Cypress College Art Gallery SUR:Biennial 2019

J. SERGIO O’CADIZ MOCTEZUMA: EL ARTIST

by JANET OWEN DRIGGS

In 1967 J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma created the sculptural mural that juts out from the front of the Cypress College Complex building. Suggesting a rocky cliff or a pre-Colum- bian ruin, the red-brown Library Mural thrusts its way into the pale grey order of the campus, offering a witty challenge to its Brutalist style.

While the many-colored concrete relief appalled the then-Cypress College President, Daniel Walker, it has since been recognized as an important artwork and conserved. But what exactly is this expressive object? How was it made? And who was Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma?

Although many of his artworks have been defaced or destroyed in recent years – most recently in July 2019, in Raitt Street, Santa Ana – J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma made significant contributions to the cultural life art of Orange County for over fifty-years. In addition to exploring the unique process that he developed to make his concrete relief murals, this exhibition presents a selection of O’Cadiz Moctezuma’s paintings, drawings, public artworks, and graphic designs. Demonstrating the artist’s diverse, boundary- crossing creative life, these artworks also speak to the ways in which dominant culture can absorb and erase alternatives to its values and preferred aesthetics.

Through the late 1960s and early 1970s O’Cadiz Moctezuma used his innovative technique to make a number of important public pieces in concrete; including a mural for Santa Ana’s City Hall, a monumental fountain for Fountain Valley’s civic center, and Library Mural (1967), a structural sculptural mural that juts out from the front of the Cypress College Complex building.

Ever the innovator, O’Cadiz Moctezuma stepped into community-based practices and the burgeoning U.S. muralist movement in 1974, when he painted two expressions of the Chicano Movement: The MECHA mural at Santa Anna Community College, and a 625-ft long mural at Colonia Juarez in Fountain Valley. Generating acclaim and controversy, the murals of 1974 earned O’Cadiz Moctezuma the title of “Radical Artist.” As a result, although he continued to work abroad for corporate clients, and to exhibit his paintings and sculptures, the artist’s civic commissions in the U.S. dwindled.

After a series of professional blows that left many of his large-scale civic works damaged or destroyed, including the Colonia Juarez and Santa Ana City Hall murals, and the Fountain Valley fountain, Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma died at his studio home in Orange County in March 2002. He was survived by six children, three former wives, and nine grandchildren.

Following a period in which it seemed that the art world had forgotten him, interest in Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma has started to smolder again. Most recently, the Colonia Juarez Community Mural (1974-1976) was included in a traveling exhibition organized for the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative, and Cypress College completed an extensive review and conservation of Library Mural.

If you call him an architect, he will smile and wave his hand as though trying to brush aside an annoying fly. A more general term – designer perhaps? No, that won’t fit either. He’ll even frown a bit if you just call him an artist.1
- Warren J. Deacon

Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma moved to Orange County in 1962 looking for a place where
he could follow his artistic vision free of traditionalist restrictions, including the restriction of medium specificity. Initially it seemed he had found it, and through the 1960s and early 1970s he made a number of important public works that skipped lightly over traditional divisions between painting and sculpture, abstraction and figuration,
and surface and form. These included a concrete façade for Santa Ana’s City Hall, a monumental concrete fountain for Fountain Valley’s civic center, and Library Mural (1967) at Cypress College.

Suggesting a rocky cliff or a pre-Columbian ruin, the red-brown outcrop of Library Mural thrusts its way into the center of the College campus. Although O’Cadiz Moctezuma used the strict recipe and ingredients of Brutalism to make the artwork, he produced a cake that looks and tastes very different from the pale rectilinear structures that comprise the rest of Cypress’s Brutalist campus. Presenting a witty challenge to the corporate homogeneity of U.S. Brutalism, Library Mural is a monument to the happy coexistence of difference.

When his challenge to the status quo bled through from the aesthetic realm and into the political however, O’Cadiz Moctezuma experienced an increase of restrictions and a loss of opportunity. The pivotal year was 1974, when, influenced by Mexican muralism and its Mayan and Aztec precursors, O’Cadiz Moctezuma painted two community-based expressions of the Chicano Movement: The MECHA mural at Santa Anna Community College, and a 625-ft long mural at Colonia Juarez in Fountain Valley.

In keeping with his boundary-rejecting practice, O’Cadiz Moctezuma was somewhat uncomfortable with the restrictions implied by the label “Chicano artist.” Understanding himself as the embodiment of ethno-cultural tides that flowed from Pre-Columbian Mexico, Europe, and contemporary North America, the artist frequently used the motif of a galleon in full sail. Speaking to personal and historical transitions, the ship sails forth, moving forever between.

