Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists Jaime Guerrero
Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists is a trio of solo exhibitions by Mexican-Californian craft pioneers curated by Emily Zaiden, Craft in America Center Director. This exhibition catalog focuses on the work of glass artist Jaime Guerrero.
Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists is a trio of solo exhibitions by Mexican-Californian craft pioneers curated by Emily Zaiden, Craft in America Center Director. This exhibition catalog focuses on the work of glass artist Jaime Guerrero.
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MANO-MADE:
NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT BY LATINO ARTISTS
JAIME GUERRERO
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE:
NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT BY LATINO ARTISTS
MANO-MADE:
NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT BY LATINO ARTISTS
JAIME GUERRERO
August 26 – October 7, 2017
Craft in America Center
Los Angeles, CA
The first in a trio of solo exhibitions by Mexican-Californian craft pioneers
Curated by Emily Zaiden
Broken Dreams installation
ISBN # 978-1-5323-5108-2
© 2017 Craft in America
Printed in Los Angeles, CA
Designed by Stacie Martinez
Printed by Typecraft, Inc. in Los Angeles, CA
This catalog was published in conjunction with the exhibition:
Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists
Craft in America Center
Los Angeles, CA
August 26, 2017 - January 20, 2018
Curated by Emily Zaiden
Craft in America Center
Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists is part of Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, a
far-reaching and ambitious exploration of Latin American and Latino art in dialogue with Los Angeles,
taking place from September 2017 through January 2018 at more than 70 cultural institutions across
Southern California. Pacific Standard Time is an initiative of the Getty. The presenting sponsor is Bank
of America.
CONTENTS
9 FOREWORD
10 ON MANO-MADE
13 BROKEN DREAMS: SCULPTING THE
RELICS OF MODERN CIVILIZATION
27 ARTIST STATEMENT
28 ARTIST BIO
29 EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
FOREWORD
Carol Sauvion | Executive Director | Craft in America
In preparation for Jaime Guerrero’s Mano-Made
exhibition at the Craft in America Center, part of
our partnership with the Pacific Standard Time:
LA/LA Initiative, I revisited the catalog we produced
in 2015 for the California Handmade exhibition,
which featured the work of over eighty established
and emerging California craft artists. The
exhibition was my first opportunity to see the
work of Jaime Guerrero: his monumental sculpture
Farm Worker.
When I first stood in front of Guerrero’s towering
Farm Worker, created in hot-sculpted blown glass,
I experienced awe at the power of the message
and appreciation of the artist’s ability to create
life-size sculptures in the challenging technique of
sculpted blown glass. The combination of beauty
and social commentary in Guerrero’s work proves
his mastery of this demanding technique and his
dedication to advocating for the underserved.
When Craft in America Center Director Emily Zaiden
decided to curate three one-person exhibitions
for our Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA partnership,
we both agreed that Jaime Guerrero should be
given an exhibition. Guerrero responded enthusiastically
to Zaiden’s invitation and chose to sculpt
an installation of life-size children and a glass
piñata − incorporating a visual metaphor for
children being held at the border. In his words,
Broken Dreams installation
“I’m working on a new body of work right now
that’s children running or congregating around a
piñata, which is normally seen as a celebration.
The pieces are referencing refugee children who
are trying to escape persecution or violence.
When you’re a little kid and you’re hitting a piñata,
you want what’s in that piñata because it’s hope.”
Jaime Guerrero will be featured in the NEIGHBORS
episode of the Craft in America documentary
series, which airs nationwide on PBS. We filmed
at the Corning Museum of Glass as Guerrero
created the figure of a small child for the exhibition.
Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and
Contemporary Glass at the museum, had these
thoughts about his clear glass sculptures: “What
makes Jaime Guerrero’s work unique is the way
that he’s using sculptural glass to talk about
issues such as race and identity and politics.
And, in particular, he is using the fragility and the
clarity of glass to talk about things that are often
concealed like the lives of immigrants and other
migrants coming over the border. We don’t often
see them, but in rendering them in clear glass, he
is allowing us to both see and not see them.”
My thanks go to Jaime Guerrero for his sensitive
translation of a societal reality into a glass
installation and to Emily Zaiden for her scholarly
work as curator of Mano-Made and writer of this
revelatory catalog. It is with great pride and
gratitude that I welcome Jaime Guerrero’s small
children and their piñata to the Craft in America
Center. Hopefully, the events surrounding the
exhibition will open dialogs and make a difference
for them.
