September 1 – September 30, 2019
Curated by Chelis López
Carlos Cartagena began his Silhouettes project in 2004. Recently, he visited Tijuana twice and worked with the children who are waiting to get into the United States. With them, he created a silhouette of a girl in dedication to Jakelin R. Caal, a seven-year-old Guatemalan girl who died on December 8, 2018, in El Paso, Texas, in the custody of U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Cartagena went to the U.S.-Mexico border to look for her in the other kids’ eyes, in their stories and experiences in the Caravans stagnated in Tijuana. He introduced himself to children who wanted to participate and told them that many years ago, he had also rode La Bestia—a freight train where tens of migrants climb the cargo railway carriages to advance their journey—and that finally, he arrived in Tijuana. It was there that the need to tell his story was born.
In a very quick way, he explained to them about his project Silhouettes for which he collects personal stories, documents, photographs, letters and everything on paper that could tell the experience of each person as a migrant. He talked with the children about missing grandparents, pets, and friends, and immediately they started to work together, assuring them that the children can tell their stories through art. Cartagena also promised that people would read them.
Installed at Red Poppy Art House are two silhouettes dedicated to Caal and the children held in the prisons at the border. These silhouettes—made of plywood and displaying the journey of migrant people—have been exhibited in several cities in the U.S. and El Museo de la Ciudad de México.
Silhouettes is the urgency to tell our experience as migrants. As Cartagena states, “some of us have had the opportunity to tell our stories, but others are not so fortunate and have left the world in silence with their blank page.”
Family Art: Saturday, September 7 @ 1:30pm
Opening Reception: Saturday, September 21 @ 7:00pm
Carlos Cartagena was born in El Salvador, and the formative years of his youth were in the 1980s when his country was beginning to bleed incurably from the wounds of war. A restless desire to make art was always with him, but initially he opted to undertake a more practical career: studying business administration at the National School of Commerce.
Cartagena was always in direct contact with painting and artists since for generations his family had been in the framing business. This, as well as the socio-political condition of his country, induced him, against all odds, to abandon his academic career and take up art, not only as a profession but also as an alternative form of resistance to the oppression of the regime in those years.
In November of 1989, Cartagena came to the United States and started to work with new techniques. First, he worked with CODICES, a group of artists working in support of Salvadoran culture, and then, for five years, was part of a group of artists at the KALA Art Institute in Berkeley. There he learned various techniques of etching and printmaking.
Today he is working independently through painting, printmaking, installations, and mixed media. In 2009, Cartagena founded a cultural project in his art studio, No Right Turn Studio. He has had the opportunity to exhibit his work in group shows with well-known artists such as Francisco Toledo, Claudia Bernardi, Rupert García, Enrique Chagoya, Nathan Oliveira. Since 1993, Cartagena’s work—in addition to being shown at numerous venues in the Bay Area—has been exhibited in El Salvador, Mexico, Japan, Cuba, and throughout the United States.
Chelis López is an award-winning Mexican journalist who has lived in San Francisco since 1996. For almost 10 years, she hosted the national radio show Línea Abierta at Radio Bilingüe, the National Latino Public Radio Network where she interviewed and produced diverse stories, including the live broadcast of the Smithsonian Folklife Festival, an annual celebration of communities and cultures in the United States and around the world presented annually in Washington, D.C. López is the host and producer of two Spanish-language shows on KPOO 89.5FM in San Francisco, Pájaro Latinoamericano and Andanzas, where she explores and offers news, comments, and interviews with newsmakers and artists throughout Latin America. She is also the San Francisco correspondent for Rompeviento TV in Mexico, as well as hosts locally at Marin TV.