“I wanted to feel like I was in a painting,” said Justin Favela about his room-sized piñata landscape “painting” I saw in 2018 at the Berman Museum. The artist, who was in residence at Berman, even included in his installation a pale-blue piñata sky fastened to the ceiling. “We never did a ceiling before, and we did it!” he said. Favela, who travels widely to show his work and speak about it at museums around the country and elsewhere, installed a wall-sized work in his recent show at Paradigm Gallery. Other works in the Paradigm show (closed May 8, 2022) included easel-sized piñata paintings and 3D works, of foods as represented in still life paintings. The paintings have a pointillist vibe to them: They are abstract when viewed at close range and coalesce into readable shapes and objects from afar. The colors are bright and joyful, and the content is both a love of Latino culture and a critique of colonialism and white dominance. Enjoy this lively podcast with Justin saying wise and memorable things, and talking a lot about food. Justin is a foodie, and he is excited for Artblog’s upcoming book, “Artblog Atlas of Art and Food in Philadelphia.” We are honored that he will participate in the book, with excerpts from this podcast appearing along with an image or two!
You can listen to Artblog Radio on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and many other audio platforms on the web. Thank you to Kyle McKay for composing Artblog Radio’s original podcast intro and outro!
Transcription
[00:00:12] Roberta Fallon: Hello, everyone, welcome to this episode of Artblog Radio! I’m Roberta, co-founder and editor of Artblog, and I’m very excited to have with me this morning, Justin Favela. Hello Justin! It’s great to see you.
[00:00:26] Justin Favela: Hi, thank you for having me! Good to see you again.
[00:00:29] Roberta: Oh, it’s great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. I want to give Justin a little bit of introduction to our people that don’t know his art and who he is. Justin Favela is a nationally known queer Latinx artist, based in his hometown of Las Vegas, but travels, widely doing installations that we’ll talk about later.
Right now he’s got a show called “Fresh Cut Fruit” at Philadelphia’s Paradigm Gallery. And that’s up till May 8th, and I want to encourage everyone to go see the show, highly, highly recommended. Justin works with installation, performance, and piñatas.
Yes- piñatas, which he makes in political characatures, that’s sort of what I would call them, of the classic Mexican birthday party pinatas, but they’re critical. They are not supportive of Western culture’s use of these pinatas. So critical of Western culture, and they’re beautiful in their crafting and really great to look at. So run over to Paradigm now for this chance to see them.
So anyway, welcome. And that was a long introduction. So let’s hear some of you now, and I want to talk about food. So you have a food themed show! Tell us about how that came along and tell us what inspires you to make your art about food.
[00:01:54] Justin Favela: Well, I think that a lot of times, especially in the United States, an ice breaker, kind of an entry point to other people’s culture, is there food. And I realized that at a really young age, as a Latinx American, right? My mom’s Guatemalan, my dad’s Mexican, and it’s this thing that’s really fun to talk about, but it’s also… for people of color it’s it could be a microaggression, right? You meet an Indian person and you start talking about Curry with them. They’re more than Curry. Right? And like, Latinos are more than tacos, and rice and beans.
So in my art, I always play with that kind of dichotomy of like celebration and exploitation or, you know, these things that seem really fun, but are also deep seated in racism and white supremacy, right? And so, a lot of my work is about, about taking hold of the narrative and saying, “okay, well, I don’t know why people are asking me about tacos and burritos all the time, but I’m gonna really lean into it and investigate this, and just become kind of this hyper version of somebody that talks about tacos and Mexican food.
So I started making a lot of art in the style almost of like, Klaus Oldenburg. Like really giant food sculptures, to point out kind of the ridiculousness of it, because that’s what Oldenburg did too, is like, “wow, can’t believe Americans eat so much, their serving sizes are huge.” Right?
And so for me, uh, referencing food in my work, it opens up, the floor for conversation, uh, about authenticity, but then also about kind of the ridiculousness of kind of pinning that on a certain identity. And so, um, yeah.
So you can see from, (laughing) from my answer to the question, there’s so much to talk about when it comes to food and it’s really a jumping off point.
So my podcast, “Latinos who Lunch,” it was about food, but it was much more than that. It was about art, it was about politics, it was about, you know, these intersections of like race, gender, and privilege.
