Ruby Chacon

Last updated

Ruby Chacon (born 1971) is an American muralist and self-proclaimed "Utahana", artist, using art as a medium to express her dual identity as both a Utah native and a Chicana. [1]

Contents

Biography

Ruby Chacon was born in 1971 in Salt Lake City, Utah where she continued to reside for the majority of her life, dedicating her artistic career to community engagement through the arts and artivism. Chacon is an artist, a mother, a daughter, and a familiar face in the community, engaging actively in community events and in her public display of murals. Chacon works with several mediums, however she is best known for her work with murals. Chacon's work has been displayed across Utah and internationally.

Chacon is amongst the youngest of six children, but the first to have graduated from high school and pursue a higher education. [2] Chacon attained her Bachelors of Fine Arts from the University of Utah. [3] Her mother was a hospital cleaner who grew up on the west side of Utah, or as what is known as the “Brown side,” and her father began his career in mining in Montecillo but later moved to the east side to start his family. [2]

Although Chacon was aware of her heritage, she was not very familiar with her Mexican identity, and when questioning her grandfather about it, he replied only with reminding her she was from Utah. [4] Chacon eventually came to intertwine both identities under the self proclaimed label Utahana, which later became a factor in her work. [2]

Chacon lived in a working-class family, where she recalls sleeping in the living room, because her house was not large enough to accommodate everyone. [2] Many members of her family had artistic ties themselves, such as her uncle Covito, who as a painter and would allow Chacon to be creative by drawing on the walls. [4] Chacon's ancestry traces back to Pueblo Indians who speak the Tewa language and her Spanish side lays stake to claim in Utah for hundreds of years. [2] After the death of her nephew Orlando Chacon, who was murdered by her sister's boyfriend, Chacon became more interested in painting her own family as a direct rejection of how the media attempted to portray them. [5]

Artwork

Ruby Chacon is a painter, though not limited to any particular medium; her artwork consists of murals and canvas paintings. Her murals are displayed all throughout Utah, Wyoming, California, and abroad in Thailand and Morocco. [3] Earlier in her life, Chacon wanted to pursue a career in teaching drawing classes. However Chacon was interested in depicting lowriders and the Chicano zoot suit style which was frowned upon. [2] Chacon's canvas paintings are mostly oil paintings, although she also uses acrylics. [2] All of her murals are done in acrylic to maintain lower production costs. [2] She does not like to frame her canvas work because she believes that those who purchase her work will likely reframe the piece, making her extra effort redundant. [2] She is said to sign her name in red after her name, Ruby. [2] Chacon considers her art to be not unlike typical Utah art because although her style veers from the traditionalist landscape artwork associated with Utah, Chacon depicts real people of Utah. [5] Chacon seeks to humanize through her work, painting people of her direct family but giving them a humanness others can easily relate to. [5]

Chacon has been featured in many shows, both local to Utah and tours beyond, and has been presented with many awards for her work. [6] She has been featured at the Hispanic Festival, Salt Lake City Airport, University of Utah Medical Center, Westminster College, Kimball Art Center in Park City, Art Access Gallery. Her murals have been displayed publicly at Horizonte, 1300 South Main; 500 North and 600 West; Northwest Multipurpose Center; Catholic Community Services, 200 South 745 East as well as in other states. [6] Her work has also appeared on the cover of the University Neighborhood partners and at the TRAX station of North Temple and 900 West in Salt Lake. [7] In 2007, she received the Mayor's award for her role with visual art and in 2021 she will receive the mayor's award again but this time for her collective, MICA. [8] Chacon's work has also been featured on book covers such as “Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicano/a Students” by author Dolores Delgado, and granted awards Utah Governor's Mansion Award for visual arts, Humanitarian Award as well as Distinguished Alumni at the Salt Lake Community College, and was named one of Utah's 15 most influential artists. [9]

