Essay from the exhibition catalog: “The Architect of the Abstract”. Vincent Price Art Museum, Los Angeles 2016
Divine Simplicity: The Abstract Constructions of Linda Arreola
by Sybil Venegas
There is an inherent spirituality in the abstract constructions of Los Angeles based artist Linda Arreola. Somewhere between the intersecting lines, positioning of colors, and the shapes informing both positive and negative space, Arreola creates spiritual grids and/or networks signifying place. This place is first and foremost a connection to the place she has always searched for, both aesthetically and transformatively. Now at mid-career, after over 25 years of art production creating largely non-objective, geometric abstractions, Arreola is beginning to unravel an acutely personal understanding of place, what it means for her and how it informs her work.
For Arreola, the Grid is the matrix or the organizing principle of her work. It is the essential yin yang, topan mictlan, wankan tanka or what many of the world’s great religions refer to as the sacred or the divine. In these ancient traditions there is always the striving towards order, balance and harmony in nature, which Arreola also echoes in her work. Much like Japanese Shintoism and Mesoamerican cosmological practices that use the grid to shape the environment for renewal and restoration, Arreola uses the grid as a means for creating two and three-dimensional spiritual landscapes. Both her sculptures and paintings have a grounded and organizational appeal and that invite the viewer into a metaphysical world. Her work is largely concerned with the forces and the spirituality found in nature and the elemental forms of the earth. For Arreola, divinity lies in simplicity and resides in her constructions, while the grid provides the pathways or the links to place. Gallerist Kathy Gallegos has shown Arreola’s work at Avenue 50 Studio in Highland Park for over a decade. Gallegos claims, “If you look long enough at her work you can see doorways, portals into other spaces revealing a deep well of clarity and spiritual meditations in the work Arreola produces.”
Arreola was born in Los Angeles in 1956 and grew up in the hills of El Sereno, a suburb northeast of downtown Los Angeles where she continues to reside in the home she grew up in. As a child, Arreola was quiet and introspective, not really active in art making, but interested in art for the emotions it stirred in her. She was exposed at an early age to the arts by her father, a long time student of the arts, whose interests included art history, architecture, and studio arts. In fact, he was recognized as the longest continuous student at California State University, Los Angeles, beginning his studies there in 1947 when the campus opened. Arreola credits her father as the greatest influence on her career as a painter, and her studies in architecture.
According to Arreola, her family was not the typical Mexican American family, meaning large, with many siblings and connected to an even larger, gregarious extended family, so often depicted in literature and film. On the contrary, growing up, her family consisted of her father and an older brother, with limited connections to extended relations on her father’s side. Her parents were divorced when Arreola was an infant, leaving her and her older brother under the care of her father in a single parent home. Growing up, she had no contact with her maternal lineage until she met her mother in her early twenties. This absence and loss would become the foundational piece of Arreola’s childhood and would inform her passageway into womanhood and her trajectory towards the arts.
Parts of the Whole
Traveling to Mexico for the first time in 1976 at the age of nineteen, and then again in the early 1980s, Arreola became fascinated with ancient Mesoamerican urban centers and temple pyramids. Her visits to the archaeological sites of Teotihuacán, Tula, Chichen Itza, Palenque, and Monte Albán marked the beginning of a heartfelt connection and artistic bond with Mesoamerican architecture, which has informed her work throughout her career. The temple pyramids, the color palette, the relationship between the sky and the earth, the astronomical and geometric urban plans that graced the placement of these ancient cities awakened a deep seated sensibility and aesthetic in the artist, that of simplicity and the belief that artistic truth lies in the pure form of natural materials. After returning home, Arreola embarked on a mission to recreate the sensations and emotions she experienced while viewing the architecture, sculptural forms, and geometrics found in ancient Mesoamerican art. She began by building wooden structures, using unfinished wood and steel cables to study suspension and how forms can be held in space with tightened cables. As she later came to understand, these were exercises in manifesting energy by the control of tension in these three-dimensional forms. They are beautiful sculptural forms, echoing both Mesoamerican and Japanese aesthetics in their built simplicity. She titled the work of this period, Parts of the Whole and with this series and other built paintings and sculptures she would complete her B. A. in 1980 and her M. A. in 1985 at Cal State University Los Angeles. Parts of the Whole would also be the pivotal work in her portfolio that gained her admission to the school of Architecture at U.C.L.A. where she would earn an M. A. degree in 1991.
