Signal Booster: Álvaro Márquez, Public Artist

Voices of Monterey reporter Claudia Meléndez Salinas interviews the L.A.-based interdisciplinary artist Álvaro Márquez, a printmaker and environmental artist who grew up on Salinas’ East Side. He describes the neighborhood as gang-wracked—you had to remember not to wear red or blue on the streets—but also a place he remembers, loves and honors. Márquez went back east to Brown University and then to a Ph.D. program at USC—which he left when he realized that he wanted to make art, not just write about it. Márquez says, “I don’t have the aspiration to become a blue-chip artist who sells paintings for $50,000.”

Now, with the help of students from L.A.’s Trade Technical College, the artist is designing parklets and community gardens in L.A.’s vacant urban spaces along freeways and in other corners of the city. He plans to “add some pedagogical elements” to these sites, explaining the vanishing of natives from both land and history. The divide between the housed and unhoused is, Márquez feels, just the most recent stage of a complicated saga of displacement and colonialism that goes all the way back to the arrival of the padres.