Notable art / exhibitions

Activism / artivism

Chacon's identity as a "Utahana" serves as a focal point for not only her art work but her work in the community as well. [15] Chacon speaks of the struggles of being first-generation student, and representing an identity that is so commonly misrepresented. [9] [2] Chacon works directly with youth in the community providing a space to heal through art and community. [6] Much of Chacon's public murals in Utah draw questions of whether they belong in Utah as a representation of the community, but it is this same critique that displays Chacon's reason for painting: to make visible the long-term presence of Latinx people in the United States beyond the history taught in typical discourses. [16] As a result, she opened a venue called Mestizo which would combine a coffee house along with a place for Chicanos to commune and speak of their trauma. [16] However, in 2002 Chacon's endeavor fell short lacking a business plan. [17] Chacon and her husband Terry went on to found the nonprofit Mestizo Institute for Culture and Arts (MICA). [17] The building had a coffee shop, art gallery and open space for community members to gather. [17]

Chacon also works alongside Bad Dog Rediscovers America and other programs that fund, and introduce art to Latino youth. [15] Chacon has also visited juvenile intervention centers and female units to provide art as a form of healing and expressing oneself. [6] Chacon guided four teens for a project funded by Bad Dog, in which they created a design for a mural and painted it together. [15] During her time at the University of Utah, Chacon discovered the power of art as a form of education as well as activism at which point she knew she had to redefine how the Latino experience was being portrayed through art. [11]

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Royal Chicano Air Force</span> Art collective in Sacramento, California

The Royal Chicano Air Force (RCAF) is a Sacramento, California-based art collective, founded in 1970 by Ricardo Favela, José Montoya and Esteban Villa. It was one of the "most important collective artist groups" in the Chicano art movement in California during the 1970s and the 1980s and continues to be influential into the 21st century.

José Antonio "Tony" Burciaga was an American Chicano artist, poet, and writer who explored issues of Chicano identity and American society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Judy Baca</span> American artist and academic

Judith Francisca Baca is an American artist, activist, and professor of Chicano studies, world arts, and cultures based at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the co-founder and artistic director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC) in Venice, California. Baca is the director of the mural project that created the Great Wall of Los Angeles, which is the largest communal mural project in the world.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Minerva Teichert</span> American painter

Minerva Bernetta Kohlhepp Teichert was a 20th-century American painter notable for her art depicting Western and Mormon subjects, including a collection of murals depicting scenes from the Book of Mormon. Teichert received her art education from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Art Students League of New York. Teichert was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Other religious-themed artwork she is known for include Christ in a Red Robe, Queen Esther, and Rescue of the Lost Lamb. Additionally, Teichert painted 42 murals related to stories in the Book of Mormon which reside in Brigham Young University's (BYU) Museum of Art. She was the first woman invited to paint a mural for an LDS Church temple.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Linda Vallejo</span> American artist (born 1951)

Linda Vallejo is an American artist known for painting, sculpture and ceramics. Her work often addresses her Mexican-American ethnic identity within the context of American art and popular culture. The founder of the commercial art gallery Galería Las Américas, she is also an arts educator and has been involved intraditional Native American and Mexican rituals and ceremonies for many years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicano art movement</span> Movements by Mexican-American artists

The Chicano Art Movement represents groundbreaking movements by Mexican-American artists to establish a unique artistic identity in the United States. Much of the art and the artists creating Chicano Art were heavily influenced by Chicano Movement which began in the 1960s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Shifra Goldman</span> American art historian

Shifra Goldman was an American art historian, feminist, and activist. She had a probing intellect and a sense of "brutal" honesty. She also had an "encyclopedic" knowledge of art history and a passion for Chicana/o art.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mujeres Muralistas</span> Artist collective

Las Mujeres Muralistas were an all-female Latina artist collective based in the Mission District in San Francisco in the 1970s. They created a number of public murals throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, and are said to have sparked the beginning of the female muralist movement in the US and Mexico. Their murals were colorful and large scale and often focused on themes such as womanhood, culture, beauty, and socio-political change. Patricia Rodriguez, Graciela Carrillo, Consuelo Mendez, and Irene Perez are recognized as the founders and most prominent members of the collective, but other female Chicana artists assisted along the way and even joined later on, such as Susan Cervantes, Ester Hernandez, and Miriam Olivo among others.

