Website: www.victorcartagena.net Email: vstudio@mindspring.com Print version: download

Studio: Project Artaud, #101, 499 Alabama, San Francisco, CA 94110

Salvadoran-born Victor Cartagena has been making art in the Bay Area since the late 80s. The work that Cartagena produced in the early to mid-1990’s battled with memories of the violence in El Salvador and the pain and separation that he experienced in relocating to the U.S. During this time, he was a member of Tamoanchán, a collective of Latin American printmakers working out of KALA Institute in Berkeley, sponsored by the California Arts Council (1990-1996). Cartagena’s work in the late 90s moved beyond solely articulating the immigrant experience.  In his work his has dealt with consumer culture, homelessness, and material waste.  His artistic palette has also branched out to include sculpture, audio and video installation. The 1998 series Mirando al Sur presented at MACLA, Center for Latino Arts in San Jose, and its continuation Anatomical Memories presented at Ampersand International Arts in 1999, were a major transition from the personal to the universal. This body of work led to the Sin Casa exhibit at Intersection for the Arts in the summer of 1999 that examined the multiple notions of home and homelessness.

In 2001 Cartagena tackled the issue of the death penalty and the media in a joint exhibit at Ampersand International Arts (works on paper & canvas) and Intersection for the Arts (installation with video, sound, sculpture & collage) entitled Capital Culture/Media Punishment. In 2002 he participated in the Espíritu Sin Frontera exhibit at the Oakland Museum with an installation/altar Homenaje a Roque Dalton, poeta Salvadoreño. In April 2000 Cartagena participated in the Home Visit project at MACLA with internationally known installation artist Pepón Osorio. MACLA’s Generation/Relation exhibit in 1994 is also where Cartagena was introduced to the local art scene as “an artist to watch” by Enrique Chagoya over ten years ago.  In 2002 and 2004, Cartagena dealt with the themes of exile, identity, perception and the use of power, presenting his work in Los Angeles, New York and San Francisco.  In recent years, Cartagena has also ventured into the world of set-design, receiving critical acclaim for his set-design for Greg Sarris’ Mission Indians, a Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production and his collaboration with Larry Reed and Octavio Solis on Shadowlight’s Seven Visions of Encarnación.  He has collaborated with choroeographer Erika Chong Shuch and actor/playwright Sean San Jose on Campo Santo’s production of Domino and is a founding member of  the gourp SECOS Y MOJADOS (with director Roberto Varea, performance artist Violeta Luna, dramaturg, Antigone Trimis and sound designer David Molina).  In this capacity he created the visual design for the piece No Olvidado, presented at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts gardens with the Grupo Jornalero, as well as  for Enterrada presented at the Emisferica Institute in Buenos Aires and Cordoba, Argentina, as well as at CALARTS, Valencia, California.

Cartagena’s 2005 solo exhibition at Ampersand International Arts Anatomy of La Mentira: Red Noses and installation Con los Ojos Vendados presented in Thessaloniki, Greece and Art L.A, are a direct response to our times.  That same year, Cartagena presented a collaborative project with Liz Oppenheimer at Intersection for the Arts in October 2005, a video installation at Photo New York (October 2005), a set installation for Campo Santo’s Domino at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (December 2005), a group show at TinT Gallery in Thessaloniki, Greece (International Photo Exhibit/February 2006), a solo exhibition at Stephen Cohen Gallery, Los Angeles (Spring 2006), and the exhibition Culture of Violence: Bang! Bang! Toy Gun at MACLA in San Jose, California. Anatomy of la Mentira was presented with the addition of a new series and installation at TinT Gallery, Greece in 2007. In March, 2008 a multidisciplinary exhibition, Invisible Nation/Nación Invisibl” will be presented at San Francisco’s Galeria de la Raza and Bang! Bang! Toy Gun will open at PanAmerican ArtProjects in April 2008. (W)here is Art?, a group exhibition at MCCLA, San Francisco, will include the Con los Ojos Vendados installation and Caritas de Azucar.

In the San Francisco-Bay Area, Cartagena has exhibited at Southern Exposure, Palo Alto Cultural Center, the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, Galeria de la Raza, New Langton Arts, Ampersand International Arts, Intersection for the Arts, Catharine Clark Gallery, Euphrat Museum, the Mission Cultural Center, MACLA/Center for Latino Arts, and the Sonoma Museum of Visual Arts, among others. Cartagena’s work has been reviewed in Art Nexus, art.es, Artweek, Art Issues, emisferica, The San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, San Francisco Bay Guardian, San Francisco Weekly, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, Cambio and El Latino, Hoy (L.A.), among others. Nationally, Cartagena has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and all over California, including Los Angeles. Internationally, Cartagena has exhibited in Mexico,Argentina,chile, Japan, El Salvador, Spain,Belarus, Ecuador and Greece

Cartagena has served as Artist-in-Residence at ZEUM, Southern Exposure, and SF Art Commission’s WritersCorps and has taught at New Age Academy. He has given numerous workshops, including two Family Sundays and the Matches Program at SFMOMA, and has presented his collaboration with Log Cabin youth at the CO-LAB exhibit at SF State University’s Fine Art Gallery in spring of 2002. Cartagena has served on the roster of Leap, Imagination in Learning and Young Audiences of the Bay Area.  He was on the faculty of Arrowsmith Academy 1998-2006, where he taught Printmaking, Mixed Media, Experimental Video and Sculpture. The work of his students has been exhibited at SFMOMA’s window galleries and Horizons Unlimited.  Cartagena has given numerous lectures about his work at places such as, UC Berkeley Museum, UC Berkeley University, San Francisco State University, California College of Arts, SF Art Institute, Intersection for the Arts, School of the Arts H.S., Concultura, El Salvador, among others.

Cartagena was awarded a San Francisco Cultural Equity grant in 2005 and the Visions from the New California grant award in 2004, sponsored by a seven-member California Artist residency program consortium and pursued a month-long residency at 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica in July 2004. In 2004 he received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation in support of the development of his work and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Award. He was a joint recipient of a Rockefeller grant with Octavio Solis and Larry Reed for Shadowlight’s production of The Seven Visions of Encarnación produced at the Brava Theater Center in November 2002. Cartagena received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation 2001 Visual Arts Purchase Award, the competitive Art Council award in the year 2000 (currently known as ARTADIA), and 1996 and 2000 Pacific Prints awards. Cartagena was also nominated for the Eureka Fellowship/Fleishhacker Foundation in 1998, 2002 & 2005-07, the 2006, 2004 & 2002 IN/SITE (formerly SECA) Art Award, the Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the SFAI 2000 and the 2003 Adeline Kent Award. Cartagena’s work is in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Oxbow School of Art, Napa, CA, the Mexican Museum in San Francisco, CA & the Collection of Egnatia Odos in Thessaloniki, Greece. Victor Cartagena is represented by Stephen Cohen Gallery in Los Angeles, CA; TinT Gallery in Greece and collaborates with Ampersand International Arts and Brown Bag Gallery in San Francisco, CA.