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JAIME GUERRERO MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT JAIME GUERRERO MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
ON MANO-MADE
Emily Zaiden | Director & Curator | Craft in America Center
Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino
Artists is a trio of subsequent solo exhibitions
by three preeminent Mexican-Californian artists —
Jaime Guerrero, Gerardo Monterrubio and Consuelo
Jimenez Underwood. Each artist employs unprecedented
formal approaches to material and asserts
conceptual perspectives that have otherwise been
excluded from the canon of the contemporary art
world. With prowess, they all push the potential
of their chosen media to new heights of expression.
These three individual artists are unified by their
desire to communicate ideas and stories through
their works. For each artist, personal identity and
cultural heritage play a strong part in the narratives
that they touch upon in the art. Each uses
craft to articulate messages about American and
Chicano culture, personal experiences, Latino
and bicultural identity, and the ever-mutating sociopolitical
tensions that exist in California and the
United States as a whole. The significance of the
object as artifact and the role of the artist in
sculpting this legacy, is a fundamental pursuit
to all three.
In planning these three exhibitions, it was evident
from the outset that each artist would generate
powerful and timely elucidations, but their commentary
became even more pertinent over the
past year and a half as the global political climate
shifted. Each artist tackles the fiber of monumental
social struggles through their work, yet they scale
their approach to the intimacy of the gallery space.
The Craft in America Center, as an alternative art
space in the heart of Los Angeles, served as a
laboratory for their exploration and expression.
For Los Angeles native Guerrero, whose show is
the first in the series, reverence for the figurative
form, and the spiritual and metaphorical potential
of glass to represent a culture at any given time,
are pathways for investigation. Jaime is one of
the few and first artists in the world to hot sculpt
life-size figures in glass. For this installation of
his work, he created his most compositionally
ambitious group of figures yet. The inherent nature
of glass in its duality of strength, yet fragility,
mirrors the nature of the human body and gives
his work added impact.
He takes glass into untapped realms with his
remarkable ability to imbue his medium with
palpable emotion and spirit. Occasionally, the
end result is a lighthearted romp in street culture.
However, in recent work, as exemplified by this
installation, Guerrero wades deep into the
waters of postcolonialism to confront paradigms
of bicultural identity.
Monterrubio’s intense exploration of the ceramic
vessel and its trajectory of serving as a canvas
for transporting cultural narrative is a driving
theme in his work. Located between muralism
and street art, two realms of the art world that
have been linked with Chicano art, his approach
to imagery on porcelain taps into pan-global
traditions that span all of cultural history. Like
Guerrero, who is inventing relics for the
contemporary world and bringing to these the
voices of those who are normally muted or
silenced, Monterrubio’s brush records glimpses
of life in urban Latino culture with the same
desire to document modern society for the sake of
posterity.
Recently known for her series of large-scale
depictions of geographic borderlines, Underwood
instills new meaning into the cartological representation
of various border states and American
cities. Incorporating various fiber materials,
found objects, wire, and nails, she creates powerful
works of dynamic beauty that spark discussion
about the boundaries that define place and
identity. Consuelo’s art consistently reflects her
personal tricultural perspective and fundamental
belief in the interconnectedness of societies.
Beyond the identifiable cultural implications, she
is compelled to shed light on the detrimental
impact of the border wall on surrounding animal
and plant life. For Consuelo, our imprint on the
natural environment is the most significant
artifact that modern society will leave behind.
Working in glass, clay, and fiber, these three
pioneers are using traditional, age-old materials
in visionary ways to voice the conflicts and
uncertainty that are at the forefront of American
culture in this unpredictable time.
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JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
BROKEN DREAMS:
SCULPTING THE RELICS OF
MODERN CIVILIZATION
Emily Zaiden
“What I hope for people to take
away from my work is some kind
of a connection, an experience or
deeper interaction that is unspoken.”
Little Girl with Hands on Her Face, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
31”h x 11”w x 9”d
In an era in which power, morality, and
order are constantly in question, what
will be the relics that our society leaves
behind as records of this tumultuous
time? Manipulating the medium of glass
with pioneering dexterity and imbuing
it with unprecedented emotion, Jaime
Guerrero has given form to the crisis he
sees our nation facing with the ethics of
immigration policy. Around 2008, as the
economy spiraled downwards and the
fallout became clear, Guerrero sought
metaphysical refuge in ancient Mesoamerican
figurines and he began generating an
ongoing series of replicas in glass. These
studies in anatomy and expression have
guided his process for immortalizing
people from modern day California with
the dignity of those ancient beings.
