Jose Arenas, the director of Taller Arte del Nuevo Amanecer in Woodland, California, knew what he wanted from a young age. The son of migrants who worked in fields and canneries and traveled between Guadalajara and San Jose, Arenas learned from his mother’s various creative pursuits, everything from quilt making to embroidery.
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Arenas went on to study at the San Francisco Art Institute and get his MFA at UC-Davis, where he had as his mentor Malaquias Montoya, an iconic Bay Area Chicano artist.
“I love that I can engage with people on creative and collaborative projects,” notes Arenas, “but then I also love the solace of the studio and working things out in my own artistic space.”
The paintings and prints of Arenas — modern and traditional, quiet and loud, personal and global — call us to remember the commonplace objects that we ourselves cherish as “mementos” of our own pasts. Below, some more thoughts on his work, from Arenas himself.
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I use symbols that speak to the experience of loss and searching for place and belonging (Many Ways Home). I started collecting those things, those symbols, that made up such a rich part of my environment, decorative elements very distinctly Mexican (Casa Calli).
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Many Ways Home/2017 Casa Callit/2019
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I was using birds as symbols for north/south migration patterns, travel, nautical symbols — all in older work. Now they fit into a new narrative (Gone/Changes).
In my latest work, I use recognizable images as an anchor for the things that represent home and have personal meaning, those little mementos I carry with me that relate to my mom’s creative practice but also to a long precolonial tradition with indigenous connections as well. All Things Big and Small juxtaposes my childhood home in San Jose with a murmuration of symbols that rhythmically hover and float above. Like other works, it signals what place and home mean to me.
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Gone/Changes/2019 All Things Big and Small/2022
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Activist Vicky Hamlin, a retired tradeswoman,
shop steward, and painter, shines the light —
in her art and this column — on the lives of
working people and the world they live in.
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