[00:04:17] Roberta: Yeah, no, I love those podcasts and let’s just clear up one thing that I was not 100% certain of, but I think you’ve closed that project. The podcast is… it’s an archive now. They’re still available, right?
[00:04:30] Justin Favela: Yes. We have five years of that podcast for free online. You could go to LatinosWhoLunch.com.
[00:04:38] Roberta: Yeah, it’s great, do it. I it’s a lot of laughing, but really, and it’s bilingual, so there was stuff that I didn’t understand, but a lot I did and I loved it. I just love it. and you talk with your, it sounds like he was your teacher, possibly? Your art historian friend, Emmanuel Ortega?
[00:04:59] Justin Favela: Yeah! He, I mean, officially he was never my teacher, but I, I ended up taking classes after I graduated from school because when I went to school, there was no Mexican art history classes offered. So…
[00:05:12] Roberta: Oh, my God. You’re kidding.
[00:05:14] Justin Favela: No! And so I… I met him through a friend, uh, maybe one or two years after I graduated. And he said, “yeah, you can come and sit in on my class, you know, take my classes. You can just, you know, hang out, maybe buy me lunch once in a while.”
And, uh, that’s what, (that’s what started the podcast, our conversations at lunch.
[00:05:34] Roberta: Yeah, Oh, that’s great. So they actually started as Latinos at lunch. You were lunching. (laughs)
[00:05:39] Justin Favela: Yeah, exactly! (laughs)
[00:05:41] Roberta: That’s fun. That’s fun. Well, one thing as you’ve been talking here, I want to talk about Taco Bell.
[00:05:49] Justin Favela: Oh yeah.
[00:05:49] Roberta: Now that seems like the classic capitalistic appropriation, if there ever was one. So… what do you think?
[00:05:57] Justin Favela: Um, well I know that for, for Latinos, for Chicanos, right? That Taco Bell is… is very inauthentic Mexican food. And so I, you know, I like to… (laughs) I like to kind of poke fun at people that are Taco Bell haters because there’s this… Yeah, there’s this really strong notion about what is “authentically Mexican.”
And I think that’s dangerous because Mexico is such a vast country when it comes to the different types of cuisine within the regions of Mexico, that Mexican food is so much more than just one thing, right? If you’re eating food in Northern Mexico, you’re talking flour tortillas, a lot of beef, a lot of red salsa, right? A lot of really spicy food. And then if you head down south towards, let’s say, Oaxaca, corn tortillas, you’re getting, there’s a lot of mescal down there. Um, they are doing things with quesadillas that I could have never imagined in my life. And there’s course mole, and all these different….
So mexican food is very, very diverse. And Taco Bell is just part of the story. It’s this industrialized, americanized, bastardized version of Mexican food that is connected to TexMex. And I remember when I was a kid, my parents and I, you know, my family members, kind of… turning their nose up at TexMex. Like, “why is there so much sour cream on that food?” or, you know, like (laughs) “that’s not even spicy” or “that’s not nachos,” “chimichangas? that’s not real food.”
And, um, I actually got to do this kind of research project slash installation with the Houston Center of Contemporary Craft a few years back where we really got to dive into the histories of the food. And what I realized, was like TexMex Is authentic. To Texas. It’s authentically TexMex, and it is Mexican food. A lot of that food was invented on the border by Mexicans or Mexican Americans, right?
And so, Taco Bell is kind of an extension of that. I always like to say Taco Bell’s my favorite Mexican restaurant just to piss people off, but it gives me the opportunity to talk about kind of these histories.
In the mid-century, like mid 20th century, that’s when Glen Bell really started to like, industrialize the taco shell, with the hard shell taco. And when– after he opened up taco bell– and that led to the globalization of Mexican food, much like the globalization of like, Chinese and Thai food in the fifties. Like it’s not really Chinese food, it’s the American version of it.
But, you know, you go to the UK, places in Europe and you go to Mexican restaurants. And a lot of times you’re eating American-style Mexican food, right? So, Taco Bell really did lead the globalization of Mexican food and they started introducing it everywhere.
And now, I actually got to go to Ireland a few years ago, and I went to a Mexican restaurant expecting TexMex and Taco Bell, but now, people are a little bit more savvier. You know, the internet has made the world a little bit smaller. And so I was in Ireland eating, like authentic– to me, right? I hate to say authentic, but– it felt like I was eating in a taco spot in east LA. It was like very like genuinely good Mexican food.
