Oral History Interview with Carlos Villa, 1995 June 20-July 10
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Oral History interview with Carlos Villa, 1995 June 20-July 10 The digital preservation of this interview received Federal support from the Latino Initiatives Pool, administered by the Smithsonian Latino Center. Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a tape-recorded interview with Carlos Villa on June 20, 21 & July 30, 1995. The interview took place in San Francisco, California, and was conducted by Paul Karlstrom for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Interview CV: Carlo Villa PK: Paul Karlstrom [Session 1] PK: Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. An interview with artist Carlos Villa on June 20, 1995. Carlos is a San Francisco artist, but this interview is being conducted at the interviewer’s home in San Francisco, 73 Carmelita Street. The interviewer for the Archives is Paul Karlstrom, and this is Session one, tape one, side A. So, Carlos, with that introduction out of the way we can proceed, and I think I’ll start out by saying a couple things by way of introduction. This is an interview that I feel has been long postponed, and it’s certainly time to do it. I also should say that you showed up here at my office this morning without planning to do this, so we just decided to grasp the moment—or the opportunity—and begin, which I think is perfectly fine, and I’m grateful to have this opportunity. We were talking earlier about a couple of projects that are under way, one of them being this Asian American art-history symposium that’s coming up in the fall and you’re going to participate on that. But, in a sense, more important, I think—related but more important—is this project that you’ve been working on, which I gather is wrapping up and has to do with, in effect, retrieving Filipino-American art history here, specifically, in the Bay area. This is something that I think then we’ll come back to later on in the interview, but that gives a kind of focus to how our conversation began. You were telling me about a change for you in your experience as an artist that in a way shifted, I think, your priorities, is the way I understood it, and what you felt really was important and ultimately led to this kind of involvement with these special projects trying to understand, to preserve a culture, to retrieve it, and with that long introduction I’m wondering if you could kind of pick up at that point again, by way of a prelude to this interview. CV: Well, thank you very much. It gives me a lot more things to think about in terms of how this could go. I could go on by continuing our conversation this morning in the sense that how my life had changed in terms of being an artist first off. I’ve been an artist who’s been exhibiting art professionally since 1958. And I’ve exhibited with some of whom I felt were artists of the California School of Fine Arts’ golden age. I was classmates with Bill Wiley, Bill Allan, Joan Brown, Manuel Neri. I had teachers such as [Richard—Ed.] Diebenkorn, [Elmer—Ed.] Bischoff, Ralph DuCasse, Dorr Bothwell, Walt Kuhlman. I mean, on and on. Bill Morehouse. I had the best of the best that the region had to offer, and I was pretty much a mainstream artist. And so my life had gone on, I guess by anyone’s standards really quite well. I’d gone to New York, I exhibited in many great galleries there. My first one-person show was at Poindexter Gallery in New York in the early sixties, and I was at Nancy Hoffman’s gallery. There were a whole lot of things that were really very, very good at that time, which made me think that I was fairly successful, you know, like in mainstream. I had friends. When I came back I met up with a lot of friends who were Chicano. Now there’s a difference between Chicano and Mexican-American. Chicano happens to be a preferred politicized statement by a Mexican-American that, "Hey, I’m taking my heritage by my hand, and I’m going to call myself what you termed Chicano, a bad term, and I’m going to make it good. And I’m going to recuperate this. And I learned that word recuperation from El Movimiento. Artists such as René Yañ ez, artists such as Rupert Garcia, and Amalia Mesa-Baines. I didn’t know Amalia then, but then there were many artists in the barrio at the time that allowed me to think along these lines. Okay, I’d gone through the methodology, all the methodologies and strategies that I was oriented to by dint of my education, MFA at Mills College, and my experience at Art Institute, and being a professional artist outside—showing and hitting on collectors and the whole shot. I was talking with René Yañ ez and I was wondering about his gallery and what he was going to do, because I saw like, well, okay, "Gallery, gallery. This might be a good opportunity for me." The more that he talked about it the more inextricable the idea of artists and their function and their role with their community in non-art terms became just as important as the art that they produced. That making a political poster was just as valid as doing a copy of a drawing by Velasquez. Or something like that. PK: So this would be, in that case, with the example of Rupert Garcia, his very powerful posters. Was he doing them about that time? CV: He had just started getting into them. He was doing a lot of writing. He was incredibly active. He was an educator, a street scholar. When I say street-scholar, he was gathering all these wonderful kinds of snippets of information that weren’t really fully . that weren’t completely fully blown, and by conversations with other scholars at the time, like Tomas Ybarra-Frausto and people like that, able to put together this Chicano history. And so Rupert was very involved. He was doing silkscreens, mostly. He wasn’t doing as many paintings as. He was doing drawings. He was doing a lot of writing. And at the time it was very, very interesting. He was together with Amalia and a number of other artists looking into the aspect of Frida Kahlo and talking. And I kind of knew who Frida Kahlo was because we have a great big mural by Diego Rivera, of course, at the [San Francisco—Ed.] Art Institute. So I know a little bit about Frida Kahlo and I know a little bit about that, but then the thing is is that all of a sudden they were sharing this history. They were sharing this [artist’s, artists’] strategy and methodology of what Diego was about and what Frida was doing. There were a lot of artists that were in the barrio doing these incredible murals, like [Michael—Ed.] Rios and Patricia Rodriquez, etc. They were doing all these incredible murals, and they couldn’t wait to go down there to do these things. I couldn’t understand why they wouldn’t want to see somebody like [Helen—Ed.] Frankenthaler as opposed to seeing somebody like Michael [Steiner—Ed.] doing his take on somebody like Diego or Orozco. And I was just wondering about that. But then I’d go down and I’d see the power and the passion of what this work was about. I didn’t necessarily particularly love overt imagery such as that, but the thing is, though, is that everyone on the street knew what that was. That aspect I really liked, and it really hit home. Because my mother didn’t know abstract art. Neither did most of the people on the street know what abstract art was. But you go down to the barrio, and certainly they might not know who the artist is but they know. They know because they’re sharing some part of history that’s depicted on some of these murals. PK: What year was this? CV: Seventies. Seventies, anywhere from about ‘74, ‘75. And murals were just going up everywhere. I mean, it was amazing. There were symbols from Aztec cultures coming out, and there were low-rider cars in some of the murals. There was this instant of history where it was present, past, and, because of the discourse of the images, it maybe talked about the future. PK: So this was the moment that you point to as representing for you a new awareness. You developed a new awareness and really shifted in some ways your thinking in terms of what was important. CV: Well, I. PK: Is that right or is that overstating it? CV: It might be a little overstated, because still, you know, like I was very much into wanting to show in New York. And indeed I had shows there, and I was showing my own kind of work, which was trying to look at old cultures—old traditional cultures—African cultures, Polynesian cultures, cultures that were around the Philippines that weren’t trashed or colonized. PK: Well, so these issues were already of interest to you at this time. CV: Oh, yes. PK: So this wasn’t brand new. It wasn’t as if you had an epiphany.