Although frozen in time like his glass idols,
the children he has chosen to depict
in his installation, Broken Dreams, are not
gods and goddesses. They are the largely
invisible, anonymous, and overlooked
unaccompanied minors who are detained
at U.S. borders on a daily basis. His
installation serves to humanize these children
and to contrast their reality alongside that
of children who come to the U.S. under
more fortunate circumstances.
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JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
“Your connection, your counterpoint with an
audience, that moment of connection, whether
it’s metaphysical, conceptual, physical, intuitive,
abstract whatever − that connection with the
work is an intersecting experience for me.”
Guerrero's uncle, Juan Miguel Guerrero, competing in a charreada.
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Guerrero, who was born and raised in
Los Angeles, has been tied to his innercity
community of Boyle Heights as an
artist and teacher for his entire life. A first
generation native Angeleno, Guerrero’s
parents both came to Los Angeles from
Zacatecas, Mexico to put down roots in
the late 1960s. His mom grew up in
Momax and his dad is from Huanusco
and both of their families have long
lineages of champion charros (cowboys)
who have competed at the charreadas (a
type of Mexican rodeo). One of Jaime’s
favorite childhood memories was visiting
his grandparents in Zacatecas when he
was about six. While visiting, he rode
horses, went avocado picking and saw
his uncle win a rodeo. These distinct
experiences were different from life back
in urban East Los Angeles and resonated
with him. Tapping into the cowboy
grit in his DNA, Guerrero tackles his
large sculptural projects with cool,
collected resolve.
Jaime’s parents supported his interest in
art and his decision to study at California
College of the Arts in Oakland in the mid
1990s. Jaime received a scholarship to
study glass during a summer program
that opened doors of possibility. He walked
into the studio and fell in love at first
sight while watching the transformative
process of hot liquid being shaped into
solid form. He also realized that he was
15
more comfortable working directly in the
medium of glass rather than on paper.
Guerrero always follows his intuition, and
he knew then that he was going to pursue
glass for the rest of his life.
After finishing college in 1997, he honed
his technical abilities and produced
incalmo (the technique of constructing
an object by fusing two or more blown
glass elements) plates, bowls, and vases
for several galleries, including Gump’s in
San Francisco. The commercial success
of this decorative work allowed Guerrero
to develop his understanding of the
material and eye for design.
A workshop Guerrero took with Muranese
glass maestro Pino Signoretto led him
to study with Signoretto in Murano, and
also at Pilchuck Glass School Signoretto’s
pioneering methods for hot shaping large
figurative sculpture enthralled Guerrero
and they have remained immensely influential
on him. Signoretto taught Guerrero
to focus on the execution of detail as well
as the sum and proportion of the parts.
Guerrero ventured outside of his decorative
bread and butter into figurative sculpture
based on pop and urban street culture
starting around 2006. Guerrero’s Homies
commemorated a line of collectible figurines
by the same name that debuted in
the late 1990s and were popular with
kids in Southern California, and beyond.
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
Facetiously playing off of stereotypes
of Chicanos from East L.A., the
personalities of these droll plastic
caricatures were conveyed through
gesture, clothing, posture, and facial
expression. Guerrero translated the
Homies into glass along with all of
their idiosyncrasies, inflating them
from a few inches to over a foot in
height. In doing so, it initiated a new
pathway of figurative investigation
for him.
Around the same period, his pop
Luchadores series of Mexican wrestling
masks memorialized the vivid
disguises that transform pro wrestlers
into their competing personae. In the
vein of the work of Einar and Jamex
de la Torre, as described by curator
Tina Oldknow as “MexicaniDada,”
Guerrero continued his involvement
with the iconography of Chicano
contemporary culture. 1 Guerrero
recontextualizes these prop masks
as modern idolatry, elevating each
mask on its own pristine pedestal
and mounting them in the same
manner that museums display their
anthropological, ancient treasures.
The fan base surrounding luchadores
has as much adoration for the theatrical
sport as prior cultures had for
the battles of their own warriors
and gladiators.
Over the past ten years, Guerrero
has explored icons and heroes both
with humor and sincerity. Guerrero
engages the idea of artifact as record—
both those of antiquity and those that
serve as physical documents of
contemporary culture. He straddles
this continuum, seeking out both the
sacred and the profane as equally
indicative of who we are as a culture.
