Of the pieces we saw in the Saint Mary’s Art Museum, there were a few that stood out to me in particular. “Amor de Primavera Regresa a Mi” (Spring Love Come Back to Me) by Ruth Buentello depicted a man holding an infant girl while standing outside in front of a fence. At the top left of the piece is a green, broken heart with the face of a woman in it. The imagery left me curious about what was being said and represented. Sam Coronado’s “Guerrilla” showed a striking image of a military woman posing behind a barbed wire fence in front of a green background. “Ida B Wells: Telling it Like it is!” by Vicki Meek had a person saying the words, “one had better die fighting injustice than die like a dog or a rat in a trap,” which holds so much applicability to many situations today. “Pastos Verdes y Cielos!! Azules” (Green Pastures and Blue Skies) stood out the most to me. Created by Miguel Aragón for the Series Project, the piece shows a man being patted down by a policeman. It was inspired by his life on the border of Texas and Mexico, and by the border lives of hundreds of victims of a drug war resulting from a power vacuum left by a prominent drug lord’s death in 1997. The rampant death and crime led to apathy and negligence from the area’s people.
…which prompted Aragon to create pleasant images through combinations of subtle colors and shapes.
Aragón creates a juxtaposition between the soothing imagery of the “green pastures” with the harsh reality of “blue skies” via placing the blue-uniformed police officer oppressing a man in front of the green colors and spirals in the background. The knowledge that this piece was created with the context of a drug war and the apathy it caused leads me to a new, emergent thought process about the motives behind the border police’s actions, and questioning what else drives their actions besides racism.
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