LOPEZ, ALBERT JR. - 2015 - Laserfiche WebLink

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Dan Cameron 110 Redondo Avenue Long Beach, CA 90803 917.251.4554 May 19, 2015 Dear City of Santa Ana Arts Commission, I'm writing this letter of recommendation to support Albert Lopez Jr.'s application for a grant to underwrite production and materials costs for the project In a Popsicle's Space with a grant from the City of Santa Ana. By way of Introduction, I am a contemporary art curator and writer, active in the field since the early 1980s. From January 2012 until March of this year, I was Chief Curator at the Orange County of Art (OCMA), and for 10 months of that period its Acting Director. My work is well known in the field, and some of the most significant working friendships I have with artists has come about through collaborations that require their talents in other capacities, Jason Middlebrook, to take one example, is an internationally respected sculptor, but my familiarity with him as an artist came about through a working relationship when I was Senior Curator at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, and Jason ran a small company that built temporary walls for museum exhibitions. I mention this last point because I first became aware of Mr. Lopez's art through my working relationship with him at OCMA, where he is Director of Operations, and during most of my tenure there he designed the installations and managed the crew. From a curator's standpoint, it's easy to spot the visual artists on an installation team, because they are the first ones to grab a piece of paper and show you how something works or how it should look by making a drawing. It quickly became apparent that Mr. Lopez's skills included painting, sculpture, and architectural design, and that his background as an artist included an MFA from LIC Irvine, which is widely regarded as one of the most rigorous and demanding programs of its kind. Frorn his Irvine years, Mr. Lopez brings a critical sensibility to bear on how pictorial imagery is best read and interpreted, and how its implicit meanings can be communicated through the use of cultural signifiers. As should be clear from his support materials, Mr. Lopez combines much of the technical virtuosity of an academically trained painter with a critical viewpoint that presents the viewer with a visual riddle; how am I to ascribe meaning to this experience? In what is arguably his most exhibited and photographed painting, a donkey poses as if for a tourist's snapshot, blithely unaware that it is half - camouflaged in the colors of a zebra, and has its left