Yreina Cervantez is an American artist and Chicana activist who is known for her multimedia painting, murals, and printmaking. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, and her work is in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, The Mexican Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum, and the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.

Rubén Trejo was an American sculptor and painter who served as a professor at Eastern Washington University.

Florence Ellen Ware was an American artist from Utah. She was a painter and a professor of art at the University of Utah for 25 years. She is well known for her murals, sponsored by the WPA and painted in the university's Kingsbury Hall in 1936.

Sonia Amalia Romero is an American artist, she is known for her printmaking, mixed media linocut prints, murals, and public art based in Los Angeles. She is known for depicting Los Angeles, Latin American imagery, and Chicano themes in her work.

Jessica Sabogal is a queer Colombian-American muralist and stencil spray paint artist who is currently active in the Bay Area. She's best known for her "Women Are Perfect! " visual campaign which she created as an artist in residence in 2014 at the Galeria de la Raza, and she is currently active in the "We The People" public art campaign created in collaboration with Shepard Fairey.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chicana art</span>

Chicana art as a specific genre emerged as part of the Chicano Movement of the 1960s and used art to express political and social resistance. Through different art mediums both past and contemporary, Chicana artists explore and interrogate traditional Mexican-American values and embody feminist themes through different mediums including murals, painting, photography, and more. The momentum created from the Chicano Movement spurred a Chicano Renaissance among Chicanas and Chicanos. Political art was created by poets, writers, playwrights, and artists and used to defend against their oppression and societal marginalization. During the 1970s, Chicana feminist artists differed from their Anglo-feminist counterparts in the way they collaborated. Chicana feminist artists often utilized artistic collaborations and collectives that included men, while Anglo-feminist artists generally utilized women-only participants.

Nanibah "Nani" Chacon is a Diné and Chicana painter, muralist, and art educator. Her work has been installed at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, the ISEA International Arts and Technology Symposium, Old Town Lansing, and in the "Que Chola" Exhibition at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, among other venues.

Irma Patricia Aguayo, also known as Patricia Aguayo, is a Chicano Park muralist and longtime activist. She was born and raised in San Diego, California. Both of her parents are from Mexico and she grew up in a Mexican culture household but was told by her parents that in order to succeed in America to act American outside her house. It was in middle school after meeting with her counselor, Ms. Barrios, where she first heard someone of Mexican descent call themselves Chicana that Aguayo realized that she also identified as Chicana. After researching Chicana artists, she realized that there weren't a lot of artists. So she decided that she would create her own artwork.

Marta Ayala is a Salvadoran-American painter and a woman muralist in San Francisco. Her work involves experimenting with colors, themes, etc. She is not tied to a single theme, medium or style. The majority of her work revolves around engaging with the community by collaborating together with other artists and teaching classes. She experiments with various colors and uses easily definable lines in her paintings and murals. Ayala's paintings and murals display a mix of colorful images reminiscent of childhood, earthly materials such as rocks and water with a mix of ancient culture. This is the reason for the word "primitive" to describe her work.

Mary Lou Romney, born Mary Louisa Stone, was an American Painter who resided in Utah. Romney studied art at the University of Utah where she earned a BFA and then completed a Post Graduate Education Certification program. She continued her education at Utah State University where she earned an MFA with a minor in Education. She was a nationally recognized painter and illustrator. She taught briefly at Utah State University, then spent many years teaching at the University of Utah, and was involved in local and regional art organizations, exhibits, and contests.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Black Lives Matter street mural (Salt Lake City)</span> Mural in Salt Lake City, Utah, U.S.

