The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 63

SUNDAY, JULY 6, 1997 A Section of the Sunday Examiner Chronicle a-tiii San 3ranrisro grjronidr 3 'jine I Malaquias Montoya Mm IP Il Portrait Of an Artist With a Mission A superb draughtsman who has remained true to his figurative path, Malaquias Montoya has given a visual voice to Mexican Americans -stir' i-rn TeL: mmim. By Vicky Elliott Chkonici.r Stakk Wkiti.k here are some artists, very few, whose voice is soft and whose work speaks for them. Malaquias Montoya has never thrust himself into the limelight, but the graphic energy of his pen and the immediacy of his images 1 have left an indelible mark. The son of farmworkers and a leading figure in the Chicano movement since the 1960s, Montoya, 59, put his stamp on the ephemera of political protest: bringing his mastery of silk-screening and printmaking to flyers that were, trampled underfoot, and his talents as a draughtsman and colorist to murals that have since been painted over. But after more than 30 unflagging years teaching and painting in the Bay Area and at the University of California at Davis, he has trained a generation of artists, far beyond his own community.

This year, in belated recognition from the art world, he was chosen as the California artist to receive the Adaline Kent Award at the San Francisco Art Institute. He spoke recently of art and his life at La Pena Cultural Institute in Berkeley, whose logo he designed. 1 I I If 5si 1.M i mm even being part of humanity. Some people will paint unrecognizable images, or cats and dogs you can control them. When you have a human form, pretty soon it's going to speak to you.

We know faces, we know twisted bodies, bodies that are proclaiming their freedom. i was struck by the image of "The Dude Who Turned Crazy." The ex-convicts in our community, people on that side of the street, have a kind of romanticism. They did drugs, they've been in prison, they're hard dudes, they have tattoos all over them. As artists, we tend to romanticize them, as we did James Cagney. That's sometimes very dangerous.

But we have to understand why these guys exist. I wanted to show that this person went crazy because of social conditions. He's not someone that you want to imitate. Teaching has always been a very important part of your life. When you're allowed to have 25 students in front of you, it's a great opportunity to bring them new ideas.

Education should be subversive. We live in a society where we grow up thinking that there's freedom: We can dye our hair purple, we can wear raggedy clothes, we can watch ridiculous programs on television, we can go and buy 1 3 different colors of Velveeta cheese. But it's almost like there's a spiritual oppression, and that's the most frightening, because we don't see it. Not understanding what it is leads you to all these other alienations. So we go out and we buy lots of clothes and drink a lot and hope that somehow that feeling will go away.

"School" comes from the Greek word skole, which means leisure. That's how learning should be: talking, questioning and trying to ana I silt 5 mm? MM 4 Photographs bylohn Wilson White you for guidance, for direction. In the movie industry, on the news, no one looked like you. You're discovering yourself, and you're using your art to speak about those conditions that you want to change. And all of a sudden, a voice that was much more articulate than my speaking voice had a vocabulary.

Artists started to get together and discuss these things. On Friday nights, with the MALA-F, the Mexican American Liberation Art Front, we talked about our commonality. And you were among the first latinos to go to college. In the late '60s, there were a surge of young men and women who were not supposed to go to university. We didn't think much "I needed the human figure, so that I could give that figure a voice, speak about the social injustices I experienced." about it.

I didn't know that Berkeley had the name that it had. I felt I didn't need the art department. I had nothing in common with what they were doing. I could not express the racism I encountered by painting chevrons or stripes or splashing paint on the canvas. I needed the human figure, so that I could give that figure a voice, speak about the social injustices I experienced.

The emphasis of the Chicano art movement, much like the Mexican mural movement, was the use of the human form, which mainstream art had done away with. We can all understand the human form, because we all feel pain, whether it's from a broken ankle or a twisted knee, or the pain that we have felt from living in a society which looks dqan on you as not 3or ,1 down the field and you could see his feet coming from under the vine. Were any artists in your family? Our house was always poor, but it was always decorated. Even in the migrant camp, where we lived in tents, we would go to work, and my mother would fix up the place. When we came home, that tent was like a home.

I was the first one to be born in. a city, but we used to go back to the mountains and visit my uncle. The colors in that adobe house were just incredible. Some years later, I asked my mother: "If we were so poor, where did you get the money to buy the paint and those decals you had going around the door trims?" She started telling me this incredible story. She said there were certain times of the year when the creeks would go down and would expose the earth, and she would scrape off the reds, browns and ochers.

You could go out there to the mountains and find these big chunks of white rock, like gypsum, and she would grind it up until it became like a plaster of Paris. With that, she would paint all the walls white. Then, with the colors she extracted from the earth, she would paint the rooms. And when she and my father would go to the dance in the mountains, she would bring home the crepe paper. When you put it in water, the dye comes out.

She would get a bucket of blue and add il to the ocher to make a green. On Highway 66, she would find abandoned tires and inner tubes and cut out designs, like birds and fish, and make printing blocks. And in the kitchen, what I thought was wallpaper turned out to be sections of tires, used as a step-and-repeat, in different patterns. For me, being a printmaker, it was a real eye-opener. We're all born creative, and somewhere along the way, some of us lose it.

Our parents would rather we not scribble on walls, but when children make marks on walls, they're saying something. It all depends on how you treat that. I oftentimes joke when I start a lecture, "My mother was an interior designer, and my father was a chemist." My father made whiskey in the mountains of New Mexico he spent time in Leavenworth state penitentiary. But 1 was always around art, whether it was our altar in my mother's room, or a Valentine candy box cut into a picture frame. There weren't any artists in the Jkrrv'I ki.pkr he Chronicle lyze why things are this way.