By the mid 1990s, Arreola’s work had moved from the three dimensional to the two dimensional, focusing on constructed paintings, adopting the grid as the base for constructing a faux three dimensionality in the work as well as relying upon unmixed or primary colors which she would layer as she built the paintings. Her preferred surface was wood and many of the series she did at this time were created on wooden panels, instead of stretched canvas. While she built her paintings upon the surface, negative space remained unpainted wood, with a faint grid anchoring the compositions. Stenciled text was incorporated as a means to juxtapose the written word or words, letters or numbers within, above or below or on top of her constructed landscapes, forcing her audience to think both literally and conceptually about the work. According to Arreola, she’s always been a builder, and that the study of architecture with its line drawings of plans and sections had a big impact on her. Rather than painting, she works by building and layering her works with paint, thinking of her work as architecturally inspired built constructions. Her influences have been diverse and many, including Japanese architect Tadao Ando, Minimalist sculptors Donald Judd and Agnes Martin, abstract expressionist sculptor, Louise Nevelson, and painter, sculptor, mixed media pop artist, Jasper Johns.
Vaguely Chicana
By the millennium, Arreola was a recognized Los Angeles based abstractionist primarily connected to and exhibiting within Chicano/Latino galleries and exhibitions. After graduate school, in the early 1990s she regularly exhibited at L.A. Artcore and through the director, Lydia Takeshita, she was introduced to the renowned artist, Gilbert Magú Luján. Luján was an important connection and he soon became a mentor and began to introduce Arreola to the world of Chicano Art. At that time, while she identified as Mexican American, she had very little connection to Chicana/o art activism, nor did she work with any ethnic and/or political iconography. Yet, Chicano movement activism was not unfamiliar territory for the artist. In the late 1960s her father Raul Arreola was a well known Los Angeles educator and activist, involved with the emergent Chicano civil rights movement and its struggles within the Los Angeles Unified School District. He was among the key East LA activists who worked with teacher Sal Castro in the struggle for educational equity and reform in Los Angeles schools and supporting students in what became known as the historic East LA School Blowouts in 1968.
Nevertheless, it was through her friendship with Magú that she came to understand Chicano/Latino art and its foundational relationship to the Chicano civil rights movement of the 1970s. She soon discovered the print classes at Self Help Graphics, and met the founder and director Sister Karen Boccalero who liked her work and encouraged her involvement with the organization. She exhibited several times at Self Help Graphics’ Galería Otra Vez, and, she began to meet people. Two of the most important connections she made at this time were with Reyes Rodriguez of the gallery and art space, Trópico de Nopal and Kathy Gallegos of Avenue 50 Studio. Gallegos and Rodriguez became ardent supporters of Arreola and gave her work greater visibility. Soon, she began to exhibit regularly at both galleries in group and solo exhibitions including, Quarteto de Luna, 2002, Vaguely Chicana, 2008 and 4, 2011 at Trópico de Nopal and Altaring Course: Political Altars for our Times, 2004, and Seven Beauties, 2013 at Avenue 50 Studio. For over twenty years, Arreola has shown her work consistently in exhibitions throughout California, the United States and Europe. In 2010 she was awarded a COLA fellowship, an Individual Artist Fellowship from the Cultural Affairs Department of the City of Los Angeles. In 2014, Arreola organized the group exhibition, Notes From the Chicano Sublime at Avenue 50 Studio, a group exhibition with fellow Latino abstractionists, Val Echavarria, Cici Segura Gonzalez and Ramon Ramirez. In the exhibition notes detailing her own work, Arreola states she has left behind the grid and has ventured into the exploration of the column and the beam. Most importantly however, she is beginning to examine in her work, her emotional past after the passing of her father in 2013. It’s a big step and the work references for the most part the place of home with titles like The Innocence of Loss, The Forgotten and A Tolerance for Insecurity.
While Chicano/Latino art has long been associated with the representational narrative and overt or implied political iconography, not all artists whose work falls within this genre produce representational and/or political imagery. Defining Chicana/o art is not an is it or isn’t it conversation as much as what works aesthetically within an artist’s perception of what they are working towards, and there are points and counterpoints, similar to the points conceived by the Mexican Social Realists of the 1920s and 30s and the controversial counterpoints produced by Mexican Abstractionists of the 1940s and beyond. They are all parts of a whole and they contribute to a larger dialogue. By 2016, as evidenced in Linda Arreola: Architect of the Abstract, Arreola’s work continues to evolve and expand while pushing boundaries both physical and ideological and-in the process-she has contributed to and broadened the concept of Chicano/Latino art and the Chicana/o art genre.
Sybil Venegas
Art Historian
Los Angeles, 2016