo and others."

Sure enough, Lopez's Web site, lopezme.com, listed more than 20 celebrities who have one of her works in their "estate collections," and recently, the Pueblo Chieftain published an article that mentioned some of those names.

Asked her secret, Lopez happily shares: She goes to concerts, stand-up shows and other public appearances — and gives the works to famous people's handlers and representatives. She admits she doesn't know whether any of her works actually make it into celebrities' homes at all.

The Indy contacted several celebrity representatives about Lopez's paintings. While most inquiries were not returned, Melissa Richardson Banks, a representative of Cheech Marin, says she has no record of Lopez's work, despite Marin being an avid collector of Chicano art.

"I manage the collection, and I don't know who she is," says Banks, who adds that she'll ask Lopez to remove Marin's mention from her site.

A representative from Martha Stewart's publicity firm didn't know where to begin to look, but shares Banks' view that Lopez's paintings were probably classified as simple fan gifts, which generally reside well outside of estate collections.

When asked about the discrepancies, Lopez says she didn't know that her self-promotion — which she sees as both business plan and fan hobby — might have been seen as misleading.

Slim standard

At best, Lopez may be faulted for aggressive idealism or reckless naïveté. Either way, her claims didn't set off alarms at the Sangre.

Its curator of visual arts, Karin Larkin, approved Lopez's works hanging in the museum. She says she did not fact-check Lopez's credentials, and in fact is unapologetic about it. (Disclosure: Larkin is an ex-professor of mine.)

"Basically, we print the information that she gives us," says Larkin, adding, "To be quite honest, whose collections she's in doesn't really factor into my decision as to whether or not I display her. And the information that goes out into the press releases, I don't necessarily put together."

Plus, Larkin adds, "She's a foyer show. It's not like one of the big galleries that we're putting together."

Sangre's marketing specialist Nicki Hart, who assembled the press release, says taking information straight from the artist is good enough: "I take it in good faith that that information coming from the source is correct."

If that sounds strange, what's stranger is that few people in the arts sector seem bothered by it.

Dewey Blanton, an American Association of Museums media representative, says that in public relations, doing background research is a given, even if there's no standard for fact-checking exhibit information. And yet minutes later, Blanton calls back to confess that if he himself were an overextended, underpaid employee in a "small museum," he may be apt to overlook such things.

Kimberley Sherwood, a board member for the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and a local nonprofit consultant, puts it this way: "I think there's a lot of room for innocent mistakes ... when we have fairly slim resources and people wearing many hats doing lots of different kinds of tasks ... there's a lot of room for understanding.

"I don't know that there's anything really there," says Sherwood of the situation, "other than perhaps a slim staff working hard to get their programming schedule out there so that they can encourage people to come and look at cool art."

In nearly a half-dozen calls, no one was willing to comment on the record about any dangers inherent to the Sangre's sloppiness.

Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center curator Tariana Navas-Nieves is careful to say that all institutions are different, but that FAC releases and gallery text are fact-checked.

"I would say that every museum has their own processes on selecting artists to exhibit, or art into their collection," she says. "And obviously all museums generally fact-check the information, the biographical and support information for each artist."

Official approval
The irony here? Lopez probably doesn't need to embellish her biography. Recently, Lopez submitted a group of works to Navas-Nieves for consideration to become part of the FAC's permanent collection as a gift. And Lopez's art was accepted, receiving Navas-Nieves' formal recommendation as well as museum committee approval.

"My presentation of the works has to do with the works," says Navas-Nieves. "In her case, I found interesting how she takes religious subject matter and gives it kind of a modern take. ... So my selection of those works was based on that."

Meanwhile, at the Sangre, Hart says the staff is working on a plan for future situations like this one, but is not yet giving specifics. As of press time, Sangre had not released any clarification or statement. However, Lopez has changed her Web site, writing now that celebrities' paintings "were gifted."

— edie@csindy.com