Left to right: Cipriano Ortega, Tony Ortega and Sylvia Montero. Courtesy: BMoCA
Sylvia Montero honors her Indigenous heritage and modern dance training, painting Apache dancers over antique sheet music. Courtesy: BMoCA
Beautiful Borracho (In a Concrete Jungle) by Cipriano Ortega. Courtesy: BMoCA
Socio-political commentary runs throughout the works in the mixed-media group exhibitionTres Voces, Un Corazón, on view at BMoCA through Sept. 13. Courtesy: BMoCA
There is a home inside Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art.
The immersive installation is a cross-section of a simple, white house, one side open to allow entrance. A rocking chair sits in one corner, the other is dominated by an antique radio belonging to Sylvia Montero and a one-stringed bass made by her son, Cipriano Ortega. Caged birds hang from the half-ceiling, and the walls are wheatpasted with poems.
Opposite the house, with its stark hues and simple furnishings, sits a piece teeming with color and energy: a larger-than-life-size baby in a cage, flanked by a portrait of a screaming woman and an illustration of a man being arrested by U.S. Border Patrol.
The piece is called El Grito de Guadalupe, and it was created by Tony Ortega, father to Cipriano and partner to Sylvia. The house, El Grito and much more belong to the summer exhibition Tres Voces, Un Corazón.
The show features works by three members of the same family who all live and work in a shared home studio in north Denver. Tony and Sylvia met during through their connection to the Chicano Humanities and Arts Council in the 1980s. The trio moved into the house on New Year’s Day 1991, just a few days after Cipriano was born, eventually building an addition to give each artist their own individual work space.
There they have remained ever since, creating together.
With Tres Voces, the artists use three-dimensional and digital art, etching, woodblock, painting, poetry and photography to explore the expansive concept of home, alongside the social and cultural forces that can create a sense of belonging — or fracture it.
Home is “not just the space that you’re in,” says guest curator Maruca Salazar. “It’s that other space, that is in your culture, your past, your memory.”
Much of Tony Ortega’s portion of the mixed-media exhibition centers on Chicano representation in American pop culture. His work blends and remixes cartoon and Western heroes: A mustachioed Superman is rechristened Super Hombre; Speedy Gonzales saves his friends from U.S. Border Patrol; a sarape-clad “Juan Wayne,” framed by McDonald’s famed golden arches and astride a horse, asks, “Who is the real illegal alien?”
Chicanos historically resided in what is now the American southwest, territory seized by the United States during the Mexican-American War. “A lot of people, my family included, were Mexican one day and were citizens of the United States the next day,” Tony says.
A popular Chicano saying, shared by both Salazar and Ortega, goes: “We didn’t cross the border; the border crossed us.”
To belong to this community is to be “always in between two worlds,” says Salazar, the former director of Museo de las Americas in Denver. She has been a friend and neighbor of the Montero-Ortega family for 40 years, and showed her work in an exhibition curated by Tony at the Fort Collins Museum of Art: Nepantla or “the space in the middle.”
In other works by Tony in Tres Voces, faceless brown people are ushered into the country by Our Lady of Guadalupe (the Holy Mother or Virgin Mary), standing in for the Statue of Liberty, or depicted laboring on top of Western Union transfer sheets. One large-scale collage superimposes two young, fashionable figures on promotional images of British actor Rowan Atkinson. It is titled, Dos Beans.
“It's a commentary on the mixing of cultures, the juxtaposition of cultures,” he says. “It's sort of a microcosm of what's happening by poking a little fun at the whole idea.”
Many pieces have a certain humor to them, though they often portray a desperate and frightening reality.
Recall the caged baby. Directly behind it is a rendition of Edvard Munch’s The Scream, with Virgin de Guadalupe standing in for the original figure. The child’s wide, unblinking eyes paired with the woman’s own unfocused stare and lopsided eyebrows add some absurdity to the otherwise unsettling tableau.
On a repeat visit, I see what Tony described during our interview: Christ in the manger. There is the mother, the child and the father — six duplicate images of an ice cream peddler being handcuffed by Homeland Security officers, a recreation of the real-life detention of Ambrocio "Enrique" Lozano in Culver City, California.
The dark scene contrasts with the vivid colors used to render it. The piñata baby is sourced from a neighborhood shop and handpainted by Tony. Underneath its cage lies a rainbow-hued sarape (Mexican woven blanket) turned into an American Flag.
Nearly all Tony’s work is bright, a product of his upbringing in sunny Colorado and New Mexico and the heavy influence of Indigenous folk art in the Southwest. “I think probably my use of color would be different had I grown up in Seattle or the East Coast or the Midwest,” he says.
While her partner’s work bursts with color and mythical American heroes, the art of Sylvia Montero is more subdued and grounded in reality.
Her first love was black-and-white TV journalism. She loves the “contrast” and “drama” of monochrome images, and first began taking photographs in high school with a 35mm camera she paid for in installments. That same camera captured the images that form the bulk of her Tres Voces display, depicting daily life in Cuba.
