Riding the Three-Headed Serpent is an exhibition by Chicago-based artist Luis Alvaro Sahagun Nuño, presenting new works that interrogate how contemporary portraiture allied with Mesoamerican indigenous healing practices can serve as limpias or soul retrievals. In creating this body of work Luis worked to heal his family’s and community’s acute spiritual distress rooted in three diseases inflicted by colonization, white supremacy, and systemic oppression: Susto (soul lost or weeping soul), Bilis (rage), and Envidia (envy of the power of the oppressor).
Luis’ family portraits are rendered in charcoal and adhered to oriented strand board (OSB), a construction material made from leftover parts of knotty or crooked trees. The OSB is then layered with resin beads infused with chants, yerbas or plant medicine, sea shells, crystals, and miniature family photos. Each piece also contains small sculptures created through ritual connection with spirit guides, which allow Luis to journey into the spirit world to identify the specific animal medicine required for each sitter. The portraits or limpias become shamanic topographical maps guiding intuitive ceremonies for the release of harmful emotional energy.
Luis references and re-uses 17th century royal Spanish portraits to spotlight, celebrate, and put in positions of power stories of indigenous survival. As a means to embolden the sitter's beauty and produce grandeur, the works of art are finished with bonded together fragments of ornamental baroque-style frames.
Riding the Three-Headed Serpent explores how craft, spirituality, and labor interweave to celebrate the complexities of Latinidad/Latinx identity, immigration/migration, and decoloniality, connecting Luis’ rich ancestral history, lived experience and creative practice to intervene in this racially charged moment.
Maria “Mariquita” Rodriguez Sahagun is my sister and the middle child of our family. During this limpia we worked on mother-daughter bonds and clearing out energies that were not serving her. Near her solar plexus chakra, which is responsible for our ability to feel confident and in control of our lives, is a picture of her daughter Natalia. The image of her daughter is a reminder of her power and ability to break spells of motherhood traumas.
This portrait is of mi Tia Lupe, La Guadalalupana. She has a strong devotion to La Virgen de Guadalupe and uses her as a symbol for hope and miracles. The limpia performed was for clearing away energy not belonging to her while setting personal heart-felt intentions as she embarks on a new chapter in her life.
Often, I think about what it means to carry different communities inside our hearts, communities as lived experiences that shape our identities. Tapping into my Nagual, my teacher in the spirit realm, I embarked on a limpia specific to one component of my identity, Huicho. Huicho invokes a specific time in my life as this nickname was given to me during my undergraduate studies. Using this identity as a means of time travel, I worked to soothe wounds inflicted via racial micro and macro aggressions during my time at a predominantly white learning institution.
Owl medicine presented itself during this work. It is a medicine for magic and courage and facilitated the pathway for resolution.
Hector Chang Nuño, my cousin El Tito, is a Chinese-Mexican born and raised in Mazatlan, Sinaloa. The port of Mazatlan, located on the Pacific coast of Mexico, is a major route for transporting goods by sea. Tito’s great-grandfather was a Chinese trader that arrived in Mazatlan and fell in love with his great-grandmother. Tito has a strong drive to learn and connect with Chinese culture. His limpia used the medicine of Dogs of Foo, lion-like creatures containing mystic powers of protection. A lion’s roar causes trembling and symbolizes wisdom, fearlessness, and pride. On his chest lies an image of the first Chinese Orthodox priest, St. Mitrophan of China, patron of lost children, for protection and guidance .
Mexicanos al Grito de Guerra is tattooed across my cousin Hugo’s chest. Possessing a restless and warrior heart, Hugo’s medicine showed up as a horse and a shapeshifting dog in the form of a wolf. Horse medicine teaches us how to ride in new directions and awakens our freedom. Dogs are known for their playfulness and loyalty and in Meixca culture Xolotl is the dog-faced god of fire and lighting. Wolves are nocturnal and territorial creatures and their howl is a grito, a scream to notify the pack of danger. Wolf and horse provide wisdom for discerning who to give loyalty to and connecting us to true freedom.
Katya Flores Sahagun is my cousin and the only family member represented in this series of limpias from my paternal side of the family. The image of Saint Kateri Tekakwitha, the first Native American saint, rests on her chest. This controversial symbol is open for interpretation as many celebrate her sainthood while others shun her religious conversion, reflecting the inner conflicts left by the residue of colonization.
