Art on Campus - Alvaro Daniel Marquez
CAPS SMALL ART COLLECTION
ALVARO DANIEL MARQUEZ
Colonial Cartographies: Soil, Land, and Space (diptych), 2018
Alvaro Daniel Marquez
Serigraphy on Archival Inkjet Print (Edition of Two)
22 x 15 inches
Location: Administration Building, Board Room
Los Angeles: Redlining and Gentrification from 1939-2015, 2018
Alvaro Daniel Marquez
Photolithography/Serigraphy on Paper (Edition of Ten)
11 x 15 inches
Location: Business Education Building, First Floor
Tiburcio Vasquez, 2018
Alvaro Daniel Marquez
Three-Layer Reduction Linocut on Paper (Edition of Twelve)
15 x 22 inches
Location: Social Sciences Building, Third Floor
Álvaro D. Márquez’s explores the links between art and historical memory, using visual narratives and aesthetic forms as a decolonial gesture. His own cultural upbringing (amongst migrant farmers and working-class laborers in East Salinas, California) combined with his educational background (as a historian and cultural scholar) at institutions of prominence and privilege, have had a strong influence on his artistic practice. Márquez embraces printmaking (including its popular affiliation with the Chicano Civil Rights and Chicano Art Movements) as a liberating artistic tool, allowing the artist to create and experiment with multiple iterations, as well as to appropriate symbolic and systemic structures in order to challenge the cultural status quo or celebrate marginalized histories. In one print, he monumentalizes the colorful Mexican-American bandit, Tiburcio Vasquez, a significant figure in the history of California, but one few actually know today, other than through his namesake hideout, Vasquez Rocks, itself probably more well-known as a popular filming location for Hollywood movies. His Colonial Cartographies diptych highlights the historical uses of mapping as a means to control and dominate communities and in another cartographical-inspired piece, he uses layered marking to trace the interconnected histories of redlining and gentrification (both mechanisms of systemic racism) across a map of Los Angeles.
Álvaro D. Márquez is a visual artist and part-time professor of Chicana/o and Latina/o Studies at California State University, Los Angeles. Raised in East Salinas, California, a community of migrant farm and working-class laborers, his work explores questions of social, racial, and gender inequality by bridging “low brow” and “high art.” Especially inspired by comic books and visual forms of storytelling, his work engages questions about the self, history, and one’s place in it. He holds a B.A. in History from Brown University and an M.A. with emphasis in Visual Studies from the University of Southern California. In the Fall of 2017, Alvaro began an M.F.A. in Art, with emphasis in Printmaking, at California State University, Long Beach.
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