‘Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican’ paints LA-influenced artistic evolution
More than 30 years of work and five years of curatorial planning have culminated in “Victor Estrada: Purple Mexican.”
Curator Marco Rios said he wanted to organize a survey show of artist and lecturer of painting Victor Estrada’s work since he first met Estrada more than five years ago. Rios said he was familiar with Estrada’s work from catalogs of “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s,” a seminal 1992 exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art that featured Estrada’s sculpture “Baby/Baby.” The show centers around 40 of the artist’s drawings that have never been exhibited before and opened Oct. 6 at the ArtCenter College of Design – where Estrada earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine arts.
“While we were visiting for the shows, one day (Estrada) just suddenly appeared with a box of drawings,” Rios said. “I was fascinated by this exterior and interior idea, that there was this bifurcation in terms of his body of work.”
The drawings represent a private dimension of Estrada’s work the public has not seen, Rios said. For curatorial assistant William J. Simmons, the drawings have a diaristic quality, suggesting a daily artistic practice that serves as a record of the artist’s visual motifs. Simmons said the drawings in “Purple Mexican” reveal the variety of Estrada’s artistic output and his command of color, and their fantastical scenes exhibit his thematic interests in identity, gender and art history.
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Daily Bruin website.
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