In this Episode of Art is Awesome, Host Emily Wilson spends time with Napa based, native Mexican artist Arleene Correa Valencia.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker with a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area.
Today, Emily chats with Napa-baased artist Arleene Correa Valencia...
About Artist Arleene Correa Valencia:
Arleene Correa Valencia is a multidisciplinary and community-oriented native Mexican artist living and working in Napa, CA. Correa Valencia investigates various ethical, political, and aesthetic strategies in her practice to address the effects of our current socio-political and ecological climate on undocumented communities in the U.S.
In 2020 Correa Valencia completed her MFA at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. She was featured in the Emmy award winning “Portraits of Napa Workers: Arleene Correa Valencia,” part of KQED Arts’ Represent series of artist profiles. She is a recipient of Deferred Action Childhood Arrivals and is one of four children originally from Arteaga, Michoacán, Mexico. Her family migrated to the United States in 1997 and made a home in California’s wine country, Napa Valley.
Visit Arleene's Website: CorreaValencia.com
Follow Arleene on Instagram: @ArleeneCorreaValencia
For more info on Arleene at the Catharine Clark Gallery CLICK HERE.
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About Podcast Host Emily Wilson:
Emily a writer in San Francisco, with work in outlets including Hyperallergic, Artforum, 48 Hills, the Daily Beast, California Magazine, Latino USA, and Women’s Media Center. She often writes about the arts. For years, she taught adults getting their high school diplomas at City College of San Francisco.
Follow Emily on Instagram: @PureEWil
Follow Art Is Awesome on Instagram: @ArtIsAwesome_Podcast
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CREDITS:
Art Is Awesome is Hosted, Created & Executive Produced by Emily Wilson.
Theme Music "Loopster" Courtesy of Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
The Podcast is Co-Produced, Developed & Edited by Charlene Goto of @GoToProductions.
For more info, visit Go-ToProductions.com
2023-10-24 - AIA - EP012 - Arleene Correa Valencia
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: [00:00:00] I remember coming home and saying, I'm going to be an artist. And my parents were just like, well, one, you don't have a social security, you don't have a driver's license, like humble yourself down. Our opportunities in this country are very limited.
Host Emily Wilson: That's artist Arlene Correa Valencia on her parents discouraging her from becoming an artist.
Welcome to Art is Awesome, the show where we talk with an artist or art worker. With a connection to the San Francisco Bay Area. I'm your host, Emily Wilson. As a writer in San Francisco covering the arts, I see so many hardworking artists doing interesting work here in the Bay Area. And I wanted people to know about them.
So I came up with Art is Awesome.
Arlene Correa [00:01:00] Valencia was born in Mexico and now lives in Napa. Much of her work reflects on migration, family separation, and visibility. Like Trina Robinson, a recent guest, Arlene is one of the artists featured in Bay Area Now at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Arlene is represented by the Catherine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, and she has a show there through November 4th featuring textiles, paintings.
The work was inspired by letters she wrote to her father when he went to the United States in 1996 to find work, and she and her brother and her pregnant mother stayed in Michoacán for a year without him. Arleene talked about how she started telling people she was undocumented to take away the power of the word, how she ended up at the California College of the Arts, how workers in the Napa vineyards need to be both visible and invisible, and how her separation from her dad inspired her art.[00:02:00]
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I'm really grateful to have this archive of letters because I think it really allowed me to understand the progression of how our migration happened and the emotions that were surfacing at the time of our family separation and our reunification. And so in a lot of the letters, you can see. Things like Hola Papi, like Hi Daddy, I love you so much.
I'm sending you lots of kisses and hugs. Please don't forget about me. I want to be with you.
Host Emily Wilson: That year-long period of separation influenced her life as well as her heart. Arleene says.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: My dad is my best friend and the love of my life and the love of my soul. And so this notion of insecurity has always been really present in my life, and it feels like this void that I've never been able to really solve.
And even though we're together now, and we live really close to each other, I [00:03:00] feel like my whole life has been... This anxious moment of fearing the separation and fearing that the separation would be repeated, right? And so I like to start at the letters because they are the foundation of my work.
Emily Wilson: At the beginning of the pandemic, Arleene began working with textiles, often deconstructing her father's clothing to make it into clothes for the children and adults in her pieces.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I've recreated portraits of my husband and my niece. In a way that I use reflective fabric and glow in the dark thread. And so if we were to shine a flashlight upon these portraits, the parent figure always attempts to protect the child from the visibility of the light and reflects that light back onto the viewer.
