Welcome to Texas Talk.

I'm Gilbert Garcia, metro columnist with the San Antonio Express-News.

On this show, we bring you in-depth one on one conversations with some of the most fascinating figures in Texas politics, business, sports and culture.

For more than 25 years, San Antonio artist Cruz Ortiz has been seeking and finding creative new ways to get art to the people.

His work has appeared on screen prints, videos, paintings, murals, campaign T-shirts and posters, pushcarts and pizza boxes.

And it's also found its way to the booth.

Ortiz's creations are informed by a punk rock do it yourself ethic, an irreverent pop art sensibility, and a fierce political activism.

On this episode, he'll talk about his early inspirations, how he sees his role as an artist, and the moving experience he had last year in Baltimore.

Let's get started.

CRUZ Thanks for being on Texas time.

I'm really excited about this.

Mr. Gilbert.

We're early in 2023.

What have you been working on so far?

You're always there are a lot of different media that you're that you're involved in.

What are you concentrating.

On right now?

I'm in research mode.

Also, like it's January.

So yeah, usually at the end of the year we're wrapping things up and now I'm just kind of taking time off, you know, building up what we're going to do for this year and a lot of working on the property kind of thing.

You're born in Houston.

How old were you when you moved to the San Antonio area and what was that experience like?

How old was?

I was probably it was high school, actually, middle school.

I moved to outside San Antonio, so I went to the little the school Henry Middle School, I think with the church, independent school District University.

Then I ended up going to Samuel Clemens High School, and then shortly after that I moved right downtown as soon as I graduated.

So.

Do you have a memory of like, when like art sort of connected with you in some meaningful way where you said this.

Is I was probably in pre-K.

I remember just drawing all that time.

I just remember, like I tell the story all the time where I have vivid memories of just coloring everything on my parents walls and in fact, the molding on doors.

How did they.

I would just color that in.

Like, were they okay with that?

Oh, hell, no.

No, It was horrible.

If I tell people all the time, like when I smell bleach, I think of my childhood because my mom, you know, would call me all kinds of funny names and color was like, you know where you're going.

And so literally, like, I had my hand in bleach watering, you know, erasing everything.

And of course, you know, that didn't do anything because the following day I was coloring again.

So there's always been sort of like a do it yourself ethic to what you do.

How much did punk rock music and punk rock culture affect you at an early age when you were starting to do art?

I was just talking to someone about this because they were asking me more about like what gravitated towards you, towards punk rock.

And I think it was because I was living in suburbia.

I was one of like eight brown kids going to Clemons High School, and that being Emerson, that, you know, predominately Anglo white culture.

Just literally I had nothing to type in a fight with those people and I didn't know how to handle it, but it was the punk rock kids, you know, the kids and their white kids to, you know, painting their fingernails with Sharpie markers.

And they were the ones who are welcoming to me and they accepted, you know, who I was.

And then, of course, we'd listen to the same morbid music, you know, and we identified with, you know, being, you know, more of.

Misunderstood.

Yeah.

I mean, we addressed patriarchy, we addressed, you know, sexism, We addressed, you know, what it's like to be, you know, living in a capitalist society.

Like, it was hilarious.

I mean, the more I think about those days, as you know, we're very angry, somber, but, you know, still had some sort of consciousness of what, you know, who we were.

So in the nineties, you co-founded Societal cultural Arts and coordinated the the mural program on the West Side for a while.

You're a really young artist yourself at that point.

Like, did you did you feel like you were kind of in over your head and what did you learn from that whole process?

I, you know, really link that to the punk rock sensibility, the do it yourself.

Even at that young age, at the high school, we were always doing some, you know, zines or some sort of bands, punk rock posters.

And I think when I met my friend, my my good friend Jorge la la da, he was went to Clemons as well, and he was actually in a band with another friend of ours, Manny Castillo.

And he was telling me he was like, Hey, there's this guy that I'm touring with, and he talks about doing murals and I want you to meet up.

And so literally we met.

I mean, I remember them coming back from tour and they smelt like tuna dusted their van, opened up and it was right there in front of a taco.

And that's classic one of.

The smells of punk rock.

What does this smell?

All tuna.

And so they and we hit it off.

We you know, we immediately we had no idea what we were doing.

I, I mean, I knew I could draw, but I wasn't, you know, really like, you know, very amazing at drawing.

But I knew that I could make things.

I knew that I could draw things.

I could, you know, collaborate with other people.

And that for me, that was the big part.

I think back now, it's like it wasn't so much my ability to draw or paint, but my ability to collaborate with others.

And the best thing was that it was activating a community that was, you know, I had seen murals, there were murals, you know, center and a housing authority had a huge mural program with Chatteris and a bunch of the older veteran Chicano artists.

And they already established that.

But, you know, that had been already 20, 30 years past.