For my cousin Arturo’s portrait, I called upon St. Judas, the patron of desperate and lost causes, inverting his saintly image on Arturo’s chest. Unicorns flank the saint for their medicine in showing us the magic in the world and helping us view life through the lens of an innocent child. In the sacred direction of the West, a place of reflection, gratitude, and accomplishment, lies the statue of liberty, to some a false symbol of freedom. Here it is used as a tool for processing Arturo’s experiences as an immigrant in this country.
Tatiana Gonzalez Nuño, La Taty, is my cousin from my mother’s side of the family. Born and raised in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, she is a trained and gifted makeup artist with a rebellious soul. During her limpia, I received barn swallow and tiger medicine. Barn swallows, although small, are outspoken and forceful. For many indigeneous cultures these birds are known to be mighty and wake people up from their sleep. The image of the tiger has the ability to embolden ambition as they are synonymous with drive, strength, and courage. Their black stripes are sharp slices of darkness and represent the ability to cut through the darkness of life to pursue healing and trust.
I created this self-portrait as a soul retrieval for deeply connecting with lost components of my wounded inner child, Alvarito. Alvarito lives inside me, a ten year old playful, adventurous, and innocent child who mentors me on living my present life with joy and laughter. I was born on the day of the warrior of Tezcatlipoca, the smoking mirror, jaguar deity, and god of ancestral memory. His image as a jaguar is represented on my hat, which is slightly tilted toward the sacred direction of the South, the place of child innocence, expansion, and raw fighting energy.
A barrida in Curanderismo is an energetic sweeping, a way to purify and revitalize an individual for renewal. Sweeping rites also serve as offerings to the divine. For this piece, I wanted to sweep away unhealthy energies while creating a stronger bond between my grandmother Lochita and my mother Toñita. The portrait is that of my grandmother holding my mother when she was a baby, my version of Madonna and child.
While I was working on this portrait in the studio, I bent down to get rope and there laying next to it was a four foot serpent. It had entered my studio and found refuge by camouflaging itself among my rope. I believe it was an omen or visit by Coatlicue, mother of gods, depicted with a fanged serpent face and wearing a skirt similar to the one in this piece, which I was working on at the time.
Haciendo Caras, an essay by Alex Santana
Luis A. Sahagun’s works mine personal mythologies to underscore how the historical violences of religion and colonial conquest appear in our own lives, as well as those of our family and extended communities. In multimedia works that drip accumulatively, protrude from the surface, and juxtapose unlikely elements, Sahagun evokes the colloquial items that inform the ideologies imposed on us. The continual reappearance of stretched, distorted faces in his work further suggests how these imposed social orders manifest as psychological distresses, bordering the realm of hallucination.
Works like En Luto Por Un Divino Socorro and Peticion Para San Ignacio de Loyola employ a strategy of material accumulation, which provides the work with a formidable sense of physical and emotional density. Through embedded ornate beading and the gathering of plastic rosaries, both works address the accumulative brutality of colonial hegemony, specifically its enforcement through Catholicism. Illustrations of San Ignacio de Loyola and San Martin de Porres cement this criticism through allusions to two saints who represent vastly different principles: the former of a Spanish Jesuit order, and the latter (turned upside down), the Peruvian patron saint of mixed peoples and racial harmony. Another sculptural work titled Gloria y Paz makes a similar point through the use of Jesus Christ, whose figure is fused with that of a colonizer wielding a sword, alluding to the bloody conquest of the Americas justified in the name of the cross.
The inclusion of found objects in Gloria y Paz frames the main protagonist with poignant symbols, including a halo made of sawdust, a spiked cactus, and a horned devil figurine. In this work and others, the amalgamation and clashing of diverse sculptural materials and found objects evokes the idea of construction. Specifically, the construction of ideology, but also the profound potential of physical construction sites and work zones, which thematically reappears in Sahagun’s practice. In Maria Bonita, Maria Del Alma this is apparent, most obviously through the use of oriented strand board as the background for the painted portrait of the artist’s mother. In this monumental work, the main figure is stately and elegant, like a saint who has been recently beatified. The combination of colloquial construction materials with ornate bead work and other delicate ornamentation lends a personalized quality to the tender portrait, and the love is unmistakable.
