What A Wonderful World!

Bradley/Luis Conversation March 2022

Bradley Sumerall: I'm not sure when I first saw Luis's work, it seems to have always been there since I've been in New Orleans and he did arrive in new Orleans the year before I did, he got to new Orleans in ’92. I came to new Orleans in ’93. I saw Luis's work probably in the mid nineties at Arthur Roger’s gallery and was always interested in it. He had the occasional piece up here and there, the shows that Arthur Roger did, and then he started applying for Louisiana Contemporary every year. I think it was a place for Luis to maybe test out new work, see what people think about it. So for several years in a row, I was looking at new work coming from Luis but, once I delved into looked at the older work, I realized that there was a big story to tell with Luis.

Luis Cruz Azaceta: Bradley approached me with the idea of giving me an exhibition at the Ogden Museum that would show my trajectory through the past 50 years. Selecting some key works that would touch upon subject matter like urban violence, the subway series, the Aids Epidemic, immigration, identity, injustice, cruelties, Katrina, dictators & the environment.

BS: I was just starting to research on my own and seeing some of the work that I did not know about from his shows in New Orleans. I'm not sure exactly when I reached out to Luis about an exhibition, maybe five years ago? I pitched it to the curatorial team and the director of the museum and immediately everyone said, yes, please. Yes, let's do that. So there was no negotiation with my curatorial team and the director's office at the museum, they loved the idea immediately, which is not always the case. 

LCA: The idea was to create a small selective retrospective as an introduction of my work dealing with the human condition, subjects and themes I’ve been addressing for my whole career.

BS: I always wanted it to be a survey of Luis’s career, but with the scale of his work and the volume of his work, I realized that I could fill the entire museum, you know? I don't think you can have one piece that encapsulates everything he does, but what I've tried to do is give you a grouping that does. In New Orleans, everyone just knows the abstraction, the move towards abstraction. And this earlier figurative work is a revelation to most, it really deepens the history.

There's so much that Luis is saying, and so many ways that Luis can say those things. With figuration, whether he's still working figuratively or abstractly, he really doesn't see it any differently. Abstraction and figuration are not only interchangeable, they can happen on the same surface, you know? I think to understand Luis, you can't look at one piece you have to look at a spectrum of his work both sculptural and two dimensional, abstract, and figurative, and that space between.

LCA: When I started selecting images to send to Bradley - around 300 images of paintings and drawings - my wife, Sharon thought I was crazy. 300 works would be overwhelming! So I drastically cut it down and Bradley and I started selecting the works.

BS: It just seems like there are thousands of major canvases in that studio. It's too much! I looked at as much as I could with Luis, but I also, asked Luis, “give me 50 of your best pieces from this period in and 50 of your best pieces for the next five years,” I really depended on his knowledge of his own work to be able to pare it down to something that was digestible. Then I pared it down further, but I could've spent 10 years in that studio and still not seen everything! It was definitely a collaborative curation, I would say.

LCA: It was painful, tedious and never ending! Later on the big problem was finding the work at the studio – a large warehouse where I have all my work. Sometimes we had to move 20 works piled up on top of the one we were looking for. Paintings that were rolled up were more difficult. Even though I had them organized by years – some were not there as they had been in traveling shows, etc. and were placed in a different spot upon their return. Bradley and some of his staff all came to the studio to help find work, in the end we all were very happy with our selections!

BS: I think one of the things that really comes out in this exhibition is how traumatic Katrina was - I think, Luis, it maybe was as traumatic as as leaving Cuba, I think there are a lot of similarities there.

LCA: In 2005 Katrina devastated the city of New Orleans – looking like a city submerged in a bowl. I was in Georgia at the time, my wife and son were with family in Baton Rouge but eventually could join me there. I made a lot of works after the - paintings, drawings, sculpture, photography. The horrendous experience that people went through.

BS: You dealt with it through your art. Being worried, being separated from your family, worried about their safety, not being able to return to your home. I think all of those things were really triggering. Katrina - that moment - is represented heavily in the work. There are four pieces in the show about Katrina, but the big drawing, the New Orleans pool is just one of the most elegant drawings of your career, massive in scale. That moment looms large in his life and in the exhibition.

LCA: In 2008, the city was still in a state of paralysis. Dan Cameron curated PROSPECT 1 at CAC, which was an exhibition that put artists from Louisiana on the map. A lot of museum directors, curators and others came from all over the world to New Orleans. It was a booster to the city of New Orleans and an art community that was totally devastated. Due to him - a lot of artists were encouraged and chose not to leave the city and soon alternative galleries and spaces popped up where many young artists from all over moved to New Orleans.

BS: I think the quote that we use in the exhibition pretty much sums it up and I believe Luis said it in the seventies, “I paint to kill la muerte, injustice, cruelties, ignorance, to give a violence.” His message, it's both a personal exploration and kind of an exorcism of these things, but also he believes in the power of art to change the world. This is his activism. All of his work is political.

