Ramona’s Front Yard (pandemic paintings)

December 13, 2020 – April 1, 2021

Opening Reception: December 13, 2020, 1 – 6pm

Appointments are not required for the opening reception

Roberto Juarez, a visual artist, has been creating paintings, prints and large-scale public commissions throughout his career. Born in Chicago, he received artistic training at the San Francisco Art Institute followed by UCLA’s Graduate Film Program. He has lived and worked in Chicago, San Francisco, Miami, New York City and Canaan, New York. Since the early 80s, he exhibited regularly in New York's Robert Miller Gallery and Charles Cowles Gallery. He has had numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries in the United States, Latin America and China. His many awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship in Painting and the Rome Prize fellowship from the American Academy in Rome. In 2017, he was appointed to the board of governors at the National Academy of Design in New York. His most recent solo exhibition, "Processing: Painting and Prints 2008-2018 " was curated by Edward J. Sullivan at the Boulder Museum of  Contemporary Art in 2018. 

For this exhibition, Sullivan wrote about Juarez’s continued fascination with what could be called “throwaway material culture.” 

Juarez states “part of my painting process has always been to gather scraps of things I found in my life that aren’t useful anymore, such as the packaging for things that I use to eat or dress myself. For these pandemic paintings, I brought two old cutting boards from my kitchen into the studio. I started printing with them on some Chinese rice paper that was gifted to me during an exhibition in Xi’an last summer.

Once printed, the image of the pig and pineapple brought out memories of my first visit to my grandmother’s (Ramona) house in Puerto Rico, and seeing her front yard. There was a giant pig tied to a mango tree, and a whole line of mangos on the porch wall set to ripen. These memories were somehow very comforting and inspired this group of paintings which are now on exhibit at the Archive/ Project Space.

It’s been a Hell of a year with a pandemic raging, police brutality, killing, racism, homophobia, and an evil clown for a president. It is most important that art, painting in my case, speaks to a personal salvation from the dread. It was not my intention, but once in my grandmother's front yard I was free again to enjoy and play with color, light, and spirit.”