Generating acclaim and controversy, the murals of 1974 earned O’Cadiz Moctezuma the title of “Radical Artist.” As a result, although he continued to work abroad
for corporate clients, the artist’s civic commissions in the U.S. dwindled. His drawing and painting practice continued to flourish however, and his explorations of identity as a diverse, mutable, and even a fragile state were exhibited at both regular open studio events and prestigious public institutions. Ever inventive and curious, the artist continued to diversify throughout his life, with an excursion into filmmaking in 1992.

NOTES
1. Warren J. Deacon: Press Release for July 25, 1971 Opening event at Sergio O’Cadiz And Associates’ new studio gallery , 2668 Newport Blvd, Costa Mesa. (P. 6-60)

 

J. SERGIO O’CADIZ MOCTEZUMA: EL ARTIST

by GUSTAVO ARELLANO

In an Orange County long accustomed to treating its Mexicans with malice and scorn when it bothers to think about them at all, few cases are more infuriating than that of J. Sergio O’Cadiz Moctezuma.

Here is a talent, an artist as adept with a pen or paper as he was with paint or concrete. Who could take on municipal art projects or Chicano murals, and adjust his wokeness based on the commission without ever compromising his essence. Who could express himself through realism or abstraction out of Escher with the same ease.

In an Orange County that always loves its art to be as trite and nostalgic as possible
— think the Plein Air movement, Wyland’s ocean murals, orange-crate label art, or the nostalgic cuteness of Paul Frank and Shag — O’Cadiz’s catalogue makes them look like crayon-box Picassos. His work makes OC stare uncomfortably at what it never dreamed of when it came to its Mexicans: unapologetic. Proud. Talented. Successful. “My idea of America,” he once told the Los Angeles Times, “is the right to be as Mexican as I want.”

And for those sins, Orange County has long declared war on his legacy.

A fountain outside Fountain Valley’s City Hall turned into planters before getting demolished in the early 2000s. A 600-foot wall mural in the city’s Colonia Juarez barrio that tackled the Mexican American experience, that brought international acclaim that O’Cadiz, was left to fade away then torn down altogether and after residents dismissed it as an earthquake hazard. Concrete artwork on Santa Ana City Hall became blocked by an annex.

And earlier this month, as Cypress College put its final touches on the O’Cadiz retrospective this essay commemorates, one of his murals off Raitt Street in Santa Ana was completely whitewashed after an unknown artist began to restore it, outraged that the city had let the work’s once-vibrant city scenes degrade to chipped ghosts.

In one of the richest counties in the United States, it’s dangerous to be a talented Mexican, as O’Cadiz and his family still are finding out nearly 17 years after he passed away.But in la naranja, the times are a’changing. And the artist that still leads the way after all these years is O’Cadiz.

***

I’m a latecomer to admiring Sergio. I knew nothing about him until about 2008, when I did a slideshow about Orange County’s Chicano murals for my former publication.

In the photo accompanying the Raitt Street mural, I noted that there was no signature affixed to it, so terrible in shape it was even then. An anonymous commentator emailed me to note the mural was by O’Cadiz, and that it wasn’t the first time we had neglected one of his treasures.

Intrigued, I began to research his life. He was born in 1934 in Mexico City to an economist who enrolled his son at a Jesuit- run school to develop his burgeoning talent. After establishing himself as an architectural designer in Mexico’s capital, O’Cadiz migrated to Orange County in 1962 and was quickly recruited to work with legendary architect William Blurock, whose Brutalist-inspired buildings were beginning to sprout up across Orange County — and found their beauty through O’Cadiz.

He worked on office parks and schools alike, many which still stand: sculptures at Willard and Lathrop middle schools in Santa Ana, murals at Monroe and Fremont elementary schools in the city. With thick-framed
glasses, short hair, and a Van Dyke beard, O’Cadiz became an artistic sensation, able to navigate John Birch-era Orange County while maintaining his artistic independence. He was a true bohemian, someone as comfortable in the boardroom as he was on the streets. And because of that, his art in Orange County became ubiquitous.

In short, we once loved him.

But by the time I began to research him, only fans of Chicano art remembered O’Cadiz.
I scratched at his story from time to time over the years until I finally connected with his daughter and archivist, Maria del Pilar O’Cadiz and decided to do a full feature on her father.

I remember visiting Pilar’s home in Santa Ana, sitting with her for hours as she told the story of Sergio. From time to time, she’d get up and go to a well-kept room just outside the

main home, which served as the repository for hundreds of his works: sketchbooks and sculptures. Large frames and small. Landscapes, women, boats, and Mexico.

“It’s about time Orange County remembers my father,” Pilar told me for my story, which published in 2012. “After all, Orange County loved him before.”

We still don’t truly love O’Cadiz. But thanks to this exhibit and school, we now have a chance.

***

Outside this very art gallery stands O’Cadiz’s piece de resistance: Cypress College itself.

