A New Dawn at the Laredo Center for the Arts after a Recent Shakeup

In the final days of 2023, downtown Laredo was frantic with paisanos en route to and from Mexico, buying armfuls of a variety of gifts: Dora the Explorer backpacks, textiles, perfumes, y fajas colombianas para cruzar por las aduanas. The mass of shoppers swirled by the invisible hand of global capitalism around the calm eye of the storm that took up the full city block inhabited by the Laredo Center for the Arts (LCA). As you walk in and shut the door behind you, the city’s volume quickly dials down to zero, as if you’ve been sucked into a vacuum, leaving only the serene quiet of a gallery.

The installations throughout the large space were a dreamlike microcosm of the world outside, as visitors immediately saw two life-sized model car installations by Keith Allyn Spencer, painted with soft aerosol primary colors on polytab over a wood base; it felt akin to walking into a Sims game. Towards the back of the exhibit, visitors saw symbols of consumerism with installations made of recycled bottles built into columns by Roberto Jackson Harrington, a large, suspended multimedia quilt by Mariah Ann Johnson, and a short parody commercial video by Michael Anthony Garcia, all emphasizing the role of consumerism during its busiest season of the year. 

The exhibit was the latest by Los Outsiders, the Austin-based curatorial collective of Hector Hernandez, Michael Anthony Garcia, Jaime Salvador Castillo, and Roberto Jackson Harrington. Formed in 2007 when the group met at an exhibit at the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Los Outsiders committed to showcasing the work of underrepresented voices in the predominantly white and affluent capital city. The exhibit’s title, Chai’n Brai Laika Daimon, was a nod to one of these voices: the unique yet much-derided language of the South Texas border where Spanish and English seamlessly tag-team through everyday conversation. 

Wrapping up 2023 and kicking off 2024, Chai’n Brai Laika Daimon was a symbol of the LCA’s new direction towards a more contemporary and multifaceted experience. With bold installations, performance art, experimental videos, interactive workshops, and even augmented reality, the exhibition offered an experience unlike many before it. 

The LCA’s new direction has its roots in the pandemic years when board members like Melissa Amici-Haynes and Pedro Morales visited other galleries like Presa House in San Antonio for inspiration. That reflective period gave birth to the LCA’s Art Acquisition Project, which invested in bringing long-lost Laredo artists to exhibit back home and purchasing their art for the LCA collection. Most notably, the LCA bought Blue Bato von Sunglasses by Chicano icon Cesar Martinez, whose work was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

The Art Acquisition Project kicked off in the fall of 2021 with Obsolescence, an exhibit by Laredo artist Jorge Javier Lopez. Since that time, the LCA has invested in consistent large exhibits that rotate quarterly, in addition to smaller shows on the second mezzanine level that houses the LCA’s growing permanent collection of local artists’ work. This approach is geared towards securing new sources of funding through grants from organizations like the Mellon Foundation, with the ultimate goal of establishing Laredo’s first contemporary art museum. 

LCA’s investments in regular comprehensive exhibits have occasionally undercut its longtime reliance on rentals to outside groups. This resulted in differences of opinion as to how to move the organization forward with a cash-strapped budget, which ultimately led to dramatic changes to the board and the LCA’s leadership and staff in late 2023, following Eric Avery’s exhibition Art as Medicine. The show included what some might consider provocative sexual imagery, like large nipple installations that popped out of the walls. According to longtime members of the LCA, this would have been deemed inappropriate for more conservative leadership within the LCA’s past, and helped foster a new approach as to how the center works with artists, an approach that former executive director Rosie Santos strongly advocated for. 

While a reconstituted LCA staff works overtime to keep the organization afloat, one unmistakable change is a more artist-heavy board. Rasquache artist Gil Rocha recently assumed the role of Interim President, complemented by an all-artist staff that gives visitors a sense of the new blood as they enter the space. The staff includes Interim Executive Director Bruno Rendon, who enthusiastically gives visitors a personalized tour of the space and the various new initiatives that are taking the LCA beyond a mere gallery space. 

“When these changes happened with the Center, there was a lot of uncertainty,” said Rendon, “but the only certainty that I knew was that we need to continue to have people coming to the center. The show must go on.”

One of Rendon’s most recent initiatives is Art Couch, a side exhibit that allows visitors to divert from the main exhibits, take a seat, and reflect on local artists. In contrast to the main exhibits that typically highlight more established artists, Art Couch often features artists who have never exhibited before. The project began in August of 2023 with photographer Gabriel Velasco, a member of the Laredo Film Society, which is housed in one of the LCA’s suites. Art Couch has since rotated new artists monthly. A recent installation featured the cross-border photography of Pepe Garcia, which was on view through the end of March. 

Rendon also runs the Community Art Gallery, which recently showed works from a watercolor workshop by Los Outsiders that was inspired by the work of Mariah Anne Johnson. “The workshop we did with Los Outsiders was a hit,” said Melissa Amici-Haynes. “We had to schedule another workshop because of the demand.”