LCA: As an artist, I am able to work with intuition, memory and imagination to convey all these human conditions. When I start a work it is to create consciousness in the viewer. For instance, the ‘Subway Series’ responding to the violence I saw in New York and paintings of buildings on fire in the early ’80s like ‘City Painter of Hearts,’ ‘Apocalypse Now or Later’ or ‘Tough Ride Around the City,’ also a divorce with a young son led to a painting ‘Verbal Wounds.’ But from the AIDS epidemic to COVID, all these things affect us collectively. I believe art has the power to change the world for the better; I think that’s why I make art.

BS: I think artists, often when they're younger, are really heavy handed with the message and then as they get older and wiser, I think the message becomes more subtle. It doesn't change - at least Luis’s message hasn't changed - but these late abstractions draw the viewer in with beauty before the messages are revealed. Luis is no exception. I think that the work is can be even more effective when it's subtle like that, the slow reveal can be more effective than something like the subway paintings that are immediately digestible as being about gun violence. Both have their place and both are fabulous, but the late mature work can sometimes be more effective as a weapon for change.

LCA: During the late '60s and early '70s I was influenced by the geometric abstraction that was going on in New York and later the German Expressionists had an impact. But the early influence in my work was definitely Goya. I confronted his black paintings at the Prado Museum. Seeing Goya made me realize what kind of an artist I wanted to be and what I wanted to say through my work. Seeing the tremendous aesthetic depicting beautiful paintings with horrific subject matter of the human condition. Years later it made me realize that a work of art has to be beautiful in order to transcend its content.

BS: Goya was a man who had gone through trauma, had gone through the Napoleonic wars and witnessed the chaotic aftermath politically of that war and commented on the state of the world from a very personal place. He had something to say and he changed the world with his art. From my conversations with you, Luis, I think that kind of defined who you are as an artist: you could ask, what am I doing painting abstraction without a message? Why? I am a young Cuban artist. I have something to say. And I need to say it through my work.

LCA: Personal experiences like going into exile - leaving your family, friends, your culture, not knowing what lies ahead, that manifested in my early works as body fragments. The feeling of not being whole, broken. In Cuba I was witnessing executions, shoot outs, bombs and terrorism, then in the ‘60s and ‘70s living in New York, seeing a lot of violence in the subway and parks, muggings, the South Bronx on fire as if there was a war - these experiences fed my work.

BS: He's a Cuban artist. He's a New York artist and he's a New Orleans artist. And I think that comes through in his work. I mean, that moment at 18 years old, leaving Cuba, the end of his childhood, that will always be a major part of Luis’s life. But he hasn't been to Cuba in, 62 years? So, how much of that is part of his identity? I think Luis has, not a bifurcated identity, but a trifurcated identity at this point between Cuba and New York and New Orleans. I think he's an artist first and foremost, and a Cuban artist, Cuban American artist, New Orleans artist. I think he was a New Yorker, it was very instilled and when it suits him he considers himself a New Yorker. But I think it helps that there are so many similarities to his homeland, you know, in our culture here in New Orleans.

LCA: In 1992 I decided to move from New York to New Orleans where my wife is from, with our two sons.  After living here for a while and absorbing the New Orleans culture I realized perhaps that the perfect transition for Cuban refugees (instead of Miami) would be New Orleans.

BS: This place was new to Luis when he got here, he didn't really know it at all, but I think there was something immediately recognizable as familiar here. The music is almost exactly the same as in Cuba, the food is similar, the colors, the culture, the pace of life is way more similar.

LCA: We do have a similar culture in terms of food, architecture, music and the sugar industry, Carnival & other festivals, it’s like what I grew up with in Cuba.

BS: I think it was easy for you, Luis, to start becoming a new entity - you’ve been here now about as long as you were in New York. The first 10, 15 years in New Orleans, you were experimenting with this new space, exploring urban blight areas in New Orleans. So I think the palette that he was fascinated with the the juxtaposition of, you know, kind of, of decaying, vernacular architecture and an abandoned car and an abandoned shopping cart or something, he was really interested in the aesthetic of decay that is often found in new Orleans, not the glorious French quarter. That wasn't inspiring as much as the fringe neighborhoods and it really inspired his aesthetic, just going out and photographing the neighborhoods and pasting these photographs onto first the painted surface and then later his sculptural assemblages.

One of the things that was a revelation to me that I didn't know about Luis until I really got to delve deep into the work was that he had a literary practice, that he was a poet as well. 

LCA: I started writing poems when I had an exhibition that related to the words of the poem. 

BS: So we decided to include one of his poems as the artist statement in the gallery with his drawings, when you go into that room of works on paper is only Luis's voice, not mine. One of his poems from the nineties speaks as kind of his artist statement in this space, which is great also for the viewers in New Orleans to know that Luis has this poetry practice.

LCA: I find it’s much better that a formal explanation of the work, more creative and clear for the viewer.

BS: Luis is so giving and knowledgeable and passionate, he's wonderful to work with. He trusts the curator - at least he did me, with the decisions and he's just generous with everything, trusting in the curator's vision, which is the best possible scenario when working with artists.

So I've loved getting to know him on this level. It's been a real honor and pleasure.