By Guillermina Zabala

Guillermina Zabala is a multidisciplinary artist and educator whose art examines the intersection between the individual and their social-political-cultural environment. Her works have been exhibited in museums and art galleries in Los Angeles, New York, Texas, Miami, and San Francisco; and internationally in Germany, Latin America and Spain. She is a second year student in the MA in Media Studies program at The New School.

 

For the past 13 years, The New York Foundation for the Arts has been offering a unique program dedicated to immigrant artists. Launched in NY in 2007 and expanded to Detroit, Newark, Oakland, and San Antonio in 2017, the Immigrant Art Mentoring program (IAP) provides one-on-one mentoring, professional training, and resources for immigrant artists. The program has three main components: first, it pairs emerging foreign-born and first-generation American artists with established artists in their discipline. For a period of three to five months, the mentors interact with their mentees guiding them to achieve specific career goals and providing them with access to art centers and resources. Second, the entire cohort of mentors and mentees gather and participate in professional development workshops and panel discussions with curators, gallery owners and museums representatives. Third, the IAP resource directory consists of over 400 participating artists from a wide range of countries who are all working in similar projects and art disciplines. 

In April 2018 I got selected to be a mentor in the first NYFA’s Immigrant Art Mentoring Program based in San Antonio. As a Latinx artist who has been practicing media arts for the past 20 years and had encountered many difficulties along the way, it was refreshing and exciting to know that there was a fully-funded program dedicated to guide and support immigrants from all backgrounds, languages, and ethnicities. As a mentor, my first task was to select my mentees from a list of applicants. NYFA recommended the mentors to look for connections based on art disciplines, themes, and specific ways in which the mentors feel they can guide and support the artists according to their needs and interests. Since my art discipline is media arts and my primary mediums are photography, video, and installation art, I naturally looked for artists who worked in those fields. In addition, as an immigrant from Argentina whose first language is Spanish, I looked for Spanish-speaking artists who might need assistance with the language. 

The selection was quite difficult to make, as there were many talented artists in the roster as well as artists who connected with my work and practice at different levels. In the end, I got paired with two amazing artists: Hayfer Brea, an immigrant artist from Venezuela and Jorge Villarreal, first generation Mexican-American from the Rio Grande Valley. 

During the first cohort meeting in late April, all participants shared their artistic experience and cultural background. It was at that gathering when I realized I was part of an extremely unique experience. I’ve been part of numerous programs for artists, including Creative Capital Professional Development program, NALAC* Leadership Program and CAELI,** but I’ve never been part of a program that connected the arts with mentoring within such a diverse set of cultural and artistic backgrounds. 

After several meetings with my mentees, we were able to set up a work plan and found several commonalities in our art practices. When I met with Brea for the first time I learned that he had only been in the U.S. for about a year and a half, so he wasn’t fluent in English and he was having a hard time navigating through artist calls and opportunities because of the language barrier. In addition, he needed help translating his biography, resume, and artist statements. With an extensive and quite accomplished artistic career in Venezuela where Brea exhibited in museums, galleries, and biennials, he found himself starting from zero in a city like San Antonio that, although mostly friendly to immigrants, could be intimidating at times; plus, he was dealing with a new language and culture. Having to build a new network of artists, curators, gallery owners and other supporters could be extremely overwhelming for someone who is still getting accustomed to a completely new lifestyle. As an immigrant, sometimes, you have to reinvent yourself to adjust to new places. In the article “Admitted: USA Exhibition Pairs Immigrant Artists With More Established Counterparts in SA,” I mentioned to the writer Nicholas Frank that “keeping one’s original culture, memories, habits, and traditions intact is important but, as an immigrant, while you feel you have to reinvent yourself you should also keep a balance and not change that much. You have to keep a lot of what you’re bringing and keep it in your art, because that’s what makes you unique.” Brea is indeed keeping his roots and bringing his cultural point of view into his new works made in the U.S. Back in Venezuela, Brea was exploring the symbolism of the horizon line in a country that had both the view of the sea and the mountains. Utilizing photography and drawing as his primary techniques, Brea expanded this view of the horizon line in his recent works by exploring the Texas landscape and its relationship with indigenous plants such as the cactus. 

