Listen to Tony Ortega Interview from KGNU (5 minutes)

By 2050, the U.S. Bureau of the Census projects that fifty-four percent of the population of the United States will consist of minorities–people from Africa, Asia . . . and Latin America.  These changes are pushing many people out of their comfort zone, leading to border conflicts with Mexico and a growing hostility with immigrant workers–especially  from Mexico.

“Food” sometimes include food for the spirit, and now until Labor Day, you can feed the spirit of community by taking an intimate journey into the world of immigrants, at the Boulder Museum for Contemporary Art, where they’re featuring an exhibit by Regis University art professor Tony Ortega.

Art galleries and museums around the world display works by Tony Ortega.  He’s known for colorful, energetic compositions and for images that celebrate manual laborers.  Fans say that the way that Ortega depicts a middle-aged woman doing laundry, a moustached man hammering a roof, and workers of all ages bent over as they harvest crops, allows viewers to enter into a human where we might be more inclined to get to know people who are normally invisible in our lives   And, get to know some special collaborations.  For instance, at this Boulder exhibit, Latino children from two Boulder Community groups helped Ortega create some large murals that are on display.  We spoke with Tony Ortega and the exhibit’s opening, where he told us about two large, children’s murals:

TONY ORTEGA says that he worked with two groups in Boulder that support children’s learning:  The I Have a Dream Foundation, and the Family Learning Center.  The 40 children were between 8 and 14, and they all took turns helping plan and paint the murals.  He says one boy, at the end of the week, asked if he had learned every art technique.  Tony told him, not yet, and the boy said, “Well, I want to learn all of those!”   Tony says that you can see that the kids get a sense of excitement and ownership.  And they will have real ownership, because after the exhibits finish going on tour, the murals will go to the two programs where the children meet.

Tony Ortega says the teaching children has helped his artwork evolve over the years.

TONY ORTEGA: says that teaching children over the years has helped his work evolve, in part because he’s bilingual and has gotten to know the parents of Spanish speaking children who are interested in art.  He says their stories resonated with his own childhood, growing up in New Mexico, explaining,  ”My mother was never married, and my grandmother helped raise me, and she did housekeeping.  My uncle was a carpenter, another uncle worked in a slaughter house.”  He says that he’s working today to show the lives of these people who he grew up with and cares about.

Tony Ortega’s work shares often intimate details such as the crispness of a field hand’s new blue jeans and favorite belt, or the tidy apron worn by a maid at a hotel.  Sometimes, his painting show a man’s concentration by the set of his mouth as he hammers nails, or the weary hunch of a housekeeper’s shoulders as she changes the linens on a bed.  But there’s one detail Tony Ortega almost never shows.  He never includes a person’s eyes. Ortega says that he leaves out the eyes because he wants the viewer to complete my images so they can put themselves in the situation.  And he says that he wants viewers to feel how much these hard-working members of society are often invisible.  He uses an example from Regis University, where he teaches art, to make his point:  ” A lot of our custodians are from Mexico, and a lot of people never look at their faces or see who they are, and I think I’m sort of playing off of that.”

And, at this exhibition, many images depict today’s conflicts around immigration.  For these reasons, the name of the exhibit plays off of the phrase Mi Casa es Su Casa.  That translates to mean, My House is Your House.  Ortega’s show at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, is called, Mi Frontera es Su Frontera.  That means, My Border is Your Border. Tony Ortega’s show runs until Sept. 5, 2010.