And if we turn off the lights entirely, the children glow in the dark, but the parent disappears. There's an act of sacrifice and separation that is very visible with the work, depending on the lighting that is used.
Host Emily Wilson:Arleene and her family live in Napa. She got the idea of [00:04:00] using reflective fabric in her work from being around workers in the vineyards.
At Catherine Clark, she stands in front of a large pink tapestry that shows children with their faces outlined in silhouette.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I've been doing a lot of research and documenting of undocumented people in agriculture since 2017. And when I've been out in the field, the one thing that really calls my attention is these reflective fabrics and these neon colors, right? Which are so specific to visibility, like the need to be visible. And then I also feel like there's this need to be invisible because of our status using that as inspiration. I've brought a lot of that fabric into my work and then in my larger textiles. I tend to also use a lot of glow in the dark threads and sometimes reflective fabrics and this pink work that we have in front of us.
There is a lack of parents and so it's a lot about the children that are in this waiting moment. Like me and the letters, they're children who are waiting to [00:05:00] be reunited with their parents.
Host Emily Wilson: Another work in the show, Children of the Sun, shows four figures in front of an Aztec calendar, painted by Arleene's dad.
The piece was inspired by a trip she and her siblings took to Mexico. Her father works as a house painter, and the figures in the piece are wearing clothing made of his old work uniforms. Her father grew up in a small town without access to art supplies, Arlene says. In the States, like lots of other people, He loved to watch Bob Ross on TV.
Bob Ross: Let's have a little evergreen tree. He lives right there. See, just make a line, take the corner brush, make a touch.
Host Emily Wilson: Her dad imitated him. But rather than trees, he often painted the stories of his ancestors.
Bob Ross: It's easier to do them fast than it is slow, though. There they go. Just sort of back and forth.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I grew up with a lot of traditional Aztec and Mexica paintings in our home where there were, [00:06:00] you know, corn gods and serpents and a lot of different elements of life and nature, the sun, the stars, the moon, things like that. To me, they’'re ways to connect back to our home country and my father's understanding of our cultural practices and where we come from. And again, very limited, but very grounded in, in love and this need to reconnect.
Host Emily Wilson: Art was her way of being close to her father and how they communicated, Arleene says.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: Art is really a language that is universal and has no roots in anything other than just wanting to be understood. And my father taught me that.
Host Emily Wilson: In spite of her parents' love of art, Arlene says they didn't want her to pursue it as a career. That was painful for her to hear.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I'd remember coming home and saying, I'm gonna be an artist, and my parents were just like, okay, well one, you don't have a social security, you don't have a driver's license. Like, like humble yourself down. Like our [00:07:00] opportunities in this country are very limited. And this was prior to daca. So before Obama gave us the opportunity to have some status. And I felt really down on myself because I felt that my parents were trying to protect me from the inevitable heartbreak of not being able to go to art school.
And so by them shooting me down, I felt that they were doing their best at making sure that the, the pain of not a lot, not having my dreams come true happened at home and not in a public space. And I'm sorry, I just feel so emotional talking about it. Because, you know, you want to protect your kids from the world. And if someone's gonna punch your kid in the face, I think you'd rather do it yourself than allow someone else to hurt them. And so that's what it felt like. It felt like they were saying no to me in my dreams because they didn't want someone else to say no to me. And I don't know what about me, I just said, absolutely not. If you don't believe in me, I'm going to believe in myself, and I'm going to do it.
Host Emily Wilson: At [00:08:00] 14, Arlene started working as a nanny. She went to the community college in Napa, and when she had taken every art class they offered, her teacher, Fain Hancock, a graduate of San Francisco's California College of the Arts, or CCA, encouraged her to go there.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I pulled her aside and I said, Fain, I have to tell you something. I'm undocumented and I'm not going to be able to do this and I don't want you to waste your time. And she said to me, I don't care. I don't care if you're undocumented. We're going to send you to art school.
Host Emily Wilson: Because of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Arlene became a dreamer, and CCA gave her a full scholarship.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I only recently gained status this year, and I'm now a green card holder. But prior to this year, I was illegal or undocumented, whatever language people use around that. When I was younger, it was really, really hard for me to... Come out and share that I was undocumented because I've been fearing this idea of being deported my entire [00:09:00] life.
And so it felt like sharing that was one of the most vulnerable things that I could do, but there was a point in my life when I was in living in New York, doing a residency where I realized that if I wasn't honest with other people, I wasn't being honest with myself. And there was a lot of internal work that had to be done in order to let go of that fear and let go of that insecurity and just accept myself for who I was.