And that, that is thanks to Glen Bell and, and the introduction of the, (laughing) of the industrial taco shell, right? They’re the ones that introduced the food to other places. And now the story kind of continues, which I find interesting.
[00:10:01] Roberta: Yeah. And it’s like, could it have happened any other way? Because now with the internet, it might have! It might’ve been brought by you to Ireland, instead of, you know, having a show and talking about food and whatnot and– not authentic, but, um, Mexican food, and TexMex, and whatnot.
[00:10:21] Justin Favela: Also the food at Taco Bell is developed by scientists to be… to just hit every part of your palette, to have the exact right temperature, texture… it’s like, one of the best, I think next to maybe Chipotle, it’s probably one of the best… like Chipotle and Panda express, it’s one of, some of the best engineered food out there since the Dorito.
[00:10:50] Roberta: (laughs) Are you being ironic? I really tell!
[00:10:55] Justin Favela: No, I’m not! (laughing) I’m being so serious.
[00:10:59] Roberta: Okay! You must go on a tour of the flavor factories in New Jersey. You know, I think they have these things? New Jersey is full of flavor factories, where they just sit there and they do this, the scientists.
[00:11:12] Justin Favela: Oh my gosh. I love that.
[00:11:16] Roberta: So let’s, um, segue back to your show and your art. I would love to talk more food with you and we can come back to that. But, um, the one question, if you could just describe one of the pieces for me, which one I really liked that I saw online in the show, is “Fruits of the Tropics, After Currier and Ives”
[00:11:40] Justin Favela: Yeah.
[00:11:42] Roberta: That one is like extraordinary to me. So what inspired it and what does it look like? We’ll get a picture of it from the gallery, but just describe what it shows.
[00:11:54] Justin Favela: Yeah. So the exhibition at Paradigm Gallery is all based on a friend’s book. Dr. Shana Klein, “Fruits of the Empire.” And I… I was just fascinated by this book. She takes the history– uh, or untold histories, I should say– about the representation of fruit, and art, and media in the 19th century mostly, um, and talks about how it really influenced the way that we ate food and what food we did eat here in the United States.
And so there was a time when bananas, oranges watermelon, those were exotic fruit here in the United States and people were afraid to eat them, or they just weren’t used to eating them. So the piece that you’re, that you’re referencing, um, I think it was originally made in Philadelphia too, which is so cool to have that connection. And also the, the United States Centennial celebration was in Philly and, uh, there was a huge orange display in that. So there’s also oranges, uh, referenced in the Fresh Cut Fruit exhibit because of that. I wanted to tie it to Philly in that way, too.
But anyway, back to the lithograph that you’ve mentioned, it’s this just beautiful, almost like a cornucopia, kind of still life, of all of this fruit. And of course, the actual lithograph is very detailed and, and I like to make these paintings to scale. And once I start cutting up the tissue paper to make it, it kind of, the image kind of gets distorted and pixelated. So when you’re looking at the pinata painting based on that, on that famous lithograph, it is pixelated. It is, uh…. What I think I’m doing is kind of highlighting how those histories have been distorted and erased over time, and how now, myself and different artists are kind of reinterpreting and uncovering those same histories in this way.
So the gesture of making things pinata, to me, is to kind of highlight the… Not only celebrate the work, right? Cause that’s very obvious, celebrating it with something colorful, and fun, and festive, but also investigating it and, and really, you know, cutting it up and trying to get to these, you know, little untold stories, and really highlight kind of like the commodification of these images.
And I never would have thought that these fruits still lives that inspired the show had so much meaning until I really started digging in. Because you know, we’re just so used to having all of this exotic fruit. Around the… around 12 months a year in the grocery stores. But let me tell you, the more I dug into pineapple production and banana production, there was a lot, a lot of histories that are, that are not told– and frankly probably hidden because they’re very violent– to make sure that we have bananas for our smoothies every morning, right?
Um, so, yeah. So this show is just that: a celebration, but also a re-entry into those histories.
[00:15:19] Roberta: Yeah. I want to say, and this is just apropos of nothing that we just talked about- it looks to me like you’re sitting in a studio, and I see shelves of paper in back of you, different colored paper. Is that what I’m seeing?