And so I was like literally 20 to 21 year old, you know, punk rock kid, you know, who cut his own hair and and his shorts, you know, in the middle of the West Side, which I was from suburbia.

So like, that was a big shift.

And yeah, you know, that kind of like cultural, you know, interchangeable type of experience, I think helped develop these things where we did not think about the end product.

It was more about the process.

It was always about the process.

I think I first became aware of your work and probably a lot of people through a character you created called Spastic, and I think you describe them as like a poster child for Chicanos in the United States.

Where where did the idea come from?

Well, I think I've always been, you know, obviously I, I tell people I literally growing up in Houston, I saw rockets go into space, like I remember like the old elementary school being outside.

And we would watch while everyone was watching on TV.

We were outside watching these things go out.

So I was always attracted to space.

You know, my dad was into Star Trek.

And, you know, of course, when Star Wars came out, we were all about that.

So it was that Americana part that pop culture has always, you know, I was always entertained by that, of course, in high school, and I became more aware of who I was culturally and how I became more enlightened, I guess you could say, about how things functioned as far as, you know, white supremacy, you know, brown boy working, trying to, you know, his family, seeing how that's been affected.

Um, I start to understand that, you know, this is a lot more complex, and I could identify with the Chicano artists that were, you know, painting the beat in the white loop or painting their experiences of being migrant workers, you know, cotton fields.

And I just couldn't do that.

And it just made no sense to me.

And so I think what I wanted to do was to produce a character or I love storytelling, right?

So that's, you know, really the basics, the basis of all my work is, you know, the idea of narrative.

And so I wanted to create a character that was just as complex, you know, like, yeah, he was raised on Scooby Doo.

You didn't, you know, life cereal watching Skylab fall apart.

Yeah.

You know, at the same time, I like being in cheese tacos, you know, So, like, and I understand that I have a long heritage of, you know, Native American being indigenous, you know?

And what does that mean?

How has that changed?

And or the mixing of cultures, just.

The complexities of people who might not understand if they're not?

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think even now, I think as you know, as we continue this American project, we are starting to to realize, you know, there's a certain thing that's happening where people do lose their sense of culture.

And that's the part that I'm always thinking about even now today, like how can we understand culture if but we've got to fix ourselves first, Like we got to look in more in like, who are we?

Yeah.

And then able to like produce and create images or products or things that remind us the humanity of who we are.

So it gets really crazy quick.

It always felt to me like your work had like the irreverence of, like the sixties pop artist, but with a very South Texas Chicano span.

But I don't actually know.

Like, were you influenced in any way by Lichtenstein or Warhol or any of those people?

Do they have any impact on you, or was it just kind of coincidental that you had maybe some of that that maybe the some of the same sensibility?

I think the sensibility was always there.

I mean, I'm a big, huge art history fans.

Yeah.

Like I'm constantly reading, you know, different artists.

But I think for me it was the recognition, visible links between Warhol's factory sensibility of like producing mass producing, just boys, I think was a big influence in my work and understanding how pop, you know, that kind of work.

I mean, you drive down Wall Street and you would see like these hand-painted signs.

Yeah, yeah.

The idea of like and that reminded me and linked also to the DIY like that do it yourself.

I'm like, wow.

They could actually, you know, print that out.

But now we have people at hand painting, you know, telephone poles and, you know, Ducati signs.

And that's the stuff that I was more intrigued with.

I felt like I can use that.

And like that's I was looking at those hand-painted signs as if I was going to the Louvre and looking at, you know, old masterworks.

It was like in that same idea of like looking at, yeah, quality painting and like, how can I use that in my own practice?

And so that's where that came from, where I start to really like focus on the language, like the idea of Spanglish, you know, like it's funny because when I leave out of state or, you know, going to other parts of the world, like people ask me, like, why you speak both.

You speak different.

Combinations.

Yeah, yeah.

And I'm like, and then, you know, when we're here, we don't think about how we sound.

And so I think that's when I, you know, start to realize there's something special in your life.

There's something that I could work with.

You've taught high school art, aside from just the technical aspects of like how to create things.

Was there a message that you tried to convey to your students about, like the role of art in society?

You know, I taught for 15 years in high school level, and I actually would do this lesson thing called the Empire Plan.

So I wanted them to develop their own sense of empire, like be do something for you, you know, and not just like, you know, look at things from different people's perspective of expectation, Asians.

And so that turned into this whole different thing.

I usually my kids were reading more.

I felt that the education system just was not working at the time.

It's still not working, I think.

And so my art classes, a lot of the advance art classes, we spent more time reading about contemporary artists, contemporary works that were being produced.

Yeah, the issues that they were, those are the things that they connected to more.

So this is people.

Yeah, I like and those kids can draw.

