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As an art student at the University of Texas Rio Grande, Josie Del Castillo came to appreciate the rich pigment of oils and how easily they spread across the canvas. “I didn’t get it at first, but it made me want to practice,” she says. “The techniques that I’ve developed now—I always go back to oil painting, even though I’ve tried other mediums.” A first-generation, Mexican-American artist raised in the border town of Brownsville, Texas, Del Castillo produces self-portraits and portraits of her friends and family, her canvases depicting the landscape of her hometown, with its palm trees, resacas, and sunsets framed by tall clouds.
Growing up, Del Castillo and her family crossed the border often to visit family in Mexico. “I never really saw a difference between the two countries until I was older,” she says. “We always saw it as ‘going to the other side.’” Today she celebrates the similarities and differences between two cultures in her work, often by means of natural symbolism. The aloe plant, for example, “has healing powers in Mexican-American culture, so I use that to symbolize healing ourselves.” Del Castillo’s portraits often explore her own resiliency and that of her Brownsville community. “I’m intrigued by people’s personalities, how they present themselves, and what they do for the community,” she says.
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Viki Eagle began taking photographs of her Native American friends when she was an undergraduate at the University of Denver. “Being one of the very few Native people on campus, I wanted to tell our story from our perspective,” she says. A member of the Sičháŋǧu Lakȟóta tribe, Eagle (who is also half-Japanese) has dealt with racism firsthand. “When I was growing up in the early ’90s, people really believed that Native Americans didn’t exist,” she says, “or if we did exist, we were still living in teepees or wearing buckskin. Our history erases us.” After completing her series of images of her friends, Real Life Indian, Eagle decided to go even further toward dispelling Native stereotypes by photographing heavy metal bands on reservations. This series, Re(Mapping) a Rez Metal Sonic ReZistance, is now her year-long focus as the Denver Art Museum’s 2023 Native Arts Artist-in-Residence.
Eagle’s interest in heavy metal stems from its ability to push back—“in the most extreme way”—against whitewashed ideas of what Native music is. Her photographs span several genres—documentary, portrait, landscape, and still-life. Eagle would like for her images of musicians and their audiences to demonstrate heavy metal’s popularity on reservations, and in the process, open viewers’ minds to the diversity of contemporary Native life. “I hope that people take away the creativity,” she says. “As contemporary Native people, expressing ourselves, our message and our story is still within that music.”
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Painter and sculptor Loren Erdrich began mixing mediums on large canvases after a friend brought back vials of natural pigments from Morocco. “They did these crazy things on the paper that I was working with,” she says, such as swirling together and blooming into bursts of patterns. “When those ran out, I ended up finding dye that had similar characteristics—my work is very materials forward.” Erdrich now uses a combination of dye, powdered pigment mixed with water, and acrylic paint on canvas, letting the materials guide the final composition. “The dye is part of the fabric,” she says. “It soaks in and colors the actual fabric. I may occasionally have marks of other materials that sit on top of the canvas but really what you’re looking at is a large piece of fabric, the color of which has been changed.” Her most recent works are included in a solo exhibition, In a Certain Light, currently on display at Shrine Gallery in New York.
Erdrich’s images center on ethereal beings. These gauzy, amorphic figures are not portraits of anyone or anything in particular. “I’ve always been interested in that crossover point between inside and outside, what is seen and what can’t be seen,” she says. “That place where you have one foot in the world that you can see and one foot in the invisible world—it’s always been about giving light to everything else around us.” Erdrich says that when she creates these figures, she’s challenging the viewer to imagine what it would be like to live a life of unlimited existence, where dualities aren’t divided and opposites can appear together. “We live in this world that really wants these clear categories and borders,” she says. “But I’ve always seen the world as many things at once. How do I get everything? How do I talk about all of it that isn’t just the actual physical thing I see in front of me?”
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In 2015, Michael McGregor quit his corporate job and moved to Mexico City, where the vibrant hues of his new home inspired him to reach for his colored pencils. “I hadn’t drawn anything since I was a teenager,” he said. The city “changed my perspective completely. I woke up to the colors that were actually in the universe.” Four years later, he moved to Los Angeles and began creating bright acrylic-and-oil stick paintings of flowers, as well as interior scenes inspired by the still life paintings of the Dutch masters and the early 20th-century Fauvist movement. The canvases are semi-autobiographical. “I grew up in a flower store,” he says. “My mom and all of my sisters and I would work in the flower store together so all of my work naturally stemmed from that.”
McGregor’s series Private Party is currently on view at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles. A white piano features in six of the show’s 34 works—a reference to the one his roommate purchased during the pandemic and to several of McGregor’s favorite Matisse paintings, all of which depict a woman seated at a piano. For McGregor, the series is a meditation on the spoils of excess. “I’m always interested in ideas of glamour and elegance, and that sort of seesaw where elegance and glamour can become decadent or hedonistic or maybe a little bit disturbing,” he says. “How can you treat elegance in a way that doesn’t feel so refined?”
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