[00:15:33] Justin Favela: Yeah, this is where my storage room. This is my paper storage room (laughs)
[00:15:37] Roberta: Okay!
[00:15:38] Justin Favela: Has the best acoustics.
[00:15:41] Roberta: Yeah, as many closets actually do. (laughs)
[00:15:45] Justin Favela: I’m back in the closet. It’s Thanksgiving all over again. (Just kidding!
[00:15:53] Roberta: Um, okay well so- let’s talk about the commercial gallery aspect of the show and the livability of this work in people’s homes. It’s very delicate I would think? So does it come with like conservation instructions on… do you put it under glass, or what do you tell people?
[00:16:13] Justin Favela: Yeah! Well, um, it is, it is tissue paper, so it is sensitive to light. Uh, I will say I try to get, I get high-grade tissue paper, so a lot of the paintings that I’ve made have stood the test of time, uh… Well, at least for the last 10 years that I’ve been making them. But there is ways to preserve the work if you want it to last longer, uh, obviously putting it in a place that does not receive direct sunlight is the best for the work.
Um, but then, yeah. If people are really concerned about the work, maybe getting wet or fading, or… you know, it’s almost a three-dimensional… I mean, it comes off, it can come off the wall a few inches if it’s fluffy, you know? And so (laughs) there have been a lot of collectors that put them in shadow boxes, which, uh, actually I really love. It looks, because it makes it more of an object, which is, which is interesting to me.
But yeah, where there’s a will, there’s a way, you know? That that was a big, hurdle that I had to, had to kind of jump across when I first started making these works, because people were afraid to buy them. And then I had the, that same trip that I went to Ireland, I got to go to Paris. And, uh, when I was a kid, Picasso was one of my favorite artists. So I wanted to go to the Picasso museum in Paris and I went there, and I noticed that I was in this gallery, and all of the paintings in this gallery by Picasso were on cardboard. And so I thought to myself, “I don’t want to hear another person tell me that making stuff on cardboard isn’t acceptable,” you know? And, uh, And so I thought, “yeah, that’s true.”
And then I started noticing when I went to other museums, like, oh yeah, this artwork from the 19, you know, from the early 1900s is on newsprint and it’s being preserved, right? So, yeah. There’s different ways to make sure that the work, uh, is safe, and… But you know what, I kind of embraced the fading of the paper a little bit more than I used to because now that I have work that’s 10 years old and I look at it, it’s still, it still holds up and it becomes kind of part of the painting.
[00:18:26] Roberta: Yeah. Yeah. I like that. That’s a nice way to think about it. It goes along with its object-ness, you know? You to hold onto objects for a long time. You don’t want to let them go. And so… it, but it will change. So you just go with the change.
[00:18:44] Justin Favela: Exactly.
[00:18:44] Roberta: Like a body changing over time. You know, you’re not going to get rid of your friends because their bodies change (laughs)
[00:18:50] Justin Favela: And you know, I have experience working at all kinds of museums over the years. I, you know, being from Las Vegas, uh, there’s not a lot of like, direct like art jobs, but there’s a lot of weird kind of jobs. And one of my jobs, uh, was, uh, helping with the archive at the Liberace Foundation. And so sometimes my job was to switch out the costumes that were on display. And so, uh, thinking of Liberace’s like giant feathered, you know, costumes, they, we could only hang them for a certain amount of months because there were so heavy, they would start kind of pulling away at the seams. And so a way to preserve that was okay, well, this has been out in the light for three months, we got to put it back, you know, and, and bring something else out.
So, um, it’s just, I think, I think when people start thinking of the tissue paper as more of something delicate and more precious, then they start thinking of actual ways that they can hold onto it a little longer.
[00:19:54] Roberta: Yeah, yes.
[00:19:56] Justin Favela: Yeah.
[00:19:56] Roberta: Good points. I want to move to a different subject now and talk about your landscape work. Because, not only do you do food and things of that nature, but you you’re very interested in the concept of landscape and you’ve done many translations of painted landscapes into a pinata. And you’ve also done some responses to land art. So I’d love to get into all of that, uh…
Yeah. So let’s talk first, um, about, how about talking about your show at the Berman Museum, where it seemed to me there were a lot of landscape um, pinata-fications, and then you were making an installation– this was in 2018– that was a walk in sort of pinata. It had a blue sky over you and everything.
