A Retrospective

The work of Emigdio Vasquez, a pioneer in Orange County’s Chicano arts movement, is being celebrated in the Begovich Gallery in the Visual Arts Center through Sept. 29.

The 72-year-old alumnus (B.A. art ’78, M.A. art-drawing and painting ’79) is known for his work in the photo-realistic style. He made his own comic books as a child, basing them on stories his father told him about the Mexican Revolution. He began oil painting in the late 1950s and creating murals in the 1960s.

Vasquez’ murals can be seen on walls and buildings throughout Orange County, including one next to Room 143 in University Hall, a mural in Disneyland’s Lawry Food Center and one inside the Fullerton Museum Auditorium. His paintings are in collections at the Laguna Art and Santa Ana’s Bowers museums, as well as in many private collections. One of his most recognized murals is the “Legacy of Cesar Chavez” in the lobby of the Cesar Chavez Business and Computer Center at Santa Ana College.

His portraits and landscape and still-life paintings, done in a style called “social realism,” have been described as pieces that give voice to the struggling working class and to Latino culture, said exhibit curator Mike McGee, professor of art and director of the gallery.

“Art should not just be decoration,” Vasquez said at an exhibit featuring his work at Grand Central Art Center last year. For him, “it’s a statement about life. My art talks about my environment, my experiences.”

Vasquez was born in the mining town of Jerome, Ariz. He and his family moved to Orange in the early 1940s, when as a boy, he started drawing comic books. Inspired by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera two decades later, Vasquez painted his first mural in his parents’ patio.

After earning an associate’s degree in art at Santa Ana College, he transferred to CSUF. For his master’s degree thesis project, he painted an 85-foot-by-65-foot mural as a tribute to the Chicano working class, complete with figures modeled after his father as a miner and other relatives and friends as field workers and laborers.

“He recorded the urban experience, unsentimentally and with dignity, neither glorifying nor criticizing,” Vasquez’ daughter and artist Rosemary Vasquez Tuthill noted. “Some of his favorite subjects are people in their environments, reflecting a slice of time in history — from orange pickers to Zoot Suits and Pachucos to famous labor leaders and street scenes.”

Her father, who now has Alzheimer’s disease, “was born to paint,” Tuthill said.

The Begovich exhibit, “Emigdio Vasquez: Retrospective,” features 50 of his 400 works. Several of the paintings have never before been exhibited.

For more information, visit the university’s College of the Arts website.

August 25, 2011