Love––like chaos and faith and other turbulences––is an emotional vehicle for the exploration of personal histories as well as broader societal systems and symbols. Bringing to play a more restrained color palette, in works like Magia Madre and Ojo Celestial Sahagun explores the emotional intensity of conflicting ideologies through surrealist disembodiment. In both works, human faces are stretched and distorted, limbs are severed, and heads are left floating in space. A sense of foreboding permeates these works, as human faces hover above chaotic oceans and alien landscapes, attempting to make sense of the world(s) they inhabit. These works, among others in Haciendo Caras, illustrate the profound tension between love and conflict, ultimately underscoring their coexistence on the same plane: messy, beautiful, and human.
PDF of exhibition with catalog essay
SIGNING THE CROSS: on the many hand signals of divination and survival in the work of Luis Sahagun.
Exhibition Essay by Raquel Gutierrez
The gestural histories of the Mexican quixotic vibrates in the art of Luis A. Sahagun and does so through the most salient of appendages—the hand. The sacred figuration of the hand is one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world. Depictions of the open right hand, for example, is most notable in La Mano Poderosa (The All-Powerful Hand), a devotional image of the child Christ flanked by his parents and grandparents on each finger, the holy family floating above the open wound of the stigmata. There’s also the palm-shaped image of the hamsa and the eye it holds in its center has long been believed of its powers against evil, as well as a symbol of good fortune. For Sahagun the hand is a repository of energy that becomes activated through recognizable patterns of embodied communication. But these are also the hands that honor the labors of the working class from which he proudly emerges.
At a 2019 artist talk at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum and in connection to critical race studies with MSU (shortly before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a series of national shutdowns) Sahagun spoke of the conundrum the Mexican philosopher Octavio Paz had first articulated in his seminal work The Labyrinth of Solitude of not belonging in the US and not belonging in Mexico. That in the place of said belonging emerges a new culture that Paz calls a cultural suicide. While Paz may think of this unbelonging as a dead end Sahagun thinks of it as a cultural reclamation—built on negation and need. I can be whatever I want out of necessity he tells the audience. He punctuated this point with a performance. He raised both hands in a prayer gesture with pointer and pinkies touching in front of his face. With his fingers still clasped Sahagun brought his hands over his head, covered in the hood of his sweatshirt emblazoned with the word Scholar, as if mimicking a rooster’s red comb, twisting his fingers into Cs and Hs, speaking a language resonant of the Chicago Heights neighborhood the artist called home since arriving there from Mexico with his mother at the age of 4. Speaking it with his whole chest.
In that moment Sahagun called in the mode of identification known as ‘stacking,’ a series of hand gestures that signal the gang or neighborhood with which someone is affiliated. It is with said hands that Sahagun recenters indigenous cosmological worldviews that provides a sense of the visionary and unpredictable in the visual historical index that underpins Unearthing: Magic, Mimicry, and the Mundane.
As you walk through the MSU Union Art Gallery you’ll find Sahagun’s surreal and gloriously rendered 6-paneled graphite and charcoal drawing Magia Madre (Mother Magic) as the exhibition’s anchoring work. This is the vehicle in which Sahagun takes us through the citational wonderland of the Broad Museum’s collection of Mexican masters and their works, revealing the shared connection facilitated by the magical qualities of the most mundane of extremities—the hand, a tool for conjuring. The hand functions as the conceptual constellation connecting Sahagun to the transformational power staged in each of the works present by both the known artists (Rufino Tamayo, Flor Garduño and Graciela Iturbide) alongside the unknown artists of ancient Pre-Columbian civilizations. Tamayo’s Observador de Pájaros (Bird Watcher). Sahagun’s engages in a call-and-response to each of the works—whether it is through the matrilineal allusions in Iturbide’s Manos Poderosas, Juchitán or the elongated palms, necks, hair locks, and torsos in both his and Tamayo’s Observador de Pájaros (Bird Watcher) or the sweeping movement of the tear-drop shaped tree echoed in the woman figure holding one arm out to her side. Sahagun’s figures hover in various elemental states—in the ether just above an open palm, in the still, mosaic waters that hold the artist’s protagonized self in view; cornfields traversing the wound of the border across his body the terrestrial site of conquest, growth and rediscovery.
