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“Making It Personal”
By Benjamin Ortiz, for
Café Latino Lifestyle Magazine
February/March 2010


Angel Otero’s first art assignment came from his grandmother, back in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, when her plants died. “She would make me put a stick next to the plant that was dead,” he recalls, “and make me attach the plant with some sort of cord around the stick, so the neighbors wouldn’t know that her plants were dead — so the plant could still be standing up.”

You might call this his first experiment in creating a “still life” as a figurative domestic illusion. Otero remembers such things from his upbringing with “Abita,” as he calls his grandma, the woman most responsible for influencing his rise from copying Hello Kitty designs and cartoon characters to forging a solid artistic career as an award-winning painter and sculptor.

At 28, “he has done in one year what many young artists might take a decade to do,” says Gail Levin, director of the Leonore Annenberg Scholarship and School Fund, which awarded Otero its Fellowship in the Arts for 2009.

With an impressive collegiate and post-graduate career recently accomplished at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), Otero has garnered raves and buzz, along with his awards, as a young artist of international significance who is in high demand.

But it all started with “Abita.” All the little details of how grandma creatively conceived of a warm home space persisted in Otero’s mind years later when he’d find himself shut up in a Chicago studio with snow falling outside. The plant-pots and vases, little porcelain figurines, the doilies and hand-woven coverings that turn wooden planks into a family table, “I started taking these memories and objects and confronting them Â… all these things have been pretty much my major subject matter,” says Otero.

The exhibit “Angel Otero: New Paintings” provides a sampling of works showing his artistic trajectory from school to New York, where he currently holds studio space thanks to the Annenberg award. This exhibit of 12 to 15 new works is “Otero’s largest solo show to date,” announces the Chicago Cultural Center, whose Sidney R. Yates Gallery is hosting the showing of pieces from private collections and Otero’s studio.

Lanny Silverman, Curator of Exhibitions with the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, points out the artist’s “unusual use of materials, the blending of collage and painting, effects of illusion of what’s real and what’s painted, and very personal content” as all notable facets of the show.

In an interview with Café Magazine, Otero speaks from his studio in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, where he had just rushed back from the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair in Miami. His work quickly sold out on the morning of exhibition to collectors and museums. On his way over to a show at the Leyendecker Gallery of the Spanish Canary Islands, Otero is still pumped up from NADA, where two museums acquired some of his works.

With humility, he mentions thinking about his family while in Miami: “My family was never very into cultural interests or the fine arts or nothing like thatÂ… So I think about my family because they were very difficult towards what was my interest in art. [They’d say,] ‘Don’t study that because it’s not going to bring us food, you know?”

Otero recounts this story with nothing but affection for his family in his voice, even though now, “I can say a museum bought a painting, which is the most important step of any artist’s career, and they don’t really get it at all.”

Otero describes his process now as experimenting with materials and creating abstractions based in familial commonplaces and scraps of inspiration from Puerto Rico, including the mountains and twisting cities built into the mountains. Even so, he does not create literal renderings of the island, instead opting for less obvious and more quietly personal references to growing up in Bayamón.

“There is a story he’s telling about his past, about the rich visual culture that surrounded him as a child,” says Lisa Wainwright, Interim Dean of Faculty, Dean of Graduate Studies at SAIC and one of Otero’s mentors. “He’s very much in the tradition from Picasso to Rauschenberg. He takes the still life as his armature, as his constant subject, and then he does things to it, he does remarkable things to it, and it’s pretty pleasing to see a format that you recognize in the history of art updated in a way that is radically new.”

Wainwright also describes Otero as a workaholic, someone who has “this inner necessity, this drive where they just can’t stop,” as Kandinsky put it. She says that viewers of his show at the Cultural Center will be able to engage “a sensibility of life, a kind of joy and energy that is infectious,” referring to Otero’s personality that won him fondness at SAIC from teachers and fellow students alike.

Regardless, Otero still thinks it’s a wild idea that a skinny Puerto Rican kid from Bayamón has gone so far. He’s now relocated to the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn because he sees it as a promising arts district comparable to Williamsburg or the Lower East Side.

“It’s cheap, and there are a lot of new upcoming artists moving to the area — I felt I wanted to be a part of this movement.” Nonetheless, he is thinking seriously of returning to Chicago at some point, the city whose cold winters inspired him to stay in the studio longer and get more work done.

INFOBOX
Angel Otero: New Paintings and Sculpture
When: Ends March 28
Where: Sidney R. Yates Gallery, Chicago Cultural Center, 78 E. Washington St., Chicago
Info: (312) 744-6630, www.ChicagoCulturalCenter.org

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