He was part of the original team that designed the campus in 1967. As part of his tasks, O’Cadiz created the gargantuan promontory that juts out of the Cypress College Complex building, one that dwarfs anyone who walks underneath it and looks like — depending

on your worldview — it’s emerging from
the earth to announce its existence, or is the remnant of a spear thrown by a vengeful God demanding we mere mortals acknowledge it.

It, in short, is a masterpiece — and too often taken for granted. Don’t worry: I’m as guilty of this as you are. Cypress College faculty have kindly invited me to lecture multiple times over the past 15 years. Any time I visited, I’d always look at the deceptively titled Library Mural (named as such because the building that O’Cadiz’s piece is part of used to be Cypress College’s original library) and marvel at how audacious it was. Wonder what all the squiggles and scratches represented.

Only until agreeing to write this essay did I realize O’Cadiz did it.

I always thought Library Mural looked in bad shape, and it could’ve been another sad case in O’Cadiz’s career, another beauty ignored to the point of having to be thrown to the dumpster. But leave it to Cypress College to do something the rest of Orange County hasn’t bothered to do with O’Cadiz: care.

In 2016, administrators and faculty began the careful task of not just restoring Library Mural, but also ensuring it would outlast us all. They set a template for caring for Orange County’s neglected Latino artists that other patrons and institutions should learn from.

I believe that Cypress College did the restoration because it was the right thing to do, but also because it sees a metaphor of itself in O’Cadiz: forgotten by the rest of Orange County, despite its talent, and just waiting for everyone else to love it.

In the meanwhile, Instagram the hell out of Library Mural and make its fame go viral. Let’s make it iconic not just to Cypress College, but also to the Southern California experience—because if LACMA’s Urban Light installation could achieve such fame, so can O’Cadiz’s ultimate gift, you know?

Gustavo Arellano is a features writer for the Los Angeles Times and the former publisher and editor of Orange County’s alternative weekly OC Weekly. He is the author of Orange County: A Personal History and Taco USA and he writes the column ¡Ask a Mexican!, which is syndicated nationally.

 

Hostile Terrain

Dr. Jason De León

A global pop-up installation and wall- map by anthropologist Jason De León, author of The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail, asked visitors to fill toe-tags with information about the 3,000+ people who have died trying to cross into the U.S. through the Sonoran Desert over the past 25 years, and whose bodies have been found.

The exhibition intends to raise awareness about the United States’ brutal immigration enforcement policy known as “Prevention Through Deterrence” that has and continues to claim the lives of thousands of people since the mid-1990’s. The pop-up installation Hostile Terrain at Cypress College is the third time the project has been installed. All three installations are precursors to Hostile Terrain 94 (HT94), a participatory art project sponsored and organized by the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP), a non-profit research-art- education-media collective, directed by anthropologist Jason De León.

The exhibition is composed of more than 3,200 handwritten toe tags that represent migrants who have died trying to cross the Sonoran Desert of Arizona between the mid-1990s and 2019. These tags are geolocated on a wall map of the desert showing the exact locations where remains were found. The installation will simultaneously take place at a large number of institutions, both nationally and globally in 2020.

Organized by the NOCCCD office of Diversity and Compliance and located in the Cypress College Theater Lobby. September 19 – November 1, 2019

 

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Jason De León is Professor of Anthropology and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles with his lab located in the Cotsen Institute of Archaeology. De León is Executive Director of the Undocumented Migration Project (UMP) inc., a 501(c)(3). The UMP is a long-term anthropological study of clandestine migration between Latin America and the United States that uses a combination of ethnographic, visual, archaeological, and forensic approaches to understand this violent social process. He has published numerous academic articles and his work with the UMP has been featured in a variety of popular media outlets. For more information on this research go here.

He is the author of the award-winning book “The Land of Open Graves: Living and Dying on the Migrant Trail” (featuring photos by Michael Wells). He is President of the Board of Directors for The Colibrí Center for Human Rights and on the Academic Board for the Institute for Field Research, a nonprofit organization operating over 42
field schools in 25 countries across the globe. Prior to joining the faculty at UCLA, Jason taught in the anthropology department at the University of Michigan between 2010 and 2019. He was a lecturer at the University of Washington between 2008 and 2010. He received his Ph.D. in anthropology from Penn State University in 2008 and earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology at UCLA in 2001. As an undergraduate at UCLA he gained his first experience conducting research in Mexico. His dissertation research focused on the development of early political economy and stone tool production among the ancient Olmec of Mesoamerica.

In addition to his scholarly pursuits, Jason is an active musician who played with the Long Beach based hardcore-punk-reggae band Youth in Asia in the mid to late 1990’s and the Americana band The Wilcox Hotel based out of State College, PA between 2005 and 2008. He is currently involved in various musical projects including periodic reunions with The Wilcox Hotel.