It is here where Sahagun reminds us that the crossing of two cultures often happens under the sign of the cross. The right hand is clawed into the self blessing gesture (a rooster shaped shadow puppet) in diagonal opposition to the groin section where scores of crosses compose a graveyard of unnamed ancestors stacked atop one another. Forgotten as if to make way for a new people in a new world. It is that historical atrocity that for Sahagun serves as a reminder of the ways anonymity confines the ancient objects of the heads and stone figurines to the space of the museum instead of the communal space. Sahagun’s engagement with these objects serves as a spiritual reclamation and healing from that rupture.
These are the objects that facilitate Sahagun’s state of calling in and engaging in the seven-stage sense-centered critical knowledge making process that borderlands philosopher Gloria Anzaldúa has articulated in her posthumous book of essays Light In The Dark/En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality as conocimiento. Conocimiento is a structure of healing that resembles closely the seven chakras of the “energetic dreambody,” that incite the senses towards a radical self-awareness, one capable of causing internal shifts and external changes having to do with the shadow self, a spiritual reckoning with the unwanted aspects of the self.
It is here that we as spectators, receivers, and witnesses to the work are guided through the difficult grief-space of loss and healing alongside the vexed relationship between viewer and institution. What is recognition to the shadowed self? What is the museum to the culturally suicidal? A shape-shifter in search of a stable context? An object in search of its maker? An author crafting meaning out of necessity. As Sahagun reminds us, he comes from “a place formally or traditionally referred to as nothing, but that nothing has always been [his] everything.”
raquel gutiérrez is an essayist, arts critic/writer, and poet. Born and raised in Los Angeles they currently live in Tucson, Arizona where they just completed two MFAs in Poetry and Non-Fiction from the University of Arizona. Raquel is a 2017 recipient of the Creative Capital | Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Raquel also runs the tiny press, Econo Textual Objects (est. 2014), which publishes intimate works by QTPOC poets. Their poetry and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Los Angeles Review of Books, The New Inquiry, FENCE, Huizache, The Georgia Review, The Texas Review and Hayden’s Ferry Review. Raquel’s first book of prose, Brown Neon, will be published by Coffee House Press in the Spring of 2021. And Raquel's first book of poetry, Southwest Reconstruction, will be published by Noemi Press in 2022.
EXHIBITION\LIBRARY GUIDE AS DECOLONIZATION TOOLKIT
Both Eagle and Serpent is an exhibition presenting an artistically constructed and colorful mythology as an act of cultural resistance and reclamation. Working at the intersection of migration, race, gender, and socio-economic status, the exhibition challenges preconceived notions of what it means to be the immigrant, the other and marginalized from Sahagun’s point of view as a Latinx artist. Both Eagle and Serpent presents a wide body of intricate paintings, drawings, and sculptures that combine beads, rope, jute, icons, concrete, lumber, and drywall, which simultaneously celebrate and critically look at his relationship with his hybrid cultural origins and identity. Sahagun is a previously undocumented immigrant, former laborer, ex-gang member, grandson of a curandera, educator and studio artist. He comes from a cultural lineage of Indigenous alchemy and spirituality and European imperialism, which hybridized traditions, histories, and belief systems. Sahagun’s mythology reflects on the integration of these ancestral parts to impart a holistic understanding of the present and himself in the world.
The exhibition title, Both Eagle and Serpent, is inspired by the queer and feminist Chicana writer, Gloria Anzaldúa whose seminal book, Borderlands is a meditation on the binaries of male and female gender, patriarchal and matriarchal order, and the critique and celebration of a dual culture.The eagle-and-serpent symbol is represented on the Mexican flag and is derived from the pre-Hispanic Mexica story of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, who guided people to an eagle perched on a cactus with a serpent in its beak. The eagle symbolizes the spirit of the sun, the paternal figure of war, Huitzilopochtli. The serpent symbolizes the human soul as the maternal figure, Tonantzin. Together they connote the struggle between male and female.As Anzaldúa points out, the symbolic sacrifice of the serpent to the ostensibly “higher” masculine power indicates the patriarchal order vanquishing the matriarchal order of indigenous Mesoamerica.