Homies (left to right): Lencho, Chuy & His Pit and Mario
Mascaras Installation
1
Oldknow, Tina,
'MexicaniDada’: The
de la Torres’ Fine Art of
Sacrifice, Einar & Jamex
de la Torre: Intersecting
Time and Place, Museum
of Glass: International
Center for Contemporary
Art, Tacoma, Washington,
2005, p. 8
Idolos (top left to
bottom right): Relic,
Olmec Head and
Female Seated Figure
Farm Worker
2
Addison, Laura M.,
Flux: Reflections on
Contemporary Glass,
New Mexico Museum
of Art, Santa Fe, 2008,
p. 22-41
He has formed links between idolatry of
ancient civilizations and the folklore and
legends of popular culture today. In part,
Guerrero excavates the significance of
the modern relic and in addition, how
glass comes into play as “artifactitude,” 2 a
term coined by curator Laura M. Addison
to characterize glass representations of
stone or ceramic archaeological treasures
as generated by artists including
luminary William Morris.
In his ongoing series of spiritual idols,
which he began around 2008, he replicates
serene statuettes, busts and
masks of the ancient American cultures.
He reincarnates them for this day and
age when we may need these reminders
of the flux and survival of human civilization
the most. Taking cues from Morris
and others who referenced worldwide
mythology for universal implications,
Guerrero reclaims the idolatry and history
of his own ancestral roots. These ancient
deities, iconic figures and mythical beings
take on renewed lives and power in the
hands of a postcolonial Chicano artist.
They also lead us to reconsider who the
enduring heroes and heroines that represent
this day and age may be.
In his more recent work, he has fully
committed himself to illuminating the heroic
bravery of those migrating to start new
lives in the U.S. His masterful Farm Worker
from 2014 was an incomparable achievement
of method and technique that lionizes
the anonymous migrant laborer in larger
than life scale. His looming figure, arms
raised in submission and with religious
overtones, speaks to those who are
criminalized for leaving their homes and
families to seek opportunities offered in
other places. Guerrero uses his work to
create dialogue about vilification and
incarceration of people of color and the
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prison industrial complex. The subject of
immigration is near and dear to Guerrero
and it is his focus in Broken Dreams.
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
In the case of his Broken Dreams installation,
his subjects are unaccompanied
children who risk their lives to make the
journey, fueled by their own fortitude.
By creating these large figures, he gives
these children permanence and a presence
that may outlast political waves of
propaganda and policy over time. They
come to escape violence, persecution
and repression, hoping to find better
lives. They are our modern day warriors.
Unlike his Idolos that resemble carved
stone or clay, his Broken Dreams children
are made of clear glass, or glass in its
purest form. Metaphorically rich with its
unaltered purity, Guerrero is fascinated
by colorless glass and the transparency
of the material– exploring ideas of
ethereality and the ghostlike qualities
of his figures.
GLASS CHILDREN image
to be shot soon
Clear glass can present a memory, a
rough sketch, or halo of an idea or image.
While nearly invisible, it can also be
more challenging to shape because it
is harder to see while it is being worked.
In its finished form, it can have a more
passive quality than other colored or
opaque materials. Guerrero notes that
the shadows it casts can sometimes seem
more real than the figures themselves. A
glass sculpture can almost disappear,
but the shadow is what spells out the
form. Shadows become what he calls
the “alter egos” of his sculptures.
These children, as emotive as Guerrero
has made their facial and bodily gestures
to be, are shells. Their clear, hollow
bodies leave room to be filled with the
viewer’s specific interpretation of who
Girl Reaching For Brother, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
35”h x 18 3/4”w x 19”d
18
15
JAIME GUERRERO
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MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
Piñata Boy, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
46”h x 16 1/2”w x 19”d
JAIME GUERRERO
these children might be. Glass has
been used to form vessels that contain
physical matter since the beginning of
culture. Herein, Guerrero uses glass
to contain concepts of identity, experience,
memory, and hardship.
The motivation to represent migrant
youth coincided with Guerrero becoming
a father and the shift in outlook
that came along with parenthood. The
fragility of his medium symbolically
heightens the tenuous circumstances
that children face and their sheer
vulnerability. These individual children
are divided by a barrier that separates
their distinct experiences. On one side
of the fence, a blindfolded boy bats at
a suspended glass piñata with colorful
streamers while three children experience
a very different reality. Those
three other children are detained behind
physical barriers like prisoners and
surrounded by shards of glass. These
crushed pieces represent how the
young migrants are similarly discarded
from society, as well as how they face
constant perils in their journey across
geography and circumstance.
“It’s important for artists to
talk about the things that
other people are and are
not talking about, to address
issues that are not being
addressed and really, we
maybe the moral markers in
that sense.”