[00:20:54] Justin Favela: Yeah, that was, that was fun. And my shoulders are still in pain from that, from putting it on the wall! (laughs) No, it’s so, it was such a cool project because the Berman really did support me in anything I wanted to do. And I said, you know what? I’ve never done a ceiling before. Let’s do it. And we figured out a way to do it, which is so cool.
The show at the Berman was a big installation at the base of the museum, and then on one of their top floor galleries, I had a landscapes show, um, and it was really, uh, inspired by the artist José María Velasco, who was a, uh, 19th century Mexican painter, that… really, his work was the symbol of the nation for a very long time. And what interests me about these paintings are, not only the beauty of them, because, you know, I think landscapes are just… The paintings that are just revered pretty much in all cultures, right? Uh, you know, when people started putting pigment to canvas, uh, they wanted to see themselves and they wanted to see the beauty of nature. And so, um, it’s a way to really capture that.
Again, once you start doing a little more research on these paintings, um, uh, they were a little bit more sinister than I thought. They were, you know, they were postcards to advertise Mexico during the colonization of Mexico. So they would send these paintings out to world expos, uh, to say, “look at all this land, just ripe for the picking, come and set up your, come and set up your industry here.” So a lot of those landscape paintings had just the beginning of villages, and towns, and cities and Mexico. Um, and uh, a lot of them, uh, I would say we’re very exoticized and the, the vegetation, um, and, and the way that the landscape was kind of laid out, uh, compared to maybe what those places would have looked like in real life.
Um, and I think that’s, that’s something that I really find interesting because before really digging into José María Velasco’s work, I never really thought about landscape paintings as a tool of colonization. But when you start thinking about it, it’s like I’m painting the, you know, a lot of art, a lot of the mentality is like, all right, uh, I’m doing a painting of this landscape, and therefore it’s a little bit of ownership over that landscape, because you were the first to really document it in that way, and everything after that is just really in response to the original painting, right? And so it’s a very, interesting subject that I didn’t think was going to be so interesting, you know? (laughs)
Um, and yeah, and then that carries on to my bigger installations because, um, a lot of these installations have figures, like smaller people in the foreground to kind of show you scale, and I always wanted to feel like I was in one of those paintings. So I started to make these paintings really large scale to the point where they were, they were kind of just taking over a room and you were really engulfed in them, which is a really, a really strange, but really fun feeling and experience.
[00:24:17] Roberta: Yeah, that’s great. So, um, let’s talk also about monuments because I, I listened to a wonderful YouTube podcast that had you speaking with your friend Emmanuel Ortega, um, and it was a lot about land art, and landscape painting, and art, and who owns the land, and who’s got the right to make the work, and you talked about mon- uh, monuments also.
So you want to talk about the land art monuments near where you grew up in Nevada and your to them?
[00:25:01] Justin Favela: Yeah. I, yeah, land art to me, um, is fascinating. And along the lines of minimalist art, I remember learning about that in school and thinking, “wow, like the audacity of these white men to make this cube and call it art, or to dig a hole in the ground and call it art, right?” (laughs)
And so just the idea of, of these, of these people reshaping the land and claiming that they’re doing, they’re actually, you know, that it’s actually art… I mean, obviously it is, it’s been documented, it’s thought of that within the institution that is the art world. And so, I always, uh, kind of think back to the same ideas behind the landscape paintings is like, what are they doing? Are they, are they an agent of colonization? Um, or are they really celebrating the landscape? So are, is land art celebrating the land or is it just, uh, a piece to like fill somebody’s ego, you know?
And so, um, I started doing these performances called “family fiestas” um, many years ago with my family, and the original idea of them was to, uh, to take over spaces and use them. And, uh, and, in kind of the old tradition of the “happenings,” uh, back in the sixties, right? Of just something happening, and you had to be there to, to witness it, to be part of the art piece, and if you weren’t, “oh, well,” you know? And, um, I did a few of them at different museums, um, really kind of challenging the notions of institutional inclusion, right? Like, who is a museum actually for? Most museums have like these beautiful lawns and parks, you know? Um, but uh, most of the time they’re not really enjoyed, cause they’re just meant to kind of be these sterile places. And so when I think of land art, it’s almost the same thing, right?