For Sahagun, Both Eagle and Serpent means to honor and represent both masculine and feminine energy as an artistic device to heal. It’s a mythology that celebrates ancient beginnings and shapes new contemporary identities in his artwork. Through experiencing spiritual and psychic interventions, Sahagun has learned that he harbors feminine energy in a male-presenting body. Both Eagle and Serpent, as an exhibition and symbolic reference, opens up a conversation about gender, power, conquest, trauma, and survival.
This project is presented through City of Chicago:: The Department of Cultural Affairs and Special Events (DCASE) ArtSpace Grant Program.
Exhibition Curated by: Teresa Silva & Luis Sahagun
Decolonization Toolkit by: Analu Lopez & Luis Sahagun
Photography by James Prinz & Tom Van Eynde
Luis Sahagun, in collaboration with El Ballet Folkloric Manquetzalli, and Simantikos Dance Company, workshops a new performance inspired by the concepts of trauma, stereotypes, personal histories, and the idea of unity through pain. Mixing Mexican folkloric movements with contemporary dance gestures, Pain is Our North Star transforms hybrid dance practice into ritual and directs focus towards a life-size sculpture that serves as a surrogate ancestor.
In Progress: Luis Sahagun, MCA Chicago
April 10, 2018
Photos by: Nathan Keay, © MCA Chicago
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Luis Sahagun and Marcela, interviewed each other about their respective art practices and addressed how violence has influenced their lives and their art. Click here to see the MCA-DNA interview.
Luis A. Sahagun, Pain Is Our North Star, Sculpture, 01/2019, (photo by: Nathan Keay)
Luis A. Sahagun, Pain Is Our North Star, Sculpture, 01/2019, (photo by: Nathan Keay)
Luis A. Sahagun, Pain Is Our North Star, Sculpture, 01/2019, (photo by: Nathan Keay)
Luis A. Sahagun, Pain Is Our North Star, Sculpture, 01/2019, (photo by: Nathan Keay)
Luis A. Sahagun, Pain Is Our North Star, Sculpture, 01/2019, (photo by: Nathan Keay)
Essay Written by: Cate White
Cate White is originally from Northern California, she received a BA from Dominican University in 1994, and an MFA in 2010 from John F. Kennedy University’s Arts and Consciousness program in Berkeley, CA. She was the 2014/15 Tournesol award recipient from Headlands Center for the Arts. Her work was been exhibited in Denmark, Los Angeles, New York City, Oakland, and Hayward.
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Old Stories, New Myths
In the halls of academia, all the old narratives of imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (bell hooks’s term) have been called out for what they are: not descriptions of reality, but rather stories made up to justify and maintain power. But judging from the way things are going in the streets, it looks like the institutionalized attempts to create new narratives are failing to have much transformative effect. I suspect that this is because we haven’t even begun to heal the generations-deep wounds inflicted by the old ones. We’re like kids growing up in dysfunctional families who vow to do things differently, but end up recreating the same pain with new faces.
However, for people whose egos and social positions don’t benefit from this system, these old narratives are easier to recognize. For their own psychic survival, the marginalized have always had to question the so-called truth. This is why perceptions possessed by minorities, working class people, poor people, street people, white trash, the uneducated (unindoctrinated?), women and queers are important. Not because it’s politically correct to let us talk, but rather we are privy to perceptions that the comfortable have not had to access. Our collective freedom depends on these voices.
Luis Sahagun has one of these voices that carries far and wide. His realness allows him to connect with any social group—from the hood to the hills and whatever’s in between. Intersectionality is the word used for that, but it just feels like wholeness.
If cultural healing depends upon revelation from the margins, Luis has much to offer. But where does Luis find revelation? He looks to his own margins—to the shadows of lost lives and to a yearning for a missed intimacy with nature. The work in The Mountains Whispered and the Canyon Sang arises from Luis’s intention to open a door to the realm of the dead, which, intentional or not, allows the reality of violence into the room. To initiate this ritual in public is to offer a supported civic experience of shared pain—a pain from which no one is immune.
Although the most comfortable are often insulated from direct violence, it infects and affects each one of us. Luis’s friends murdered in Chicago Heights were caught up in the same sweep of violence carried out with the arrival of the conquistadores, which began across oceans with the distortions of the teachings of Christ, or perhaps further back with our early wakening from participation mystique when lives became separate from life. Or can we trace this separation all the way back to the ultimate origin, the Big Bang? Is our cosmos the first shot fired? In that case, all issues are the same issue—our issue. And we may need to go that far back to find our way forward into a consciousness of true connectedness.
