People say we should be the change we want to see in the world, but rarely do those people take any kind of action themselves. Erin Salazar is San Jose’s artistic fulfillment of that sentiment. The artist, muralist, and seamstress is on a quest, advocating for large, public artworks in San Jose, with a particular emphasis on the rights of artists to be paid professional wages for their work. So far it’s been a success: with the help of a Knight Cities Challenge grant and a grant from San Jose Made, Salazar has created the Exhibition District, a group with an end goal of transforming over 40,000 feet of blank walls into original works of art. A graduate of San Jose State, Salazar is also an artist and she still creates, but she’s found almost a higher calling to beautify the city while simultaneously advocating for the rights of local artists.
“As of now, the murals that Exhibition District has done are kind of organized with one artist and a bunch of assistants, but we are working to be more inclusive in our selections. We also want to make sure that we are curating in a way that every mural is an extension of the artist’s portfolio, instead of forcing an artist to fit a certain mold. When it comes down to it, the goal of the Exhibition District project really is a collective want to make San Jose, and the whole area for that matter, look as beautiful on the outside as I feel it does on the inside.”
The sum of our yesterdays and the pull of our tomorrows shapes us today. Andre Hart is no different. The rural, golden east foothills, the house his grandfather built with his own hands and his wild Bob Dylan hair are not just where Andre has come from, they are the influences that shape him and his work today. Relatively new to the San Jose art scene, Andre, who has been drawing and painting since he was three, is primarily self-taught. Though he tried art school, much of his instruction has come from an unnamed early mentor and his family friendship with San Jose artist, teacher and gallery owner Al Preciado.
“I’m not a painter. I am an artist. It has nothing to do with paint or color; it is something you are.”
Andrew Hart
A little over a year ago, in the shadow of his grandmother’s passing, Andre’s grandfather gave him a nudge to move forward with his art. He encouraged Andre—not in an over-handed, “do something with your life, kid” approach, but with the blessings of an experienced man of a quiet generation gently sharing the potential he saw in his daughter’s son.
The result, among others, was a self-portrait.
Andre Hart: I see a part of my work as ‘paraphrasing’ or taking someone else’s ideas and going against them, kind of like how folk music has done—taking a theme and exploring it in new ways. Taking an idea and ‘twisting’ it a bit, that’s kind of how I work.
So, I was reading a newspaper article. I ended up wanting to do something different where I wasn’t focusing on faces, which I do a lot of, and I still ended up with a face in there, but it’s not my traditional face. I don’t have a lot of nudes, either, actually. I just wanted to do something different. At the time, I was listening to an old blues song by Booker White called “Fixing to Die,” and there is a line in it that says, “I know I was born to die, but I hate to leave my children crying.” I was listening to that song and thinking about our society. That one just came at a time when I was really irritated with everything that was going on all around me. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean an end-of-the-world kind of thing. I guess there were ideas about how I was very frustrated with our government and the way that there’s a left and a right and how those are our only choices when really that’s not a choice. That’s no choice. Two sides. It’s Republican or Democrat. That’s not a choice at all. So that’s what that came out of. Why was I born into this free country that’s not even free kind of a thing?
This is different from my other work, and when somebody who hasn’t seen it before sees it, they are turned around and completely terrified by it. It almost seems so foreign. That’s why the hand ‑‑ it’s not her arm, obviously. It’s very contorted, and there are six fingers on the hand. Everybody always misses it, too, because the hand looks so realistic. It’s elongated, it’s like she has two forearms. I made it that way because I think that the corruption in this government and in this society, and I’d say it’s in the world, is just so subtle that you’re distracted by so many things that you just miss the obvious.
The colors with that came from… I’m not an environmentalist in any way, really, I just wanted the whole picture to look like pollution. Not for the environment… pollution of our society.
