BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
I was born in El Salvador in 1966. The formative years of my youth were in the 1980s,
when my country was beginning to bleed incurably from the wounds of war. A restless
desire to make art was always with me, but initially I opted to undertake a more
practical career: I began studying business administration at the National School of
Commerce.
I was always in direct contact with painting and artists, since for generations my family
had been in the framing business. This, as well as the sociopolitical condition of my
country, induced me to assume art as my role in life, not only as a profession but also as
an alternative form of resistance to the oppression of the regime in those years.
In November of 1989 I came to the United States and started to work with new
techniques. First I worked with CODICES, a group of artists working in support of
Salvadoran culture, and then, for five years, was part of a group of artists at the KALA
Art Institute in Berkeley. There I learned various techniques of etching and printmaking.
After working on printmaking for several years I decided to start exploring other
techniques and artistic modes of expression: I began to paint large-scale pieces in acrylic
on paper and, in parallel, to work in mixed media, using old wooden boxes as containers
for compositions with found objects to create a story. The original idea was to create
"strange machines," to make us stop for a moment and reflect on where technology is
taking us, how much democracy we find in it, or, beyond that, how the wrong use of
technology is secretly dehumanizing society.
People responded positively to this project and since then I have been invited to
several residencies and exhibitions in museums in the United States, including The
Legion of Honor of San Francisco, California, The Oakland Museum of California and the
De Young Museum in San Francisco, California. In 2006 “The Time Machine” (one of my
Music Boxes) was exhibited in El Museo de La Ciudad de México. Also I’ve had the
privilege to be an artist in residence at the Wilfredo Lam Museum in Habana, Cuba.
In 2009 I founded a cultural project in my art studio, No Right Turn Studio. I yielded my
space to this project in an attempt to fill a gap in our Latin-American community: a
place where many artistic disciplines could converge with the historical necessity that
forces us to rethink certain codes or reconceptualize our principles as a society. No Right
Turn Studio hosted visual art, music, documentaries, reading workshops, etc. This
cultural project was successful, since we do not have a place to embrace all these LatinAmerican activities in San Francisco. The most satisfying event we were involved in was
the co-production of the Silvio Rodríguez concert in 2010.
Today I am working independently doing printmaking, paintings, installations, and
mixed media. One of my most recent inclinations in visual art is learning to design and
make jewelry. Several of the pieces I designed as part of the compositions of my Strange
Machines are subsequently being used to create conceptual jewelry pieces.
Teaching is another of my passions, and so I have participated in different programs in
the Bay Area, for instance at the De Young Museum in San Francisco and at the
International High School of Oakland, California, and also in other countries like El
Salvador and Cuba. I have taken part in the art program at the René Girón Art School in
San Miguel, El Salvador and the Antonio Canet Art School in Havana, Cuba. I focus my
workshops on discovering ways to do art with low-cost materials or even more, how to
create art from recycling or reusing materials.
I have had the opportunity to exhibit my work in group shows with well-known artists
such as Francisco Toledo, Claudia Bernardi, Rupert García, Enrique Chagoya, Nathan
Oliveira. Since 1993 my work, in addition to being shown at numerous venues in the Bay
Area, has been exhibited in El Salvador, México, Japan, Cuba, Hawaii, and various cities
in the United States.
- Carlos Cartagena