The artist’s Broken Dreams piñata
component is a typical scene from
many Los Angeles households and a
ritual of childhood in Los Angeles. The
piñata is a now ubiquitous part of
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MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
birthday parties across Southern
California. It plays a strong symbolist
role in Guerrero’s installation, looming
outside of the realm of contact
for the detained children. It is the
pin the tail on the donkey of recent
generations. As a party game, it
involves what is essentially a semiviolent
act of giving each child a
chance to whack the piñata while
blindfolded so as to attain the prizes
contained within. No one knows
who will take that winning hit that
cracks the piñata open, and anyone
is a contender. Once it breaks open,
the mob frenzy begins and everyone
fends for himself or herself as the
kids amass as much candy or prizes
as possible. None of these children
are able to see what lies before
them. In each case, their eyes are
covered. However, the fate of the
children on one side of the arbitrary
dividing line will confront obstacles
that the child batting at the piñata
could not ever conceive.
In terms of process, his singular
technique of forming a life-size
figure while hot, from the inside and
outside, is unprecedented and
extremely challenging. With territory
conquered by only a few predecessors,
Jaime has boldly raised the
bar with the scale of his figurative
pieces. Few glass workshops
nationally are able to accommodate
work of this size, and even fewer
glass crew members are equipped
to execute the work. Guerrero
approaches the work in parts often
starting with the head, then the
arms, and shirt and finishing with
the pants and shoes. All of these
parts are put into kilns where they
are stored at the right heat until they
are attached hot and then placed
back into a kiln.
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
The weight and bulkiness of these
parts as they are joined is extremely
difficult to balance and manage at the
end of a blowpipe, which requires
exceptional skill and synergy with his
team. Usually, these take a team of six
to ten people for execution.
The coordinated timing of the team
and the steady, even heating of
the components are critical and must
be managed with precision. It is a
given that any glass artist must be
in sync with the team and they must
have good chemistry so that each
player knows what the other is doing.
In addition, Guerrero has to ensure
that the parts will fit together by each
piece being the perfect size and temperature
to slide into another.
“It’s very important for my work
to always be changing, always be
growing, always be improving.”
Balance and support are critical factors
to the engineering of his figures. Some
of the components are blown and
hollow while others are solid masses,
depending on how the piece must
balance. Often, shoes are solid which
helps to support and stabilize the
weight of the piece as it stands.
Signoretto’s wisdom, early on, has
guided Guerrero in conceiving and
executing the structural stability of
the figures.
The invention of new techniques goes
hand-in-hand with the creation of new
sculpting tools to generate the work
and its fine-tuned detailing. The spirit
of the original Studio Glass Movement
stemmed from experimentation, and
at times improvisation, and Guerrero
continues that tradition. Tools are
Little Girl with Hands on Her Face, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
31”h x 11”w x 9”d
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JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
invented and sourced to serve his
process. He has commissioned specialized
utensils and he is scrappy in adapting
unlikely everyday objects for these
applications. He has relied upon everything
from a fork to imprint curls of hair,
to a butter knife to add facial detail.
“Process is a huge part of why I create.
I think that process is as important as
the idea. In some cases, I think it’s
more important than the idea.”
Guerrero laments the lack of value placed
on skill in the making of things that has
swept the art world and our culture. He
has dedicated himself to advocating for
craft, first training and practicing to perfect
his technique over time and on a continually
evolving basis. Then, applying that
mastery and mentoring others whom he
guides to enter the field.
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Little Brother, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
33 1/2”h x 14 1/2”w x 14 1/2”d
25
In addition to his studio practice, Jaime
has devoted himself to teaching his craft
to younger artists in Watts, Boyle Heights,
and other underserved communities.
Guerrero has been an advocate for his
neighborhood community. He has worked
to open access for people of color to
work in glass, an expensive medium that
is relatively inaccessible to most. He has
founded two programs with free glass
blowing classes for underprivileged Los
Angeles youth of color. These programs
have given roughly 500 students a sense
of agency, the ability to explore their
potential and their voices, and shown them
that the world is larger and possibilities
exist beyond their surroundings. Prior to
starting his own teaching studio, Guerrero
led the glass program at Watts Labor
Community Action Committee. In 2015,
he started a crowdsourced studio where
local teens could learn to blow glass for
free. He has balanced his time between
mentorship and his creative practice.
