Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label painting. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 01, 2025

Directions to where you and I belong | arnoldo colibrí




arnoldo garcía: abuelito in blue
(9"x16 'on fat paper, June 2025

Go south

To winter from the borders

Go north to flee to freedom

Go east to meet the grandfather of all grandfathers

Go west, sleep, to rest, to be safe, among the only humans who make life as part of their life

Go to the center to place your head on the pillow made of dirt and the bones of our ancestors

Go up into the stars and constellations

Go down into the DNA of the human soul

If you are human

If you are life

You are a nomad

You are movement to keep the natural world alive

You are where you belong.

 

January 8, 2025

Wednesday, August 26, 2015

We are all picassos

We are all Picassos.
Todas y todos somos picassos.
My DNA is digital
my besos are analogue
I spin through space
two eyes here
two mouths there
the mother displaced, distorted, missing in Michigan 
the father invisible, drowned,
dismembered on the canvas of fertile grandmothers

I arrived piece by piece across the migrant spectrum of soul
I will be buried and the earth will be whole again and again
My fate is twisted, a twister, a storm of tenderness
My days are here with you
My nights become DNA,
I spin and float reassemble
myself in your bodies
I ghost other worlds
parallel soul parking
fitting carefully between two bodies

My love is DNA
my hate is analogue
Borderless not wireless
My head leans against the head of Coatlicue
My ears are pounded by the drumming
of wars plummeting through my skin

We are all artists
our tongues the brush
our veins the palette of colors
the rio bravo pleading to jump tracks
and wash herself of the maquiladora blood
Picasso made flesh offerings for our eyes to see
Guadalupe buried our placenta in her cries

Today is the day I will eat prickly pears with lemon and chile
smile against the sun
know that everything and everyone I love
will burst from my pores and my senses will make clouds
free the rain from the prison of pipes, asphalt and dams
Two or three more world wars
Ten, twenty, thirty revolutions
Where we disarm the men with guns and pigmentation
we'll get it right
we'll figure out how to be together
dance and not damn ourselves together
Wind 
Water
Land 
Our bodies return whole to the spiderweb,
gently feed the cosmos...


Sunday, April 13, 2014

Soul seas | Day 12 & 13 | poetry month


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My tenderness will absolve my rage
Or else I will have to eat my fingers
So that I can never carry a weapon
other than an ink pot
where I will dip the nubs of my blindness
to scribble your names...

I will not die on the border of nothingness
I was born to live in a sea of
colors,
pigment,
abandoned bones and continents
tsunamis,
movements,
contradictions,
betrayals,
resistance,
meditations,
forced drownings,
Rinches,
linchings and fatal crossings
A sea that fits in a wound the size of your smile,
carried on the back of the starry loneliness of our night

The muddy languages of
displaced grandmothers
disappeared fathers
mortal mothers
and indigenous grandfathers (who followed the lead of the women
into the fields and their horizons)
spoke our names
spit us into existence
kneading their saliva into the dust
with the longest caress,
in their howling breath,
to gestate our skins pockmarked with black moons

Here we are
unbowed,
even after so many defeats,
Planting in their shadows
Dreaming the same dreams over and over
Until the sea herself tells us to quit ploughing the land
to enter the realm of her feathered skin
She repeats:
It is you that has been defeated,
not the land,
not the ancestors,
not the prisoners,
not the martyrs,
not the women who have borne us,
not the migrants,
not the people whose labor feeds our souls.

Together we can lay in the sun or bury ourselves in the darkness
Together we can decide
Who shall be first and who shall be last
Who will keep us together from start to finish
Who shall be the ones to carry our sweat on their shoulders
and who shall serve the bread of our love

...

Monday, April 08, 2013

[Poema 8] Descolorido






Los colores son más diferentes, más brillantes, en las fronteras. Necesitan toparse, autodefinirse, clarificarse, para ser color. En su mezcla los colores se oscurecen y se aclaran mutuamente.

En su lodo, los colores híbridos dominan.

En su reino, los colores singulares apuntan hacia la mezcla.

Aprender colores es aprender nuevos lenguajes.

Amarillo lenguajes de soles vivos.
Rojo, lenguaje de pueblos ancestros.
Negro, lenguaje puro.
Blanco, lenguaje mezclado de lenguajes, mestizo.
Guindo, lenguaje de pieles.