That high community demand was reflected at the show’s opening, where Los Outsiders’ Hernandez was initially concerned about how one of the performances would be received. “We had a performance by Julia Wallace from Houston. It was going to involve a Ouija board and get the audience involved. I was like, ‘I don’t know if Laredo is ready for that.’ But we asked, and Gil said, ‘You know something, sometimes we just gotta go and see what happens.’ It had a great response, and everybody thought it was really interesting because she involved the audience. And that was just a way to bring them and make them feel that this exhibition and art is for you,” Hernandez said. 

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At a recent art walk at the Canopy Complex in Austin, I was struck by how often I ran into signs of my hometown. Walking into Ivester Contemporary, my eyes quickly met the unmistakable animated works of Josias Figueirido, who had just exhibited with Julio Obscura at the LCA for its fall quarterly exhibit, Dreaming at the Border, which incorporated interactive augmented reality with a virtual reality headset and a cellphone app that visitors could use to explore hidden realms behind the exhibit. A large painting by Jasmine Zelaya stood tall to the left and was part of the same series of abstract female faces that looked at you at the Los Outsiders exhibit. As we discussed Laredo and its artists, owner Kevin Ivester mentioned his gallery’s display of work by Juan Dios de Mora, a Laredo printmaker who has previously exhibited at the LCA. 

Laredo has long bred artistic talent that has radiated to the outside world, as shown by the far-flung work of iconic Laredo artists like Cesar Martinez and Amado Peña. As a native Laredoan, I can say with certainty that we are often conditioned to feel “unworthy” and marginalized because we live in what some might consider an inferior place that’s “in-between” and perpetually in the shadows of bigger city centers like San Antonio and Austin, and the even larger metropolis of Monterrey, Mexico only a few hours south. We have often relied on these places for a sense of culture and identity, but for the first time, it seems like our light is reflecting back as outside curators and artists give the city a closer look. The LCA’s recent exhibits show that Laredo is a creative force unto its own, with its artists imagining new and different realms that break free from the dominant border story defined by refugees in despair. 

The LCA’s current two-part exhibition featuring Cruz and Olivia Ortiz embodies this more complex and nuanced view of the border. Cruz rejects the dominant idea of a “border,” as shown by his social media description of his festive oil painting El corrido de cuando when we partied in Laredo: “Not as the line between masses but the gap as a cosmic center. Rejecting la frontera as a peripheral existence and announcing fronterizmo as a series of mega-epicenteres, como fluid-filled pulsating muddy earthen vertebrae sprouting with plantas and river animalitos.”

In the upstairs mezzanine, Olivia’s exhibit Cosmic Lines; From There to Here further transcends the constraints of a physical border. Her abstract paintings focus more on emotional and personal borders, particularly those that constrain women into traditional societal roles. Her large abstract oil painting The Center of Attraction, which radiates pastels and charcoals that she describes as a “lyrical dance on canvas,” is an allusion to Octavio Paz’s essay “Máscaras Mexicanas,” which critiques how Mexican women are placed in the difficult position of serving as both pillars of society charged with preserving the culture, but also as passive sexual objects. 

In line with the LCA’s new programming, Cruz and Olivia contributed their own workshops and performances. On March 23, Cruz collaborated with the No Border Wall Coalition on a printmaking workshop; Olivia held a lyrical dance performance against the backdrop of her paintings. 

The interest of outside curators and artists comes at a critical and exciting time for Laredo, allowing the thriving grassroots artistic movement here to benefit from a more inclusive curatorial approach from outside. According to Los Outsiders’ Hernandez, this emerging symbiosis between forces within and without would not be possible without the time and investment from organizations like the LCA. Hernandez notes that the LCA, spearheaded by Gil Rocha, was instrumental in putting the 12-artist exhibit together over a yearlong period. In contrast to past approaches where there was limited support for outside artists, the LCA helped with a variety of logistical issues, including shipping and installation, as well as working with its longtime sponsor La Posada Hotel to house visiting artists. 

In January, Los Outsiders pitched an idea to rent a large van to take a group of collectors and curators from Central Texas down to Laredo. The LCA was fully on board. 

“That’s another example of the LCA really stepping up,” Hernandez said. 

Cruz and Olivia echoed similar thoughts about their experience with the ongoing exhibit. One of the nicest touches coordinated by the LCA was the live mariachi band on the exhibits’ opening night, which turned Cruz’s festive works into living corridos. 

With 2024 full of excitement and uncertainty, the LCA will spend another year forging its identity as a unique artistic space that is not quite a museum, not quite a gallery, and not quite an event center. Instead, it is more like an blank canvas.

 

Cruz Ortiz and Olivia Ortiz’s exhibitions are on view at the Laredo Center for the Arts through May 3, 2024.