Yeah, I had you know, drawing two classes and all of those kids could draw like, what am I going to do, teach them or trying to teach, I think yeah, there was no there was no.

And that's the challenge right now is critical thinking, you know, empathy, those kind of things that we get from real education are there's gaps.

There's missing stuff.

Those kids are not, you know, children and they're just not being provided with that kind of, you know, access to to critical thinking, to like really breaking things down and how we understand who we are and how we fit in this world.

You talk about the impact of punk rock on you.

You know, punk rock musicians, I think, by nature have tended to sort of identify as like outsiders or underdogs in society.

And we've seen examples.

I mean, Kurt Cobain inspired the most famous one of somebody from that world who just achieved so much success that it was really disorienting for him.

And I mean, you've had commercial success and you mentioned the love you've had.

You're working in the mood.

Was there ever a point in your career where it became kind of disorienting or uncomfortable for you as some you know, your work has been, I think, directed to and about the underdog.

Is it is it ever been uncomfortable for you?

Constantly.

Yeah.

I never comfortable ever like and I think that's something that, you know, I always think about which becomes problematic.

You know, obviously, like I think one of the things I would always tell myself and it was something that my dad would always say, like, if you're comfortable, something's wrong.

That's interesting.

Yeah, I, I, it was this work ethic idea of like and I really paid attention to that.

Like, it literally worked my, you know, self to, you know, to literally exhaustion like every day.

And now I think about that differently.

Like obviously I think you know that as I go and continue you know, my practice more the theory part of my work versus the practice, I start to slow down and think, you know, maybe resting is probably the biggest.

Yeah.

You know, form of production and slowing down and then paying attention to like the small things.

I mean, I think as you hear older people say that all the time and we never listen to that.

And I think there's obviously something there and I think I don't know if I would do anything differently, but I think about that a lot recently.

Like how how is you know, how is my method of producing work actually, you know, cultivating new ideas, new different things and possibilities for my work.

So you've talked a lot over the years about being frustrated at the idea that art is something that you only see on museum or gallery walls and, and you take your art to all these different places.

And I wonder when it comes to something like when you did like the Papa John's box with the Vespers go, Yeah, obviously that's good business for you.

But it also was there also some sense that you had like, my work is going to be this is going to be in a context where people who probably would otherwise never see my work exactly are going to see it.

Is that part.

Of it I'm I don't like museums.

Yeah I think they're very problematic.

Yeah I think they are based on institutionalized, um, situations that, you know, further the white supremacist model of how to maintain control and culture.

Like, I literally think that I think there's so many different issues with that.

And I think learning that when I was painting those murals on the West Side, I literally got that quick because I knew as soon as I was present and a wall and painting walls, I knew that these people had never seen, you know, something like other than a hand-painted sign, they were actually seeing art that was addressing issues related to their, you know, existence.

And I think for me, that's where I was like, how can we get more art to the people and understanding art history, right?

Like Andy Warhol.

Lucas In that those guys, there are no rules.

Keith Haring There are no rules in art making at all.

Yeah.

And so me doing a Papa John's pizza box.

Yeah.

Is completely breaking the rules of of contemporary fine art.

You know what I mean?

Like, I don't care.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You hadn't been following those rules anyway.

I mean that because again, I see that that model is very problematic.

And I think how can I get, you know, my work, you know, good design, you know, you know, well practiced, you know, production of making work.

How can I get that more out to the people?

And you know, Warhol did the same thing where it was, you know, his understanding of commercial art and how he was able to, like, produce images that were recognizable, brushstrokes, color patterns that was on, you know, using something that the industry had already created for consumption.

Yeah, well, he wanted to do the same thing.

But the idea was bringing, you know, art to people and, you know, making us think again.

It's about challenging the public and people to collaborate together, to understand each other, how we can learn more about what we are as humanity and what we can do for the future.

You've been very politically active over the years and you've done campaign T-shirts, posters and whatnot for, you know, for Barack Obama, for Hillary Clinton, for Beto O'Rourke and others as as a reach a point for you where, like, you have to turn down candidates or candidates or like, please do this.

It gets interesting.

I think a it's been really interesting.

We actually even had so yeah, we've had candidates come over to us.

Like they won't be named.

Themselves.

There were all kinds I mean, both sides do interesting know both sides, too.

We've had both sides.

You know, all sides have come through.

And and we just literally I think, you know, it's become a vetting type of thing now.

We really have to, you know, figure out who this candidate is to give him.

It's like giving them an endorsement.

Yeah.

Really?

Yeah.

And that's the thing is becomes interesting.

You know, Olivia, my partner, we literally think about that a lot.

Like how how can we how can art and design literally help these candidates further their goal to getting change done.

And so that's the thing is like we didn't really, you know, talk to each candidate one by one and, you know, hang out with them and really get to see their faces, you know?

