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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. โI didnโt get it at first, but it made me want to practice,โ she says. โThe techniques that Iโve developed nowโI always go back to oil painting, even though Iโve tried other mediums.โ 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. โI never really saw a difference between the two countries until I was older,โ she says. โWe always saw it as โgoing to the other side.โโ Today she celebrates the similarities and differences between two cultures in her work, often by means of natural symbolism. The aloe plant, for example, โhas healing powers in Mexican-American culture, so I use that to symbolize healing ourselves.โ Del Castilloโs portraits often explore her own resiliency and that of her Brownsville community. โIโm intrigued by peopleโs personalities, how they present themselves, and what they do for the community,โ 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. โBeing one of the very few Native people on campus, I wanted to tell our story from our perspective,โ she says. A member of the Siฤhรกลวงu Lakศรณta tribe, Eagle (who is also half-Japanese) has dealt with racism firsthand. โWhen I was growing up in the early โ90s, people really believed that Native Americans didnโt exist,โ she says, โor if we did exist, we were still living in teepees or wearing buckskin. Our history erases us.โ 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 Museumโs 2023 Native Arts Artist-in-Residence.
Eagleโs interest in heavy metal stems from its ability to push backโโin the most extreme wayโโagainst whitewashed ideas of what Native music is. Her photographs span several genresโdocumentary, portrait, landscape, and still-life. Eagle would like for her images of musicians and their audiences to demonstrate heavy metalโs popularity on reservations, and in the process, open viewersโ minds to the diversity of contemporary Native life. โI hope that people take away the creativity,โ she says. โAs contemporary Native people, expressing ourselves, our message and our story is still within that music.โ
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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. โThey did these crazy things on the paper that I was working with,โ she says, such as swirling together and blooming into bursts of patterns. โWhen those ran out, I ended up finding dye that had similar characteristicsโmy work is very materials forward.โ Erdrich now uses a combination of dye, powdered pigment mixed with water, and acrylic paint on canvas, letting the materials guide the final composition. โThe dye is part of the fabric,โ she says. โIt 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 youโre looking at is a large piece of fabric, the color of which has been changed.โ Her most recent works are included in a solo exhibition, In a Certain Light, currently on display at Shrine Gallery in New York.
Erdrichโs images center on ethereal beings. These gauzy, amorphic figures are not portraits of anyone or anything in particular. โIโve always been interested in that crossover point between inside and outside, what is seen and what canโt be seen,โ she says. โThat place where you have one foot in the world that you can see and one foot in the invisible worldโitโs always been about giving light to everything else around us.โ Erdrich says that when she creates these figures, sheโs challenging the viewer to imagine what it would be like to live a life of unlimited existence, where dualities arenโt divided and opposites can appear together. โWe live in this world that really wants these clear categories and borders,โ she says. โBut Iโve always seen the world as many things at once. How do I get everything? How do I talk about all of it that isnโt just the actual physical thing I see in front of me?โ
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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. โI hadnโt drawn anything since I was a teenager,โ he said. The city โchanged my perspective completely. I woke up to the colors that were actually in the universe.โ 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. โI grew up in a flower store,โ he says. โMy mom and all of my sisters and I would work in the flower store together so all of my work naturally stemmed from that.โ
McGregorโs series Private Party is currently on view at the Hashimoto Contemporary Gallery in Los Angeles. A white piano features in six of the showโs 34 worksโa reference to the one his roommate purchased during the pandemic and to several of McGregorโs 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. โIโm 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,โ he says. โHow can you treat elegance in a way that doesnโt feel so refined?โ
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