La lengua brota de colores, es una paleta de audio-colores, colores-olas, colores-ondas, colores gargantales.

Ser bi-lingüe en colores es ser arcoiris-machete,
doble filo con venas.

Mi lenguaje es verde,
mis venas azules,
mi piel vidrio,
mi caminar café,
mi corazón azul celeste,
mis ojos torbellinos de polvo,
mis oidos el color de montañas que sueñan ser
semillas en los picos de pájaros o de un colibrí libertador.

Los colores mortales,
los colores infinitos,
topan en mi piel
y algún día quebrarán todos mis huesos.

Los colores de mi lengua prueba todo..

Mi cuerpo es una bomba de colores,
un cuerpo de incesantes explosiones de fragmentación de arcoirises;
un cuerpo que pregunta y cuestiona y no acepta
e insiste en el trueno de mi corazón descolorido,
para barrer ojos y paredes,
pieles y sepultados,
soles y lunares.

La guitarra tiene una sombra cristalina, donde
reposan los colores cimarrones,
los esclavos fugitivos se esconden en su boca.

Mis colores son descendientes de
purépechas,
palestinos,
yemenis,
mexicanas,
mestizajes,
chicanos,
xicanas,
hombres, hijos, padres,
abuelitos, tátarabuelitos, vecinos ancestrales,
sepultura venerada, polvo,
callos, tintas, pinturas, voz,
la piel es una envoltura de
frágiles huesos, tierras, cielos,
cinco o más soles,
una explosión cultivada por mis manos,
un deseo hondo con piernas fósiles,
un migrante viento, fronteras, hamburuñas,
sueños astrales, amores, montañas, plantas, palabras y poderes.

Los colores digitales, electrónicos y venales
y una mujer llamada Guadalupe/Coatlicue
(que en este mundo le llamo la mujer de la paz y el amor)

Dentro de mi mueren más soles, colores, explosiones constelares oceánicos,
que escurren de tus ojos y mis nubes futuras, tierras-en-gestión,
explosiones potables.

Dentro de mi nacen semillas coloridas, explosivas,
que pulverizan soles y plantas,
la germinación de colores.

Tu cuerpo es color que hace preguntas infinitas,
cuestiona entre lo negro y lo blanco,
alza polvorientas banderas, huipiles en los irises.

Vamos acumulando colores que surgen de los dolores,
colores gestados en vientres de dolor
gestando y pariendo colores hasta que una noche
todos los colores tienen su propio arcoiris, su propia piel,
su propia insurrección,
la revolución de ser humano
una cadena rota de colores libertadores.

Hasta que los colores mismos estén libres de su color:
Los negros liberan el negro
Los blancos el banco
los mexicanos liberan la mezcla
Los palestinos liberan a Palestina
Los migrantes liberan a la tierra
Las mujeres liberan a todos los colores
Los colores liberan a los colores
y el dolor cesa de ser color.

Nadie teme el gris.
Todos tememos el blanco, la blancura, la blancanada, la blancaloca, la blancabanco,
la blancura perfecta de los dientes que comen todo
y nunca sufren caríes.

Nadie teme la pureza.
Todos temen el mestizo,
La mestizaje que duerme con todos y sueña con sí misma,
La mestizaje que pare negros, blancos, indios y toda clase de sorpresas
con pigmentación clara:

El color perro.
El color carcajada.
El color sonrisa.
El color cintura.
El color basura.
El color pechos.
El color luto.
El color espacio.
El color zapatos tirados.
El color piernas cruzadas.
El color reunión.

Las reservas de nuestros colores, el color
explosivo, el catálisis de mis írises-redes visuales,
transmiten la energía y la carne de mi pigmentación.

Sólo quería ser alegre.
Me tupía de sus colores sin saber
que cada uno, cada infinito color,
era la raíz cósmica
de la tristeza.
Sólo los colores
llenan, sucumben
mi deseo
mis deseos
colorados
*
asi
me haces
sentir.
quiero ser
inundado
abrumado
invadido
por los colores
de tu voz

Soy todos los colores
Mi piel, una arcoiris poroso
Mi lengua, una paleta vibrosa
ojos de acrílicos despellejados
témpera sobre mis labios.
Tu sobre todo.