Luis’s project—sourcing new knowledge in lost voices, creating new forms from new knowledge—is fueled by the psychic necessity to integrate all of his fragmented parts: one hand in Mayan soil; one foot in the stirrup of a conquistador; another foot on the streets of Chicago Heights; an arm wrapped around the livelihood of sheetrock, plaster and concrete; fingers typing applications to art institutions; a mind in translation between Spanish and English; and hood and museum. These fragments, when subjected to the alchemy of studio practice, become the icons of contemporary myth—a necessary foundation for relevant change.
Unlike narratives that limit perception, myths expand it—by employing sensation, emotion, color and form through story, character and archetype. Narratives pretend to be truth. Myths are metaphor. Truth is to be questioned or tyrannically enforced, while metaphor is to be experienced. We don’t heal our hearts with our minds. We need new experiences for our bodies. Crying opens the heart for empathy, body heat transforms helpless rage into power, and sensual delight fuels the inexhaustible energy of joy and play that we need to continue in our shared struggle for wholeness.
A collaboration between Luis Sahagun, Simantikos Dance Company (https://www.simantikos.com) and Sylvie Grace (https://soundcloud.com/sylviegrace).
This collaboration consisted of using my mother’s breath and heartbeat to create sounds, melodies, and movements with the intent of channeling messages to my ancestors and friends that were murdered in the Chicago Southland due to gun violence and other social injustices.
A collaboration by Luis Sahagun, Matthew Motep Woods and Simantikos Dance Company.
The title of this video comes from the lyrics by Matt Motep Woods, (https://soundcloud.com/matthew-motep-woods/07-for-those-of-us).
Simantikos (https://www.simantikos.com)
foam,silicone caulk, hemp, and paper mache.
synthetic rope, beads, foam, fake pine tree, acrylic, ink
A collaboration by Luis Sahagun, Matthew Motep Woods and Simantikos Dance Company (https://www.simantikos.com).
Panel Moderator, Faye Gleisser | Is an Assistant Professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Specializes in Modern and Contemporary art and the representation of histories of violence and radical resistance. Her dissertation considers the intersection of performance art, biopolitics, and technologies of surveillance in the 1960s and 1970s in the US and abroad through artists’ deployment of guerrilla tactics. She received her PhD at Northwestern University in the department of Art History.
Panelist:, Matt Woods (& Luis Sahagun) | Matt won “Best of Show” awards for his figurative painting style from Art Pace while in Texas, then moved to Chicago to manage a service learning program initiative with 6th through 8th graders. This quickly led to a range of partnerships that allowed him to cultivate a teaching style that synthesized technology, popular education, and contemporary art with both grassroots organizations and public institutions.
In his personal work, aside from self-producing two albums (Savage Journey and Orfeus Uprising), Matt created and curated one of the flagship events at the start of a second wave of underground black artists and musicians. The Soul Sessions (started from his loft downtown) influenced, nurtured, and celebrated a cluster of Chicago creatives that are now internationally recognized.
About our conversation:
The idea of the panel discussion came to me when my friend and collaborator Matt Woods and I talked open heartedly about where we both come from. He asked me " how did you get out"? He was referencing the hood. In my work I talk about my friends that were murdered due to gun violence and other issues. So, I opened up to Matt and he in returned opened up to me. Matt is a talented vocalist that makes sounds about leaving the "hood" or his economically deprived neighborhood. He has a unique story that involves the black panthers, and moving from California to Texas and then to Chicago. Matt and I are both educators at the Museum of Contemporary arts and at other Museums and after school programs throughout the city of Chicago. What we have in common is trauma and guilt from surviving our friends and neighborhood, so that is why we both try to be artist that reach out to brown and black communities to try our best to empower.
Very special thanks to my fourteen teen students that were in attendance at the panel discussion and were, at the time, participants of the Smart’s summer art program. Produced in partnership with the Smart Museum (University of Chicago) and the Chicago Housing Authority, the 6-week program explores public art and museums across Chicago. They were led by a team of mentors that includes historian Ashley Finigan, and myself, Luis Sahagun.