In August 2020, eight artists painted a Black Lives Matter street mural in Salt Lake City's Washington Square Park, outside the Salt Lake City and County Building, in the U.S. state of Utah. The city had commissioned the painting with a contest "to support and memorialize the national movement to eliminate systemic racism".

Graciela Carrillo is a Chicana artist and muralist in San Francisco and member of the all-female Chicana/Latina artist group Mujeres Muralistas. She is a co-founder of Galería de la Raza, a gallery utilized to showcase the everyday lives of the Chicano community through art during the Chicano Civil Rights movement through the Chicano muralist movement.

References

  1. ↑ "UTAH'S ALTERNATIVE PIONEERS". Salt Lake City Weekly. 23 July 2009. pp. 20–25. ProQuest   363200149.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Welch, Michele A. “The Utah Women's Walk.” Utah Valley University Digital Collections: 2006.https://uvu.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/womenswalk/id/434/rec/1
  3. 1 2 Chacón, Nanibah Nani; Chacón, Ruby; López, Alma Elizabeth (2019). "Artists' Statement". Frontiers. 40 (2): 258–259. doi:10.5250/fronjwomestud.40.2.0258. S2CID   201789068. Project MUSE   730160.
  4. 1 2 Iwasaki, Scott. “Ruby Chacón's Culture and Identity Is Shown through Art.” ParkRecord.com, ParkRecord.com, 31 May 2017, https://www.parkrecord.com/entertainment/ruby-chacons-culture-and-identity-is-shown-through-art/.
  5. 1 2 3 Guidos, Rhina. “Chacon's Ruby-Red World.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 17 Aug. 2003, https://archive.sltrib.com/article.php?itype=storyID&id=100D37D062164718.
  6. 1 2 3 4 Martin, Sue. “Ruby Chacon: Art of Healing, Art of Humanity.” 15 Bytes, Artists of Utah, 23 Mar. 2018, http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/tag/ruby-chacon/.
  7. ↑ Hunter, Rosemarie, and Anne-Marie Fischer. “Creating Sustainable University-Community Partnerships in Research Intensive Universities.” Memorial University Research Repository, 14 June 2013, https://research.library.mun.ca/1825/.
  8. ↑ “Mayor's Artists Awards.” Utah Arts Festival, https://uaf.org/mayor.
  9. 1 2 Daniels, Garth. “Ruby Chacon.” NowPlayingUtah.com https://www.nowplayingutah.com/artist/ruby-chacon/.
  10. ↑ SLS Mural. Gonzaga University. Accessed November 4, 2021. https://www.gonzaga.edu/school-of-leadership-studies/about/sls-mural.
  11. 1 2 "Arte Latino: The Sequel - Artists of Utah's 15 Bytes". 15 Bytes. Artists of Utah, 2006. http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/arte-latino-the-sequel/.
  12. ↑ Boone, Kasey. "Constructing the Self 30 Self-Portraits at SLC's Main ..." 15 Bytes. Artists of Utah, 2006. http://artistsofutah.org/15Bytes/index.php/constructing-the-self-30-self-portraits-at-slcs-main-library/.
  13. ↑ Chacon, Ruby. "Catholic Community Service Outdoor Mural".
  14. ↑ Chacon, Ruby. "Cihuacoatl and Golden Rule Outdoor Murals".
  15. 1 2 3 Dicou, Natalie. "The Colors of Community". The Salt Lake City Tribune [Salt Lake City], 27 November 2008, archive.sltrib.com/article.php?itype=NGPSID&id=11081159. Accessed 05 10 2021.
  16. 1 2 Macias, Jennifer (2017). "Latinx History outside the American Southwest and Borderlands". American Quarterly. 69 (2): 421–433. doi:10.1353/aq.2017.0035. S2CID   149111312. Project MUSE   663339.
  17. 1 2 3 Staker, Brian (24 July 2008). "Mixed Use". Salt Lake City Weekly. p. 26. ProQuest   363197543.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.