And yeah, there's sometimes that we've had to turn down some candidates.

We're just like, yeah, yeah, I was there.

Almost the last year.

You visited Vivaldi right after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, and I know the experience really affected you a lot.

And then you ended up writing a corridor and you talked to your friend.

Have you?

Medrano, who's a great mariachi violinist and singer, and basically you all working together.

We were able to get a big group of mariachis to go to anybody perform there in downtown.

Your body is probably about a week or so after the shoot.

But what was that, that whole experience?

I thought it was probably the most profound project I have ever done throughout my artistic career.

Like, I think I was really thrown off.

I had gone as soon as that shooting happened, the massacre the day after Elaine out of the US.

Reporter out of New York now was reporting on ufology and I was like, I want to go over there to take photos.

I mean, just to document.

I had already been documenting, you know, Texas landscapes in a sense that was different, where I was documenting like all the little towns and how each of those little towns have detention centers or prison units and it was always curious to me that I was, you know, driving throughout Texas and every little town has a little prison system and like and how they're really reliant on that business.

And so I knew exactly where that school was at from traveling up and down, you know, going through 90 so many years.

And I knew I was like, oh, my God.

And then I immediately saw the news, like all the officers, old man, it looks like the army was already there, like houses of small town.

And yeah, so I had ask like, I want to jump in, let's go, I want to go to Valda.

And so we were there for like three or four days and I, I had never seen anything like that, like to see the media literally from that perspective was interesting to, to see the journalists just exhausted from like and that the journalists that were there are the same journalists that traveled throughout the nation for all these struggles.

So they all know each other.

Sure.

Yeah.

And like things like that, I was just like, this is outrageous.

This is what I as an artist, what am I supposed to do?

Just take pictures of this, like and I knew there had to be something else.

And so I on a couple of other projects I had been working on, I knew the first as far as my practice, I have always, like admired Jose Guadalupe Posada, Mexican artist who did a lot of corridos and corridos are essentially ballads, right?

And they're written down accounts in song form of the news of the day.

And it's like tragedies, funerals, divorces, you know, all these, you know, almost extravagant kind of activities.

And so I really wanted to do something that was different.

Like I wanted to I was like this I could I could do something like that in Uvalde.

So I called Anthony Medrano and one or Ortiz of companions that America was like award winning mariachi group in in Texas and immediately is like, Let's do it.

He goes, I've had so many people come.

He had people call him His mariachi is like, we should do something.

And I was like, Well, let's let's get a bus, let's get.

And then we like literally he hung up the phone 30 minutes.

So he goes, Cruz, I got to mariachi groups and that was like 15 people or something.

And then the word went out on the mariachi wire or whatever.

That was like, like it was literally like, yeah, like, and overnight it.

Became a national story.

Yeah.

No, New York Times, you know, when we did the bus, New York Times was on the bus, Rolling Stone, everybody was there was just insane.

Have you put it This is too like lyrics right there.

Has there been music put to it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We, we actually after that event which was interesting because there was a bus with 50 mariachis, but when we got to Uvalde again the mariachi wire like there was mariachis from Mexico that came.

Yeah.

And from all the surrounding area.

So it was like 80 mariachi.

And you took prints to the legislature last we were kind of advocating for for gun.

Reform, right?

Yeah.

So that's how we actually we didn't even get involved it We made these corridos screenprint in prints that we did here in the studio.

And we were literally with as the mariachis were singing, we were handing out all these corridos, and the corrido literally just talks about the event.

But it was interesting because like the media will produce news with certain guidelines, there's like a channel that they have to maintain, right to be stay in the middle.

This was not in the middle.

Yeah, this was a repeat of a a report based on what the people were talking about, what was their perspective.

And so I think for me, like, you know, producing something like that was so important.

And we did take those to the Texas legislature, which is really cool, because Jessica Yellin, who also works with us on these projects, has been a big, you know, political worker there on the Hill.

So it was an easy access.

And of course, we had so many people take photos.

We just have a little bit of time.

But as a last question here, we were talking recently, you said that you see a connection between journalism and what you do and what connection do you see?

Well, I think beyond just documenting, it's the narrative, the story of people, the story of of a place.

I think for me, that's something that I've always connected to.

I keep looking for common, common denominators throughout my work, from the early murals to, you know, engage in commercial art, engaging contemporary art.

And I'm always thinking about like, what's something that, oh, this reminds me of journalism.

I mean, the fact that we were there on the ground and evolving and reporting and responding, you know, using the community voices.

So.

Cruz, thanks so much for being on the show.

No problem.

That's all for this edition of Texas Talk.

Thanks for tuning in.

If you have any questions or thoughts you'd like to share with us, please email us at Texas, talk at Taylor and dot org.

We'll be back next month with a new guest.

Until then, take care.