Thank you! Chicago Artist Coalition for the support, space and encouragement, Faye and Matt for your wisdom, empathy and your interest in participating, and of course everyone else that attended the talk, I appreciate your time, commitment and continual support of my artistic journey.
oil, acrylic, caulk
In my cardboard painting series, I begin the process by habitually collecting cardboard found on the streets of my community. Once my studio is congested with material, I begin to meticulously stack and adhere it together, until large cube-shaped structures are formed. After the gluing process is completed, I use my power tools to deconstruct and disfigure the form. Deliberate cuts, tears, and slices are made to the surface with the ultimate goal being to develop a history that capsulizes and uncovers the materials physicality.
This series of paintings have been featured in New American Paintings.
34x26x12 Nail polish, lipstick, screws, acrylic, oil on cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
34x26x12 Nail polish, lipstick, screws, acrylic, oil on cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
38x31x7 Gesso, nails, spray paint, acrylic on cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
33x26x12 Acrylic on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
26x22x8 Gesso, Spray paint, acrylic, on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
18x19x6 Cardboard on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
60x84x16 Cardboard on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
60x84x16 Cardboard on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
40x20x13 Cardboard on Cardboard
Copyright © 2014 Luis Sahagun. All rights reserved. The content on this site may not be copied or downloaded without permission.
Luis Sahagun’s paintings, sculptures and objects are icons of an invented personal mythology. Utilizing materials and processes that reference his own experiences as a laborer and construction worker, he develops images and forms that combine personal histories and fantastical elements, with the aim of giving a voice to stories of under-represented communities. Brotherhood : Leyendas de un Bracero presents new work created during Sahagun’s year as artist-in-residence in Roswell, New Mexico.
Characters and landscapes featured in the current work, such as those in the sculptures Baby, Don and Hunch, are informed by research into Native American and Japanese mythologies, as well as Sahagun’s own stories and poems. Composed of cement, wax, and gold and silver gilding, the works demonstrate Sahagun’s sustained interest in combining construction materials with fine art processes. The artist’s recent return to figurative painting can be seen in large-scale works including The Words of Silent Ancestors and Angels Came to Hear Him Sing.
In Sahagun's own words, “My mythology has developed by taking the memories of childhood friends, that were murdered or imprisoned, and abstracting their identities to create morally strong anthropomorphic characters that occupy the alternate reality I’ve constructed. In short, I am rewriting my vision of Chicago through symbol and metaphor. These are the tools that allow me to connect with my family, the divine, and to death.”
spray paint, and caulk on panel
close up view
English version
hand carved 2x4's (pine wood)
Spanish version
wood, hemp, concrete, cardboard, and drywall
wood, hemp, concrete, cardboard, and drywall
hemp, concrete, cardboard, drywall and wood
concrete, wax and red mirror gilding
joint compound, concrete, and acrylic
Kruger Gallery Chicago
foam, spray paint, concrete
Kruger Gallery Chicago
concrete, wax, and 14k gold leaf
caulk, acrylic, joint compound on cement board
The Urban Box Project (TUBP) was originated by Luis Sahagun. It included Union Street Gallery, a not for profit community based gallery and Bloom Township Government in cook county. The artistic team consisted of Luis Sahagun, a Chicago Heights native, along with two Bloom Township high school art students. The Students were provided with a weekly stipend for their internship.
During the month of July 2015 the Urban Box Project dedicated time to making art interventions in the streets of Chicago Heights, Illinois. These interventions were seen as small artistic gestures in forms of performance, paintings and sculptures created in the streets of the city.
Some of the interventions included participating in local community fairs to provide a creative presence to the community. In addition the team playfully yarn and flower bombed major highways and created free balloon animals at the public library.
All of the interventions were photographed and promoted on social media via instagram via #theurbanboxproject.
The final exhibition was in August 2015 and it contained a collection of Luis’ artwork, visual documentations of the street interventions performed by the TUBP and independent sculptures created from the collected rubble.
Every Thursday while the exhibition was open, the public was encouraged to join the Urban Box Project in making a site-specific sculpture created with the debris and objects excavated from the streets of Chicago Heights, Illinois.
An article was published in the Chicago Tribune about the project. http://my.chicagotribune.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-84147914/