User:Artist012502/Shizu Saldamando

Early Life and Education
Shizu Saldamando was born in 1978 and raised in the Mission district of San Francisco. Her mother of Japanese descent and father of Mexican descent both appreciated artwork and were invested in social issues. Saldamando enjoyed drawing and was affirmed in her talent by others as a child. As a teenager, Saldamando was influenced by publications like Teen Angels, which celebrated the popular Chicano aesthetics of the time, as well as the growing punk and cholo cultural movements. She took advantage of artistic groups in San Francisco, like the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts. After graduating high school, Saldamando moved to Los Angeles and found there a community of like-aged individuals who celebrated Chicanismo and appreciated the British musical artists that she liked.

Saldamando spent her undergraduate years and earned her BA at the University of California, Los Angeles. Saldamando received criticism towards her artwork in college, with one of her professors reportedly telling her, “‘Your work looks like 1980s Chicano art. It’s a dead movement. It’s over. Don’t ever go back.’” Despite this, Saldamando continued to incorporate Chicano iconography and cholo aesthetics in her pieces.

After completing her undergraduate degree, Saldamando was accepted into a managerial role at Self-Help Graphics (SHG) supported by the Getty Foundation’s Multicultural Undergraduate Internship Program. Additionally, Saldamando was accepted into SHG’s Professional Printmaking Program, a program which encouraged her to use her heritage as a major influence in her artwork. Saldamando eventually left this position, and went to school at the California Institute of the Arts for her MFA.

Saldamando has continued to make art using her mixed-media style, and also is a successful portrait tattoo artist. Saldamando has discussed art through writing, authoring such articles as “On Portraiture during a Pandemic”. She is also involved in her community, leading such artistic events as paper-craft workshops.

Artistry
Saldamando’s friends are usually the subject of her artworks. In order to capture their personalities and features, she photographs them candidly and works off these images to create portraits. In her artist statement, Saldamando says that “By exploring subculture through personal narrative and employing an eclectic mix of materials, I hope to disarm fixed hierarchical social and artistic constructs.” In the same artist statement, she also clarifies that her focus on showcasing her friends (the majority of whom are minorities) functions to “...glorify everyday people who are often overlooked, yet whose existence is the embodiment and legacy of historical struggle.” Many of the people that she depicts in her artwork embody punk or other underground aesthetics.

The mediums she uses are diverse, and include wooden surfaces and a variety of textiles.

Saldamando’s work is held in high esteem by many. One UC Riverside professor describes it as “‘...very L.A…It’s that blend of punk-pop aesthetic with pretty Japanese-girl-craft, meticulous rendition combined with the laid-back posture of her subjects.”

Selected Exhibitions & Collections
In 2007, Saldamando launched an exhibition in Los Angeles’s Tropico de Nopal. This was her first stand alone exhibition, and featured not only some select portraits created using unconventional techniques and materials, but also “...two large-scale ballpoint pen drawings done on bedsheets and four colored-pencil drawings on paper.”

An exhibition which made Saldamando’s name more prominent in the art world was Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement, which debuted in 2008 at the L.A. County Museum of Art.” This installation featured some of her most novel works: her drawn-on handkerchiefs which allude to those made by incarcerated Chicanx individuals.

In 2011, Saldamando was featured in the Portraiture Now: Asian American Portraits of Encounter exhibition at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery, which focused on Asian-American identity. Her work Carm’s Crew was shown alongside the work of artists Hye Yeon Nam, Roger Shimomura, Satomi Shirai, Tam Tran and Zhang Chun Hong.

In 2016, Saldamando’s To Return exhibition premiered at the Charlie James Gallery. The exhibition was comprised primarily of colored pencil portraits on wooden surfaces representing members of her social circle in Los Angeles.

In 2020, Saldamando contributed artwork to Self-Help Graphics’ Dia de los Muertos exhibition. Her piece for this show, titled When This is All Over, was inspired by the historical oppression of both Mexican and Japanese-American individuals. The piece is an ofrenda-style sculpture made out of a piece of metal fence and adorned with Washi-paper flowers arranged in a geometric pattern which mimics the pattern of the fence links.

As a Wanlass Artist in Residence, Saldamando hosted a solo show, L.A. Intersections, at Oxy Arts in 2020. This show featured a plethora of colorful wood panel portraits.

Selected Artworks
“The Holy Quatro” is a piece inspired by Saldamando’s late teenage years, drawing upon her love of British shoegazer rock artists and the Chicano community that she found in Los Angeles. Saldamando drew these four portraits on handkerchiefs, her reasoning for this being that “‘The handkerchiefs make the work more delicate, sort of precious. And the quality you get is really nice, because it’s so soft and easy to blend.’”

Salamando’s Vexing is a print created in 2008 that celebrates the punk aesthetic that many Chicanx individuals claimed. The name of the piece is inspired by The Vex, a locale where Chicanx people could appreciate punk rock music and uplift alternative styles. This print features Saldamando’s acquaintance Martha Carrillo, who dons a punk makeup look and is surrounded by graffiti-style words that are still to this day iconic of the punk scene in Los Angeles.