I tell my students, "Please don't take any notes. Iet's talk." Because we learn from each other. Your silk-screen studios were places to hang out. I had workshops in Oakland from 1969 to 1980. Kids would come in off the streets, anyone could come in, and we would do posters for high school dances, local fundraisers, community health clinics and events dealing with police brutality.

People would say to me: "Why do you do posters in five or six colors that will just be torn down?" I said, "We're inspired by that community, and we must give them back the best we can give." The idea was that we would reach the community with images, symbols they were familiar with, so that they would take pride in themselves. A poster of a Mayan face was a way of reaching them. Murals and posters become like our newspapers. They record events that are not important to the rest of the world. And most have an empowering ending, the overcoming of those tragedies.

I once was interviewed with another artist who said he left his politics at home when he left his door, and that he wanted his murals to make people feel good about themselves, to look up and say, That's me," and be smiling. And my answer was: "Until they get home, and the toilets are plugged up, and the windows are broken." Murals should not become just another form of art therapy. People in power would like for us to make pretty walls, decorate the community make people forget that they live in this ghetto, make them not want to ask questions. Why don't we tell people how they can organize and change those things? Two drawings, "Memories" (1992), right, and "El Vato que se Volvio Loco" (The Dude Who Turned Crazy, 1992), far right, appear in a retrospective of Montoya's work at the San Francisco Art Institute through July 13. A further exhibit will be held at the Center for Latino Arts in San Jose starting July 19.

little town where I lived, and I didn't read about artists. But growing up, somehow I got it in my mind that artists were special, very sensitive, that they felt more compassion. 1 remember being shocked to find there were artists who were racist. How did you learn printmaking? I came to Oakland and worked for Continental Can then 1 answered an ad in the paper that said: "Printer wanted. Hours 8-5.

I had never had a job in my life where you didn't work night shifts, on weekends, holidays. After I confessed that I had not done silk-screen printing, only some classes in handprinting letters, the guy said: "If you work for me for one month, I'll teach you how to silk-screen." So I went to work at a graphic design studio. They printed a lot of posters for clients, and that's what I ended up doing. In 1965, my boss suggested I go to San Jose City College and take a class in commercial art, and I started taking drawing classes from Joseph Zirker. From there, I came to Berkeley in 1968.

Zirker thought that Elmer Bischoff, of all the professors, would be more receptive to my style of drawing. It wasn't for commercial art. understand that at Berkeley you felt out of place. Bischoff told me: "I'm really the only person who still uses a paintbrush." I did have conflicts with some of the professors. I wanted to express my experience, and they would say, "Why are you doing cotton pickers? It's so archaic." They were on a different track altogether.

They were into doing chevrons, and the content was something that was left and gone. I needed a language. I needed to give life to the images that I had in me. They said: "No, that's not art." Then I discovered (the Mexican painters) Siqueiros, Orozco and Rivera, and I felt, "You can express yourself and your feelings." That's what was missing. There was no emotion.

In the late '60s, as a Chicano, you were exploding you were becoming awake. There was the farmworkers' struggle, the civil rights struggle. All your life you'd been looking at other people wlj didn't look like Tell me about how you grew up. A We used to come out to California every summer to work in the harvest, in the grape fields, and then we would go back to New Mexico. And finally in 1947, when I was 9, we settled in the San Joaquin Valley near Fresno.

We would move from town to town following the different crops: grapes, peaches, onions, all the fruit trees. My mother and my sisters worked in cutting sheds, cutting peaches to dry, and apricots. Winters, we would pick cotton. There were seven children that survived, four sisters, three brothers, and four more children that passed away at a very young age. Then my parents separated, and my father went back to New Mexico.

My mother insisted that we stay in school. In the past, we would start in one school and then go to another labor camp, so we never really got stable in school. We wouldn't start until early October the Mexican kids and poor whites and African American kids could stay to help their parents with the harvest until the grapes were picked and the raisins were boxed. And at 1 3, you were allowed to leave school. You were shy, you spoke broken English, and then you had a name like Malaquias that was an added strike.

So in third grade, they put me in a special class, supposedly for slow learners who were having a hard time keeping up, where we got to draw and cut out paper, make collages. Everyone in there looked like me, or lived in the same neighborhood. We didn't learn much, the rest of the time was playing. So it was an incredible warm atmosphere. Drawing became like another language for me.

I liked school. It was a place where I could draw; I had access to paper. And what about your brother Jose Ernesto, the Chicano poet? He was always daydreaming. Where 1 enjoyed the physical work, he hated the fieldwork. 1 wanted to be a worker.

I would often find myself imitating some of the fast pickers, the ones people looked up to. I joke with my kids that they want to be like Jose Canseco or Mark McGwire, but I would go to bed wanting to be like Roberto, the guy i who had just picked 400 trays. Jose was different. You looked MALAQUIAS MONTOYA 1938: Born June 21, in Albuquerque, N.M. 1947: Settles near Fresno.

1970: Graduates with honors in art from UC Berkeley. 1969: Founding member, MALA-F (Mexican American Liberation Art Front), Oakland. 1970: Director, Chicano Studies Art Project, UC Berkeley. 1974-81: Art workshop director, Taller de Artes Graficas, Oakland. 1984-89: Professor, Ethnic Studies and Printmaking departments, California College of Arts and Crafts.

1990-present: Professor, Chicano Studies Department, University of California at Davis..