Sylvia took months to transform the black-and-white photos using watercolors and solar etching. At first, she says, “ I couldn't touch them. They were just so beautiful to me. Little by little, I started playing with it.”
The idea of a family exhibition was initially met with a similar reluctance. Used to solo shows, Sylvia did not want to be pigeonholed as a wife and mother. Yet her works are undeniably feminine: Her Cuba photographs are primarily of women in public spaces. Two collages feature the Virgin Mary; one, a re-working of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica, is titled, Men Make Wars.
Her work has a “female orientation” because “that’s what I am,” she says. “I'm a woman, I'm a Brown woman, and I'm a visual artist. And I've always felt that. That's who I am and what I do.”
Sylvia honors her Indigenous heritage and modern dance training, painting Apache dancers over antique sheet music. Her ancestors resisted registration and removal by the United States government; she says it’s important to celebrate that survival.
“Being a Native American, I cannot concentrate on the genocide 24/7,” she says. “We are victims, there's no doubt about it. Even though it exists all the time, that dark feeling, I wanted to feel the goodness of it.”
Sylvia's work might not dwell in the darkness of our current moment, but it shares a keen social-political consciousness and fierce commitment to community underscored by Salazar as a key facet of Chicano identity and art.
“The guidelines given to us,” she explains, are “go ahead, take a trip, study, get your degree, then come back to your community and make it better.”
Those qualities draw her to the family’s work. “Their artwork is very, very committed — very, very purposeful. They are compassionate, respectful, but they are not silent.”
The son of two artists, Cipriano Ortega was immersed in the arts like few children are.
By age three, he referred to his playroom as his “studio.” He participated in his first exhibition in third grade (with a selection of handmade puppets). Television consumption was limited to PBS, and his toys were generally focused on building and making. He attended middle and high school at Denver School of the Arts. There was never a time he imagined a life path not centered around creation.
“ To be part of that heritage is great,” Cipriano says. “That's the beauty of creativity and art and music: You'll always be part of that regardless of who hears it or not. You're leaving an artifact behind.”
Over the years, he has dabbled in nearly every form of art imaginable: costuming, set and prop building, poetry, painting, playwriting and songwriting, singing, playing and making musical instruments. Cipriano’s main set piece for Tres Voces demonstrates his proficiency across disciplines, while meditating on the many purposes and definitions of home.
A bluebird in a cage nods to the five-year period he spent recovering his singing voice after a martial arts injury exacerbated his “bad vocal technique,” damaging his left vocal cord.
Blue is the color of the throat chakra, he says.
“I like tinkering with things, and I enjoy world-building,” he says. “That's another reason why I built this house in the museum. I wanted to create a space to evoke a feeling of isolation, but also safety and security. Because my studio is that. It is where I go to seek refuge and express emotions. It's a gift.”
Said studio is filled with drawings, lyrics, photographs, posters and instruments he’s built, challenging Cipriano’s claim to minimalism. Unlike Lo Lo House, the family’s real home is exceedingly colorful, the teal doorframes contrasting with the red walls. Art adorns every surface, gathered from around the globe and representing numerous traditions and cultures.
That sense of abundance is in keeping with the artistic customs of rasquache, Salazar says: making something from nothing. “They are techniques that come from using everything from everywhere. You make magic out of anything and everything and nothing, because that’s what we’ve been given.”
Underneath the political commentary and meditations on culture and identity in Tres Voces, Salazar says, is an older and more enduring theme: love.
What she sees is the love they have for one another. “To be together at this age is really special, and the only thing that holds that idea together is love.”
When he looks at the exhibition as a whole, Cipriano sees a shared devotion to artistic expression and exploration as the glue holding it, and the family, together.
“ Art, we take it very seriously,” he says. “It's our practice, it's our existence. It's what keeps us going through all the turbulent times that we live through, outside and inside the house and the home.”
ON VIEW: Tres Voces, Un Corazón. Through Sept. 13, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Tuesdays through Sundays, Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA), 1750 13th St. Pay what you can.
Voces: Exhibition-inspired poetry reading. 6-7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 13. $20 non-members / $15 members
Join Cipriano Ortega and guest poets in this reading co-hosted by BMoCA and Denver nonprofit Sacred Voices.
Performance: A plague I call a heartbeat. 6-7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 27. $20 non-members / $15 members
Cipriano Ortega and Denver-based movement artist Elle Hong explore themes of time, turmoil and survival within the social worlds the artists inhabit separately and together. A karaoke and dance party will follow the performance; audience members are invited to participate.
Concert: Los Lo Los. 6-7:30 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 12. $20 non-members / $15 members
Celebrate the closing of Tres Voces with an in-gallery concert. Los Lo Los is a “low rock blues band” blending elements of rock, blues and jazz, featuring Cipriano Ortega on two-string slide bass, Garrett Pavlicek on baritone saxophone, and Bret Batterman on drums.