And so Michael Heizer, uh, has a lot of work in Nevada, and one of the pieces is, one of his, one of his first in 1970, “Double Negative,” where he dug two canyons out of the old Mesa near Overton, in Nevada. And he, uh, and it’s been there for many, many years, kind of falling apart, it doesn’t look like a nice clean cut anymore, that’s what the work’s about, you know, entropy and all that…
and so I thought, what would it be like if I brought my family here, and we use the space like a park, or just to have fun, and threw a party. And so, my family knowing nothing about land art, and we really just took over the space and had a really fun day and.. now that, that place has a different meaning to me. Now it’s a place where we had a party, and that is the art piece to me now, you know? So it’s a really, it’s a really kind of cheeky, but also like, serious way of reclaiming space, um, that was once ours.
[00:28:12] Roberta: Yeah. Wow. I hear that. And your family, was… were they happy? What are, what is their experience of these fiestas?
[00:28:22] Justin Favela: Well, when they’re… So “Double Negative,” that was a challenge because it wasn’t tied to an institution, and it was just kind of, we just went out there and did it. And so, it was just, really, my family is very supportive. So, uh, they don’t really ask questions, they just say, “all right, what do you need us to do? Well okay. I’ll bring the grill, I’ll bring the drinks.” You know, everybody has their, you know, assignments and, uh, they just went out and helped.
But when we get to travel to museums now, it’s, it’s really fascinating because at first, they quite didn’t understand what was going on, and what this was about. And that’s one thing that I wanted to make sure, that, I wanted my family to be in on the joke I wanted them to be in on, on, on the piece and, and be a part of it, and actually collaborate with me on the work.
And that’s actually exactly what happened, uh, you know, one of my aunts always is in charge of decorations, one of them is always coordinating our outfits, one of my uncles is always in charge of the food, and my cousin loves to make sure that she does the pinata, you know, so everybody has a job now. And it’s become a family tradition. So now every year, um, they’re just like, Justin, where are you going to take us this year to do a Family Fiesta? You know? So it’s become really, uh, it’s, it’s become a family tradition and, um, In a way really kind of brought us closer because, because I’m in charge of this one thing that we do, um, kind of like, the social hierarchies of my family are completely, uh, you know, just put in a blender and, and, you know, the, kind of the, the normal rules for the male, you know, for the men and the women that are kind of switched around.
And, and I, I have seen that that has affected our relationships in real life when, uh, When you know… Especially, I know a lot of Latino or immigrant families know this experience is like when, when you go to a, uh, a barbecue, you know, the men sit over here, drink beer and talk, and the women are over here cooking, and, you know, and I definitely noticed a difference in how we interact after that, which is very touching, and I didn’t realize that’s what was going to happen with this artwork.
[00:30:36] Roberta: That’s amazing. It’s almost like you’re doing a social practice project with just the community that is your family (laughs)
[00:30:42] Justin Favela: Exactly. (laughs)
[00:30:43] Roberta: Which is wonderful! It’s it’s a new thought about social practice art.
[00:30:49] Justin Favela: Precisely. Yeah.
[00:30:51] Roberta: So, where are you going to take the fiesta this year? Do you have a place yet?
[00:30:55] Justin Favela: I don’t have any fiestas confirmed yet, but I am working on it. Um, you know, the pandemic kind of threw us for a loop. So I think maybe 2023 will be the, will be the restart of the family fiesta. But, um, you know, I, I hope to, yeah, I hope to do more in the future. And I think they’re coming, for sure.
[00:31:16] Roberta: Good. I hope so too.
Well, let me just thank you so much from the bottom of my heart. It’s been a lovely conversation and I’m so deeply grateful for you to be here today. So thank you.
I’ve been speaking with Justin Favela, thank you, Justin! Oh, and where are you speaking to us from?
[00:31:34] Justin Favela: I’m in Las Vegas, in my studio. Yeah.
[00:31:37] Roberta: Well, we’ll see you in cyberspace again, I’m sure. And I hope you can bring a Fiesta to Philadelphia! That would be awesome.
[00:31:44] Justin Favela: I would love that. I would love that. Yes. Thank you so much for having me. This was fun.
[00:31:49] Roberta: Thank you. Bye bye.
