Fruits of the Tropics, After Currier and Ives

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Justin Favela
Fruits of the Tropics, After Currier and Ives
2022

About the Item

This piece is an original artwork by Justin Favela titled "Fruits of the Tropics, After Currier and Ives " made of tissue paper and glue on board. It measures 12” h x 14” w. This piece is currently on display at Bradbury Art Museum. Artwork will be shipped to collectors in June 2023 following the close of the exhibition. ABOUT The Artist Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and known for large-scale installations and sculptures that manifest his interactions with American pop culture and the Latinx experience, Justin Favela has exhibited his work both internationally and across the United States. His installations have been commissioned by museums including the Denver Art Museum in Colorado and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. His latest major project, Puente Nuevo, is on view in Fort Worth, Texas, at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, through June 2020. He is the recipient of the 2018 Alan Turing LGTBIQ Award for International Artist. Favela hosts two culture-oriented podcasts, “Latinos Who Lunch” and “The Art People Podcast.” He holds a BFA in fine art from UNLV. ABOUT The Fresh Cut Fruit Series Fresh Cut Fruit features artworks rendered in paper, including piñata-style paintings, sculptures, and a large-scale mural, which directly reference 19th and 20th-century Latin American still lifes. Through a reinterpretation of these references, Favela reveals the settler-colonial infrastructure embedded within the visual representations of fruit and landscapes. The artist’s paper renditions reclaim power and identity from the canonically imperial bodies of work they reference. Known for creating ephemeral works of joy that build upon cultural commentary, Favela looks towards his Mexican-Guatemalan heritage and experience as inspiration for his art. Favela uses multi-colored layers of tissue paper and glue to create vibrant large-scale murals. Often reduced to a kitsch symbol of Mexican culture in the American mainstream, piñatas serve as a unifying ritual of celebration in Latin America. Favela amplifies the commodification of the piñata as it is consumed in American culture, utilizing the symbol as a commentary on the absurdity of ‘authenticity’ amid the multitudes of Latinx experiences. Reimagining the exoticized stereotypes of Latinx iconography through colorful, joyful work, Favela creates a space for communities of color to tell their own stories. The artist’s new body of work draws inspiration from Shana Klein’s groundbreaking scholarship between visual studies and the history and politics of food in her 2020 book, The Fruits of Empire. Klein’s interdisciplinary research links the turn-of-the-century technological advancements in fruit refrigeration and transportation to the concurrent proliferation of fruit imagery in visual and material culture. Throughout the imperial expansion of Latin America, fruits became complex visual tools, deployed in service of a wide and often contradictory range of messages. Fruits appeared in visual campaigns diverging from nation-building and identity formation, to reinforcing settler-colonial cultural systems, to galvanizing resistance among the marginalized class of agricultural workers responsible for their harvest. Still life paintings, in particular, became vehicles for narratives ranging from the colonial conquest of Indigenous land, the creation of ‘the nation,’ and later, the imperial exploitation of farmworkers. In Fresh Cut Fruit, Favela presents a vibrant installation reinterpreting 19th and 20th century Latin American still lifes that display the agricultural bounty and diversity of their respective lands. Expanding across the gallery walls, the rich tones of tissue paper recall the playfulness of celebration, welcoming the viewer into the space. Thousands of hand-cut tissue paper pieces come together to form pixelated images of masterworks, such as Still Life With Plantains and Bananas, by the celebrated Puerto Rican artist Francisco Oller. Historically dismissed as surface-level representations, still lifes, as seen by Favela, reveal cultural, social, and political insights that transcend their appearance as naturalistic depictions of fruits. Favela’s subversive renderings of these works in brightly colored cut paper breathes new life and meaning into a painting genre long misunderstood as superficial, through a medium often dismissed as the stuff of disposable party decor. For Favela, food serves as a vehicle to explore the ways in which history, culture, and identity are systematically alienated from the material to become a digestible illusion for the masses. Favela’s vibrant ‘piñatas’ serve as radical acts of resistance; they not only blur the boundaries between traditional notions of art and craft, but they also celebrate the never-ending ways of being Latinx in a world that insists on reducing identities to mere consumer products.

Creator:
Justin Favela
Creation Year:
2022
Dimensions:
Height: 12 in (30.48 cm)Width: 14 in (35.56 cm)
Medium:
Glue,Board,Tissue Paper
Movement & Style:
Contemporary
Period:
21st Century
Condition:
Gallery Location:
Philadelphia, PA
Reference Number:
1stDibs: LU188210021052