The name of Raúl Baltazar has been rolling off my tongue for the last few weeks. Ever since Oliver Shipley sent me the first tapes of the artist and himself having an initial conversation, I’ve been trying to understand everything that comes out of Raúl, from the way he drinks coffee with cinnamon to post-colonialism and an appreciation for dumb kids. that they think is full of it. I went from being amazed by the rhetorical questions of this artist, to laughing at his jokes, to eating Oaxacan mole next to him. Before I met Raúl, I was struck by the ease, intimacy, and eloquence with which he spoke about prisons, post-colonialism, and art as a political tool. After meeting Raúl Baltazar, I realized that he exemplifies the type of artist who is deeply committed to theory through practice. It would be wrong to say that he takes himself too seriously. He doesn’t, he’s calm, cheerful and quick to smile. But he sees the role of the artist as one that is central to social change.
Baltazar is out of his politics from the start. “We have to be careful about the ways we are used as artists. Artists are powerful, we design the dollar bills. It’s important to recognize the ways we can serve the community as storytellers and teachers.” When asked about his most memorable project of his, he recalls his experience working with Los Angeles juvenile inmates. Baltazar facilitated art classes at the largest juvenile detention center in the US, right here in Los Angeles. The artist digs deep, rhetorically probing the ways in which criminalization is linked to our (post)colonial foundations. He seems genuinely concerned about living in a city that incarcerates more young people than any other city in the United States. Baltazar suggests that he, too, could easily have been locked up if he hadn’t found some direction as being creative. However, where there is conflict, this artist finds possibilities. Baltazar himself reminds me of the artist who works to heal society; the one that somehow embraces chaos and gives it a beautiful meaning. Consequently, Baltazar’s murals have intentionally transformed the prison-like architecture of Johnnie L. Cochran Jr. High School into what now resembles a colorful Aztec temple. Where once the middle school was an arena of architectural contention, it now seems more like a site of intellectual and spiritual learning.
Baltazar was in the Navy. He grew up in Los Angeles in the late ’70s and ’80s and found a way to escape. But if you’re from LA, even if you hate LA, you find ways to come back. LA, he muses, is the kind of place that even when you get so tired of its highways, its snobs, and its smog, you come back and the city amazes you with its well-hidden secrets and exciting hotspots of art and culture. Los Angeles is undeniably dynamic. It is a city that seeps into your flesh and bones. It becomes a part of you that you can’t shake, continually opening up new stories.
LA for Baltazar as a child was magical. The murals on the walls of his neighborhood poured into his psyche and into his bloodstream. They became part of his cultural environment and his identity as an artist. The images created by Los Angeles artists have had a lasting effect on Raul. He has been inspired by the (Chicano) movement to reclaim public space through murals. He recalls that as a child he was in awe of the East LA Streetscapers murals on the Daily and Broadway, as well as a painted Tweety Bird wearing a hat. His politically minded parents were also an influence. He has blossomed from these seeds. His Los Angeles roots remain essential to how he works in the community as a politically conscious artist.
Raúl Baltazar will tell you that he is influenced by the popular stories that were passed down to him from the lips of his grandfather in Chihuahua, Mexico. He imbues his art with cultural and spiritual symbols from around the world. In his work you can find Buddhist allegories as easily as you can find something typically Aztec. In his murals we see dragons, monkeys, elephants and trees of life, all archetypal figures that tell stories about knowledge, deception, falsehood and spiritual truth. He uses the idea of performance and “stage” life in one of his murals on the grounds of JLC Middle School, filled with somber Angelenos in the dark night. Water somehow drips or flows through his work, referencing the unconscious nature of knowledge and stories passed down from generation to generation. Much of his work reinvents popular tradition. In fact, one of his JLC murals of him is literally infused with “good luck” magic. Raúl told the JLC children that if they touched the mural, they would have good luck. The mural itself became an interactive performance piece in which part of its meaning became the magical luck that would come from touching it. Baltazar does not create flat, lifeless objects. He creates art that is alive and breathing, interactive and transformative. The Good Luck Mural is a great example of the ways in which art can take on spiritual qualities or, as Raúl puts it, it can become a “sanctuary or a place that is going to revitalize you in some way.”
A curandero/a is a community healer. What is compelling about Baltazar is that he is aware of the ways an artist can work as a community healer, suturing or speaking to the wounds, losses and possibilities in our communities in powerful ways. The mere fact that Baltazar feels connected to the Los Angeles community is telling. He says that he doesn’t just work for himself; he tells us how he wants to use the medium of him as an artist to repair the spirit of the community and pass on the tradition of storytelling. The murals speak loudly, reflecting the stories that resonate for the communities that live vibrantly within the margins. Even more than narrating/painting political stories of struggle and survival, Baltazar’s murals function as temples and gathering spaces for the Los Angeles community. I am sure, too, that hundreds and even thousands of children will be influenced by Raul’s murals, just as he was influenced by the murals he saw as a child in Los Angeles.
The figure of the trickster often comes into play in Baltazar’s work. Raul says, “The trickster makes you question what you believe and whether or not you really believe it, and he does it in an imaginative way that’s part of folklore. Those are the stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. And, no one had to pay to get it printed or go through a lot of hoops. It just happened. They kept being revitalized because they had agency, because they taught something, because they were relevant to people’s lives. That’s what I’m trying to do with my work. .Make it relevant today.”
In many ways, Raúl Baltazar’s role as artist and trickster breaks and defies categories. He works radically to resist being labeled as any kind of artist. Baltazar is at the same time a performer, painter, filmmaker, sculptor, muralist and illustrator. Focusing on the wall art of him here is a choice I made primarily to demonstrate the ways he interacts with the community. Certainly, however, Baltazar is an artist who defies the tradition that seeks to identify art and artists as “Chicano” or “postmodern” or “conceptual” or “painters.” In fact, more than anything, Raúl Baltazar is a teacher, cultural worker, and healer in the form of an artist.