Statement / Bio

www.victorcartagena.net

Statement / Bio
Salvadoran-born Victor Cartagena was awarded the "Visions from the New California" grant award in 2004, sponsored by a seven-member California Artist residency program consortium and pursued a month-long residency at 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica in July 2004. In 2004 he received a grant from the Peter S. Reed Foundation in support of the development of his work and was nominated for the Joan Mitchell Award. He was a joint recipient of a Rockefeller grant with Octavio Solis and Larry Reed for Shadowlight's production of The Seven Visions of Encarnaciòn produced at the Brava Theater Center in November 2002.

Cartagena received a Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation 2001 Visual Arts Purchase Award, the competitive Art Council award in the year 2000 (currently known as ARTADIA), and 1996 and 2000 Pacific Prints awards. Cartagena was also nominated for the Eureka Fellowship/Fleishhacker Foundation in 1998, 2002 & 2005-07, the 2004 & 2002 IN/SITE (formerly SECA) Art Award, the Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the SFAI 2000 and the 2003 Adeline Kent Award. Victor Cartagena has been making art in the Bay Area for over a decade.

Cartagena tackles numerous social issues in the U.S. such as consumer culture, homelessness, and material waste. His artistic palette has also branched out to include sculpture, audio and video. In recent years, Cartagena has also ventured into the world of set-design, receiving critical acclaim for his set-design for Greg Sarris' Mission Indians, a Campo Santo/Intersection for the Arts production and his collaboration with Larry Reed and Octavio Solis on Shadowlight's Seven Visions of Encarnacion.

Locally, Cartagena has exhibited at Southern Exposure, Palo Alto Cultural Center, the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley, Galeria de la Raza, New Langton Arts, Ampersand International Arts, Intersection for the Arts, Catharine Clark Gallery, Euphrat Museum, the Mission Cultural Center, MACLA/Center for Latino Arts, and the Sonoma Museum of Visual Arts. In 2002 he participated in the "Espíritu Sin Fronteras" exhibit at the Oakland Museum with an installation/altar "Homenaje a Roque Dalton, poeta Salvadoreno." In April 2000 Cartagena participated in the Home Visit project at MACLA with internationally known installation artist Pepón Osorio.

Cartagena's work has been reviewed in Artweek, Art Issues, The San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Bay Guardian, The San Jose Mercury News, The Oakland Tribune, Cambio and El Latino, Hoy (L.A.), among others. Nationally, Cartagena has exhibited in New York, Philadelphia, Honolulu, and all over California, including Los Angeles. Internationally, Cartagena has exhibited in Mexico, Japan, El Salvador, Belarus, Ecuador and Greece.

Cartagena has served as Artist-in-Residence at ZEUM, Southern Exposure, and SF Art Commission's WritersCorps. He has given numerous workshops, including two Family Sundays and the Matches Program at SFMOMA, and has presented his collaboration with Log Cabin youth at the CO-LAB exhibit at SF State University's Fine Art Gallery in spring of 2002. He teaches Printmaking, Mixed Media and Photography at Arrowsmith Academy and the work of his students has been exhibited at SFMOMA's window galleries and Horizons Unlimited. He also teaches printmaking at Berkeley's New Age Academy. Cartagena has served on the roster of Leap, Imagination in Learning and Young Audiences of the Bay Area. Cartagena's work is in numerous private and institutional collections, including the Honolulu Academy of Arts, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Contemporary Art Museum, Honolulu, Hawaii, The Oxbow School of Art, Napa, CA & the Collection of Egnatia Odos in Thessaloniki, Greece.