Artist coming to Ogden for residency puts focus on spiritual healing
-
- Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño of Asheville, North Carolina, will serve as Ogden Contemporary Arts’ third annual artist in residence, beginning Friday, Jan. 5, 2023.
-
- An example of the artwork created by Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño, recently announced as Ogden Contemporary Arts’ third annual artist in residence.
-
- An example of the artwork created by Luis Alvaro Sahagún Nuño, recently announced as Ogden Contemporary Arts’ third annual artist in residence.
OGDEN — Ogden’s incoming artist in residence plans to spotlight 12 local residents from immigrant cultures and how their lives have been affected by injustices and how they can surmount obstacles in our society.
Beginning Jan. 5, Luis Alvaro Sahagun Nuño will spend the next two months sharing his art with the Ogden community at The Monarch, 455 25th St., sponsored by Ogden Contemporary Arts. He said his artistic style focuses on painting, performances and sculptures that confront the palpable inescapability of race, transforming them into acts of cultural and spiritual reclamation.
“I grew up undocumented and disconnected, and my practice is in part a response to this,” he said. “I conjure indigenous spiritualities to embody the aesthetics of personal histories, cultural resistance, and colonial disruption.”
As the grandson of a Curandera (healer) and himself a practitioner of Curanderismo, Sahagun said when he makes art, he is making a mystical instrument that forges a pre-conquest connection in order to interrupt Eurocentric models and heal wounds of colonization.
“I spent 10 years as a construction worker, pushing my body to its limits as I poured concrete and installed drywall. Now, I use the skills of the construction worker to create objects in homage to the undocumented laboring class, a lineage my family is part of,” Sahagun said. “My materials are silicone, lumber, drywall, concrete and hardware. These atypical fine arts materials, when mixed with beads, sea shells, rope and maize, create artworks that celebrate the craft of brown labor while immortalizing my stories and the stories of my communities.”
OCA Executive Director Venessa Castagnoli said the organization is excited about Sahagun’s unique approach of inviting visitors into his studio to experience limpia (clean) rituals and believes it will create a new perspective of what art is.
During his two-month stay, Sahagun said he will conduct 12 limpia portraits.
“We focus on bringing ritual and ceremony to that story to bring a new meaning that reclaims the narrative. I then conduct a spiritual cleansing in which I use drawing and bead making as a shamanic tool to find the medicine needed for the sitter’s healing,” he said.
To begin a portrait, he said he transforms into a spiritual consultant. He assesses the person’s emotional situation by asking them what burdens they want to release. Next, he said, he embarks on a shamanic journey, using the medicine wheel to procure the cleanses, healings and/or purifications that are needed as he taps into the spirit world by connecting with his Nagual, or spirit guide.
“I then work on the portrait over a number of sessions while performing multiple limpias, drawing facial features in charcoal and fashioning clothing and other features from miniature animal sculptures to ‘communicate’ a recommended medicine,” Sahagun said.
He also adds custom-made resin beads that are charged with plant medicine, crystals, chants and photographic images important to the subject or person.
“Recent loss and a curiosity ignited by research on ancient indigenous traditions of ceremony, ritual and healing is what is leading this project,” he said. “I am not an individual that is focused on being an expert, but rather I believe in communicating and creating spaces where we can come together grieve, vent, rant and for knowledge sharing.
Sahagun was born in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico in 1982. His grandfather came to the United States in the 1940s under the Bracero Program, working in Chicago’s steel industry. His parents found work in the fields in the late 1970s and Sahagun was brought to America in 1985. He became a naturalized citizen in 1995 under President Ronald Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act.
Raised in Chicago and now a resident of North Carolina, Sahagun’s art has been exhibited at numerous venues including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Latchkey Gallery in New York City, the National Museum of Mexican Art of Chicago, Charlie James Gallery in Los Angeles and many others.
“I was not supposed to make it. As an undocumented child growing up in an impoverished Chicago suburb surrounded by police corruption and violence, my future was bleak,” he said. “I camouflaged myself in toughness in order to survive and nearly lost myself to the streets. However, two of my best friends fell victim to gang homicide, another was imprisoned in juvenile detention and I myself was falsely accused of attempted murder.”
That’s when he said he gained unforeseen clarity and redirected himself in a more positive, healthy lifestyle. He became the first in his family to graduate from college, eventually earning a Master’s of Fine Arts.
“After college, I worked for a furniture design company where I became one of their top design engineers and was instrumental in financially transforming them from a $1 million to a $4 million company,” he said. “After, I joined a Fortune 500 design company’s research and development team. I share this part of my journey because at this point in my life I was financially successful, but I was existentially lost. The material things that I had meant nothing to me, but society told me that in order for me to be happy I needed to have what others wanted. I had lost sight of what was important to me.”
In 2008, he was laid off due to the economic recession and after a year of fighting depression he went for a walk in his community and discovered a local art gallery. Union Street Gallery offered him an internship that granted him access to artists and their studios.
“This is where I was reminded of my love for art. Art became a vehicle for me to examine who I was in this world and how I could contribute to society,” he said. “I believe art has the power to transform lives because it transformed mine. My hybrid cultural origins and multiple identities become strength, the power to see back and ahead and through, and my hands labor to keep up, mining old traditions for new tools to help my spirit and ancestors speak to and through me. My art screams what is written in my bones.”