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La Vida Loca

Celebrate Latino art and culture during National Hispanic Heritage Month, today through October 15, 2002!

See our traveling exhibition Arte Latino: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum, on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, through September 22, 2002. These sixty-six paintings, sculptures, and photographs represent many different cultural traditions developed by mostly Spanish-speaking artists who have settled in America.

Mexican American Carlos Almaraz is described as a "painterly painter" whose works are rich in thick, sensuous pigment. In Homage to Still Life, Almaraz has combined still-life elements of bottles, wine goblets, and fruit with female models and sculpture atop a pedestal, evoking the traditional studio space of the artist. These are juxtaposed with Mexican masks, cars speeding on a freeway, and even a ballot box. Elsewhere in the frenetic scene a girl playing with a hoop runs toward a larger-than-life multicolored rabbit, while a man appears on a television screen, perhaps a newscaster reporting on the day's top stories. At lower right is the artist's self-portrait, drawn as a simple profile study. Almaraz sips a cup of coffee as he gazes calmly upon his creation and his world.

Pictured: Carlos Almaraz, 1941 Mexico–1989 USA, Homage to Still Life, 1986, oil, 72 x 108 1/4 in., Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase.