SALINA ALMANZAR
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STUDIO BLOG

A PEEK INSIDE

Updates!!!!

11/4/2015

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Felicidades! It's been a while! 
I just picked up Piri Thomas' Savior, Savior Hold my Hand and Julia Alvarez's collection of essays Something to Declare. My god they are fantastic writers. There's something really raw about both of them though their writing style couldn't be more different. I've also been attending several artists talks. The Lancaster Library recently received funding for PBS's Latino Americans series. There's a series of talks and screenings happening until next Spring and I'm so excited to attend as many as I can. Patricia Johanson came to Millersville for the Conrad Nelson lecture series. Her work is unrelated to my more identity based work, but she's very smart and works between education and fine art. I feel like much of what I'm doing is the same. It reminded me of how excited I was about the cross-section between education and art when I saw Latoya Ruby Frazier at the SPE conference. Both women are well-versed in their area of expertise and take time to really educate their audience beyond the work they produce. It was reassuring to know that I, too, can delve further into the references I'm interested in and take the opportunity to educate my audience as well. I always worry that I'm too much in my own head with the things I want to address. 

Moving on, I decided I want to make 12 busts. 12 because I like making 12 of things. Because there are 12 months in a year, the 12 disciples, 12 people in a jury etc. etc. 12 just feels weighty and important and it's the only even number besides 16 that I've gravitated toward. 12 is also the age I was when I really felt 'different' than my peers. I moved to Lancaster in September 2001 from the Bronx. I had transferred to a 5th grade class in Lancaster City and was faced with a very different culture. In New York I felt like race didn't really matter. We celebrated everyone and there were so many different cultures in the area we lived in. We were also so so young. After 9/11, I think everyone became more race conscious. My uncle is has a more ruddy skin tone than his siblings. He worked at a Starbucks near the World Trade Center and had to volunteer handing out coffee and pastries to those that were cleaning what was left of the towers after the attack. I remember him calling several times angry that people would see his skin, assume he was muslim and spit, literally spit, at him and tell him to go back to his country. This was my first real encounter with race and understanding that I'm white-passing. Moving to Lancaster, I didn't 'sound' like my latina counterparts because I had a "New York accent" and most of the latinxs in my grade were bilingual. It was the first time I felt like my voice, my skin, and being from a different city set me further apart from them. We were also attending a baptist church with a primarily african-american congregation. Conversations about my hair, how I talked, how I dressed, and how "I wasn't one of the loud ones" were a daily occurrence. I can't say that I've experienced racism in all of it's ugly forms, but boy do I know micro-aggressions. So, for me, 12 feels like the age I lost a sort of naive sense of who I was and gained a more complex understanding of my culture. 

Here is how many pieces I have so far!

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day two...Sort of

8/25/2015

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Today is day two and I will be meeting the Advanced Class this evening. I'll probably write about that tomorrow after my second day with the beginning class. As I've mentioned, I'm working on a new series involving embroidery, photography and various printmaking media. I'm referencing symbols and icons from my Puerto Rican and Dominican backgrounds in this series (see here!). It's called Lazos de Sangre which translates to bloodlines. Here I'm actively in the process of exploring my heritage but deliberately not really addressing my family proper. I feel that it is important for me to sort of reach back as far as I can into the history of both countries to better understand how that culture has morphed into what it is today in the States. It's difficult because growing up in a Latinx household, it is easy to assume that everything your family does is somehow influenced or similar to what happens on the island but in reality everything that happens on the mainland, down to the Spanish we speak is vastly different than the island. So I'm in a position as a second generation of Latinx living in the states that 1) speaks better Spanglish than Spanish, 2) Has never visited Puerto Rico (though I have been to DR) 3) Is considered by much of my family (in the most endearing way) the least Latinx of all Latinx. I'm white-passing, don't have an accent of any kind and am still learning about what it means to be Latinx. Granted I'm well pretty well versed in the history of both Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico but still my book smarts are somehow deemed less than the smarts others in my family gleaned from being on the island or living in the Barrio or Boogey Down Bronx. It's a hard road to navigate and I'm finally learning to express these somewhat suppressed feelings of cultural confusion through my artwork. In the process I'm reading tons of books and articles regarding Santeria, Taino Mythology, Feminism and the Latinx community, and the list goes on and on. A lot of the 2D pieces I've started are self-portraits I've shot and then manipulated post-printing. They've evolved tremendously and are very organic in nature. I tend to let them dictate what they need. I generally have an idea of what's going to be in the piece as far as which motif I'll use however, more often than not I'll add things on a whim or because it just feels right. 
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This is the first attempt I ever made to directly address identity and Latinismo in my artwork. It took about a year to really feel comfortable doing this.
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Here you can see the repetition of motifs from the second piece. I also have begun to incorporate the vejigantes masks more explicitly.
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This one actually sold. It is the second and most hasty attempt at the topic. I made it in about two days and something just clicked with it. It was shown at Sunshine Art + Design in Lancaster, PA.
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This piece is the first to use something other than faces. It is the first to also draw from Taino symbolism in the stitching patter on the breasts. This will be on view at Sunshine Art + Design in September!

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Photo used under Creative Commons from Sneha radhakrishnan
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