Friday, February 13, 2009

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Driving from East to West Oakland
to See Our Walls Speak (part 1)


One Sunday a week after the BART police killing of Oscar Grant III I took a drive from Oakland's eastern edge with San Leandro, driving down Foothill and then turning right on 103rd or so and driving west on East 14th, aka International Boulevard, all the way to West Oakland, to drive a bit on Mandela Parkway and the surrounding neighborhoods.

I took photographs of murals, graffitti and other commercial and non-commercial art on walls and in windows.

This is the visual record of that Sunday morning driving east to west with a beautiful sun shining on our tragedies and daily tribulations of work, family, community and survival.

There is a battle between art, graffitti, tagging and commercial art, decorative art that advertizes. The contradictions abound.

Our walls speak whoever writes or paints on them. Like the mural above, tagged with some "consideration," that is making the tag almost a part of the mural, blending it like streaks in her hair? A second tagger or color however disrupts and mars whatever was friendly in the first tag.

What does this mural depict? This is the legendary myth of Popocateptl, "the smoking mountain" (the "warrior" on the right) and Cicihuatl Chicihuatl Itzaccihuatl, the sleeping mountain (I can't remember the spelling right now, I'll correct it later!).

This is the personification of two volcanoes that are in the Valley of Mexico and have been depicted as a Aztec warrior watching over his "sleeping beauty." This is the eurocentri interpretation. This myth is painted and protrayed everywhere, from restaurant and grocery store calendars given out free every new year to countless those paimted by anonymous community muralists on public and private walls in the Southwest, in Mexico and other parts of the Mexican-friendly world.

Here's a close-up
The figures do not look "Indian" -- although undoubtedly there are Mexican indians that can pass and are off-spring of Europeans who forced themselves on Indian women, some inter-married, many didn't.

Popocatepetl continues rumbling and is linked up and down the Pacific rim of the Americas with what's known as "the ring of fire" -- active volcanoes, the last major eruption was back in May of 1980 when Mt. St. Helens blew up. Now there's a volcanoe in Alaska spewing and melting a glacier in the process. Global climatic change at home.

With this new knowldege, then the myth of Popocatepetl and Iztaccihuatl takes on a different story. When sleeping beauty wakes up she's gonna make us pay!

Here's another close-up of the mural:
Here a tagger placed his/her spray on his leg, a clumsy attempt at blending or just plain defacement, as the artists or painters of this work would not-so-gently or nicely say.

I kept driving east, sometimes dangerously, as I pointed my camera in the direction of art on the buildings along East 14th/International Boulevard.















More art on the walls, of varying quality and skill:

I messed this shot up because I didn't pay attention to the stop sign's shadow over the portrayal of the girls playing jump rope.











Here's a mural at the East Oakland Youth Development Center wall, on 82nd and East 14th.

All these shots were taken while driving.









Further down East 14th:
She was a beautiful apparition from Michoacan or Africa.











This is a student mural done by students at Melrose Leadership academy, defaced by taggers and then the tagging was painted over. This mural is particuarly significant because MLA students organized a protest demanding a traffic light for community safety. MLA students did an action, taking over the street, creating a human chain and stopped traffic. And they got a traffic light installed! This happened about 2002?















Mural on the two floor facade of the Catholic Worker building:


This mural depicts Latin American heroes, Che, Bishop Romero of El Salvador and others.











Here's a blend of commercial and cultural mural on the facade of the Corazon del Pueblo:

This is a much better version of Latin Americanist Indigenist-oriented mural theme, which inspires Chicano mural painters and others, and has its long roots in the Popocatepetl/Iztaccihuatly theme and imagery.

The mural atop Corazon del Pueblo is developed and stylistically speaking in quite great form.

Corazon del Pueblo us my type of shop, it has Chicano/Mexicano "kitsch" and fine art, including music CDs, postcards, earrings and other jewelry, ceramic pottery, Virgen de Guadalupe and Frida Khalo pseudo-devotional art that I love to hang on my doorways and walls, huipiles, guayabaeras and posters of Mexican revolutionary icons and lots of knick-knacks for all occasions ! And on top of all this, Corazon del Pueblo truly is a cultural center, with a back room, a speakeasy of a new type, where the owner opens to community meetings, mounts fine art shows and allows many of us to put on poetry readings, musical offerings and other cultural activities inside and in front of her store.