With Jorge Villarreal, the relationship of mentor and mentee focused on his professional and artistic development as a photographer and the promotion of his portfolio throughout new networks. A first-generation Mexican American, Villarreal grew up around the Mexico/U.S. border studying and capturing both cultures through his camera lens. He also developed a personal connection with Cuba, a place he visited multiple times and learned how to appreciate their gente, unique ancestral cultura, and beautiful scenery. Villarreal’s series of Cuba’s paredes despintadas (jaded walls) struck me as a clever and symbolic representation of Cuba’s culture highlighting the many layers of changes and traditions that have passed through the island. 

My photography work is also conceptual, so I felt connected with both of my mentees’ creative process. We utilize the representational power of the image to tell stories that cross borders and expand horizons to meet in a place where cultural identities are being reframed and reinvented. What started as a mentor-mentee relationship soon transformed to a reciprocal learning experience where immigrant artists with different backgrounds and artistic experiences found common narratives and new meanings in our artworks.

As we were approaching the end of the mentorship program and at an informal gathering that took place at one of the mentors’ houses, we came up with the idea of organizing a multidisciplinary exhibit of works from both mentors and mentees. Thanks to the City of San Antonio, our proposal for the exhibit got selected to receive financial support and scheduled to be part of the Centro de Artes exhibitions. All participating artists were thrilled to learn that their artworks will be part of a major exhibit titled Admitted: USA, and the organizers at NYFA were excited to know that a program that was supposed to end after the 5-month mentorship was going to conclude, instead, with a multidisciplinary art exhibition at one of the major gallery spaces in San Antonio. 

The collaboration between mentor/mentee within a multidisciplinary creative process was an aspect of this program I did not focus on before we started planning this exhibit. As a mentor, producing new artworks with my mentees revealed a new facet in the reciprocal learning process. With my mentees Brea and Villarreal, we decided to focus on photography from our city, particularly artifacts, landscapes, buildings and spaces that were representational of our memories as immigrants. Organizing the images by a color scheme that started from blue and ended on saturated reds, greens and yellows, we created the photo installation Retomando Nostalgias with over 100 images. 

In her article for The Texas Observer, Robyn Ross encapsulates the meaning of this installation perfectly: “Zabala, Villarreal, and Brea were one of several mentor-mentee teams who collaborated on new work for the exhibition. Because all three use photography as a medium, they decided to create ‘Retomando Nostalgias.’ Villarreal contributed photos of the border wall between McAllen and Reynosa and of the mid-century Echo Hotel in Edinburg, TX. His image of a South Padre Island sign reading “Road Ends Ahead”—the sign, not to mention the road, is already consumed by sand dunes—reminds him of skipping high school to hang out at the beach. Zabala’s images include several of her own high school, as well as public memorials to four students from that school who were abducted and killed in 1976, during Argentina’s military dictatorship. Brea contributed views of the mountains in Caracas, the building where his grandparents live, and photos of eye-catching chairs he found in the street.

The installation’s title roughly translates as ‘Revisiting nostalgic memories,’ although Zabala describes ‘nostalgia’ as a memory that’s particularly heavy with emotion. ‘It’s a recollection that’s deep in your heart, and that’s also very common in immigrants,’ she says. ‘They will tell you they feel nostalgia for home—that feeling of emptiness, that you’re missing that part you left behind … I think that’s what we want to say: All these places are part of us, and we left them behind.’”

In retrospect, the impact of the NYFA’S IAP in San Antonio was extremely valuable because it opened multiple opportunities for all artists, mentors and mentees involved. Creating art and showcasing it as a collective transformed the IAP from a theory-based to a practical-creative based program. The exhibit Admitted: USA marked the perfect culmination to a 5-month professional development program and the beginning of an innovative new network of immigrant artists.

 

*National Association for Latino Arts and Cultures.

**Community Arts and Education Leadership Institute.