And so I started saying out loud, like, hi, I'm Arleene. I'm undocumented or I'm illegal or whatever. And just started using that word so much that it removed everything. All the power that that word had over me started to be removed. And I feel that I healed a lot through that. And I wanted to do the same thing in my work.
Host Emily Wilson: Along with the show at Catherine Clark, Arlene is one of 30 artists included in the Bay Area Now show at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. She has an installation with benches and doors from a detention facility in Oregon, [00:10:00] along with several textiles. Recently, Arlene's work was also shown at the Armory, an international art fair in New York.
It's gratifying for Arlene to have her art getting attention.
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: It feels really special to know that I'm helping write our history in a non traditional way that is equally as valid and powerful for us. And I think a lot about the ways that I was taught at school about my own people and our history in Mexico and the way that our country is portrayed through text.
It's not that it's incorrect, it's just very biased. And I think that art allows us to see a different perspective and allows us to tell our own truths. And I'm really honored to be able to tell the truth of my family and my community in a way that looks back at that little girl that never went to a museum or an art gallery and says, you are invited to see yourself in this work. And you have an opportunity to understand this work without having had [00:11:00] that art knowledge or that art education.
Host Emily Wilson: This is the part of the show, three questions where I asked the artists, the same three questions to learn a little more about them. When did you know you were an artist? What's some work that made an impression on you? And what's the most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area?
Artist Arleene Correa Valencia: I first knew I was an artist when I was sitting on my bed in Mexico, missing my dad and wanting to be with my dad and knowing that I didn't know how to say that or how to share that.
I think that was it. You know, that was the moment where I thought. Well, man, if there's anything I have to communicate in this world it's this feeling that I love my dad.
Work that's made an impact on me, there's plenty of, right? But I think the biggest work that I can [00:12:00] think about is Fernando Botero, who is a Colombian artist who just recently passed.
When I was in high school, I remember studying his series on the Middle East where he depicts What has happened in the Middle East and the violence that has been inflicted on people, and it's very raw. It's large bodies bleeding and dogs biting people. I remember reading that he had gotten excluded out of a lot of countries.
Because they didn't want to face and confront the fact that this was happening or that there was someone to take responsibility for this act of violence. When I was really young, I just thought, wow, that guy, he's got, like in Spanish we say, tiene huevos, he's got some eggs, you know, he's got some balls.
That guy can paint something and not be afraid to paint the truth. All of his other work is just so beautiful and, um, focused on culture and family and, uh, Colombia and depicting day to day life and normal [00:13:00] people and all kinds of people. But it was that series that really impacted me because I felt like if he can paint the truth and he can share the truth and he's not afraid to share the truth, then why would I be afraid to share the truth, right? Like, I shouldn't be. I should paint my truth. There, there's a lot of power in sharing the truth. Even if it takes the world time to accept it and to embrace it and to take responsibility for it, I should do the same thing.
The most creatively inspiring place in the Bay Area. That's hard because I feel like there are obviously a lot of like art spaces that show other work are very fundamental to my practice and how I move through the world. And, you know, having access to other art spaces is so important, but for me, the most inspiring place is probably my parents' dining room. And it's because there's so much. Conversation and pain and love that happens around the dining [00:14:00] room. Um, so much fighting, so much arguing, so much like she's the favorite. No, he's the favorite. You didn't make me my favorite food. You know, like so much transitioning and honesty that happens around the dining room.
And obviously my work is so centered around family. And it always feels that when I'm at mom and dad's house. I take home something new with me, or I understand something differently about myself or about the world or how we live in this world. And that, you know, might not show up in the work for for years to come, but it's constantly in my mind and in my heart.
Host Emily Wilson: Thank you for listening to Art is Awesome and thanks to our guest, Arlene Correa Valencia. Her show, You Are Born Like This, You Are Born Brown, You Are Not Born White, is at San Francisco's Catherine Clark Gallery through November 4th. She is also one of 30 artists in the Bay Area Now Show [00:15:00] at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where she has an installation with benches and doors from an ICE detention center in Portland, along with textiles. Please subscribe and join us next time when we talk with artist Patrick Martinez, known for his mixed media landscape paintings, neon sign art, and his peachy folder series. He has a show, Ghostland, at the Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco, through January 7th.
Art is Awesome is a bi weekly podcast dropping every other Tuesday. It was created and hosted by me, Emily Wilson. It is produced and edited by Charlene Gotu of Gotu Productions. Our theme music is provided by Kevin MacLeod with Incompetech Music. Be sure to follow us on social media or visit our website.[00:16:00]
Till next time.