Guerrero’s craft is fundamentally motivated
by a desire for social justice and
empowerment. As an artist, he echoes the
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
initial principals of the Arts and
Crafts Movement, which continued
to feed and characterize the Studio
Craft Movement and craft today.
Those original artists theorized a
creative approach for generating
lasting objects that had implications
for social reform. In Guerrero’s
hands, that philosophy of idealism
remains, along with the spirit of
transformation. Craft provides a
voice, particularly for the underprivileged,
the disenfranchised and
the forgotten. Not only has he chosen
to document contemporary social
conflict in his work, he is also leading
the charge of action by teaching
others to use their voices through
art, in the ultimate act of regeneration
and ideally, cultural change.
Detained children from
Broken Dreams installation
ARTIST STATEMENT
JAIME GUERRERO
Before I am an artist,
I am a craftsman.
My work is about intersecting experiences
and the rediscovery and
shaping of relics into new forms as a
way of self-questioning. Many things
can exist as relics. In my vocabulary,
relics can be ancient artifacts but
can also exist as metaphors for objects
in our memory. These memories exist
in a place and time, and the objects
associated to them are what I consider
intersecting experiences, which
come in many different forms and tap
into our subconscious in different
ways. My work seeks to connect to
an audience on this level. This connection
to someone else’s nostalgia
of objects in a place and time is
what intrigues me the most.
It is important for me as an artist to
create fine crafted glass sculptures
because it is exactly this interaction
with the material that solidifies and
unfolds the rediscovery process for
me. It is also significant that these
objects be recognizable as a tool for
association. Glass is the perfect
medium to accomplish these goals
because of its ethereal quality and
its nature of transparency.
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JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
ARTIST BIO
EXHIBITION CHECKLIST
BROKEN DREAMS INSTALLATION
1974 – Born in Los Angeles, CA
EDUCATION
2004 – Summer Program (Juried) with Master Pino
Signoretto and with Masters Checco Ongaro and
Benjamin Moore, Pilchuck Glass School. Seattle, WA
2003 – Summer Program (Juried) with Masters
Checco Ongaro and Benjamin Moore, Pilchuck Glass
School. Seattle, WA
1997 – Bachelor of Fine Arts, California College of
the Arts (CCA). Oakland, CA
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
2017 – Contemporary Relics: A Tribute to the Makers,
Skidmore Contemporary Art. Santa Monica, CA
2015 – California Handmade: State of the Arts, Sam
and Alfreda Maloof Foundation for Arts and Crafts.
Alta Loma, CA
GRANTS, SCHOLARSHIPS, AND
AWARD HIGHLIGHTS
2012 & 2006 – Saxe Fellowship Award for Outstanding
Artistic Achievement, Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI).
San Jose, CA
2004 – Scholarship Award, Pilchuck Glass School.
Seattle, WA
2003 – Corning Award Nominee, Nominated by Checco
Ongaro and Benjamin Moore, Pilchuck Glass School.
Seattle, WA
1993 – Scholarship Award, California College of the Arts
(CCA). Oakland, CA
Piñata Boy, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass, wood
46”h x 16 1/2”w x 19”d
Piñata, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass, paper
46”h (includes paper streamers) x 24”w x 7 1/2”d
Little Girl with Hands on Her Face, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
31”h x 11”w x 9”d
2014 – Galería Sin Fronteras, National Museum of
Mexican Art. Chicago, IL
2013 – Torpor, Snite Museum of Art, University of
Notre Dame. South Bend, IN
Little Brother, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
33 1/2”h x 14 1/2”w x 14 1/2”d
2012 – Playing with Fire, Oakland Museum of California.
Oakland, CA
2012 – 50 Years of Studio Glass, The Crucible.
Oakland, CA
2012 – Chicana/o Biennial, Movimiento de Arte y
Cultural Latino Americana (MACLA). San Jose, CA
Girl Reaching For Brother, 2017
Blown and hot sculpted glass
35”h x 18 3/4”w x 19”d
2008 – Blown Away, Museum of Craft and Folk Art.
San Francisco, CA
2008 – Modern Antiquities, Mexican Consulate.
San Francisco, CA
2006 – My Homies, Bay Area Glass Institute (BAGI).
San Jose, CA
2006 – Day of the Dead: Laughing Bones Weeping
Hearts, Oakland Museum. Oakland, CA
2006-2001 – Mastercraft, Gump's. San Francisco, CA
2002 – Substance of Choice, Galería de la Raza.
San Francisco, CA
Photography of exhibition artworks by Madison Metro
All other images courtesy of Jaime Guerrero
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