Art Brokerage - Carlos Almaraz Artist Page

B. 1941-1989 - Both of Carlos Almaraz’ parents were born in Mexico – his mother in Mexico City, his father in Aguascalientes. His father came to the United States as a child and lived in Chicago during the Depression, returning periodically to Mexico, where he met his wife and where Carlos was born. The family moved to Chicago when Almaraz was a year old; they settled there for seven years. His father worked in the steel mills while Almaraz attended public schools, learning English in an environment of multiracial and multicultural tensions. He was aware from an early age, he says, of a sense of “bifurcation” in his surroundings.

When Almaraz was eight, his family moved to California, settling for a short time in Chatsworth, then a rural Mexican-American railroad village near Los Angeles. After six months in Chatsworth, the family moved to West Los Angeles. From there they moved to the grittier East Los Angeles barrio, a Mexican-American city within a city. Almaraz lived there from the third or fourth grade through his graduation from Garfield High School. He was “saved,” as he says, from total disaffection by his high school friendship with Danny Guerrero, who was involved in theater, and by life-drawing classes with David Ramirez at Garfield High. An excellent student, he graduated in 1959. Almaraz spent the summer after graduation at Loyola University and subsequently attended California State College at Los Angeles for two-and-a-half years. Although the college offered no painting or drawing instruction to speak of, he did meet Frank Romero there – “a much superior draftsman to me” – and, with his encouragement, applied to Otis Art Institute, to which he received a scholarship and where he studied intermittently. In 1962 the artist felt a strong need to go to New York, which he saw as the center of the contemporary art world. He stayed for six months before returning to study at U.C.L.A. for a year. Then he went back to New York to stay, during 1965-71. In 1971 Almaraz left New York, exhausted by physical and emotional crisis and diseased by alcohol. He returned to Los Angeles, where he was hospitalized with severe pancreatitis, he was on the brink of death and was given last rites. After forty-two days in a coma and experiencing extended hallucinations, an out of body episode, accompanied by a “a sense of complete depletion and collapse Almaraz wrote in his journal: “I realized I needed to start over again, but had no idea how I was going to do that.”

Almaraz’ solution was to immerse himself in the Chicano movement through various sources, including the Los Angeles cooperative gallery; Mechicano; Luis Valdez’s Teatro Campesino; and the United Farm Workers movement led by Cesar Chavez. For several years Almaraz lived in Frank Romero’s house. He returned to the Otis Art Institute to complete his M.F.A. (1974), and he became involved in the Los Angeles mural movement. Between 1973 and 1978, an active mural-painting scene centered in the East Los Angeles Mexican-American community attracted virtually every talented Chicano artist. Almaraz met the artists Gilbert Lujan and Beto de la Rocha, which, with the addition of Frank Romero, resulted in the first major exhibition of “Los Four,” during 1974 at the University of California, Irvine, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and several other institutions. In 1975, the artist visited China, with which he was fascinated; and in 1977, he went to Cuba, which, compared to what he had “sensed in China,” was disillusioning.

Like other artists who had participated in the Chicano movement, Almaraz gradually detached himself from it as the 1970s waned. In 1981 he married the painter Elsa Flores, whom he had met while doing cultural work in the community and after seven years of friendship they began dating when she was working in the studio above his in downtown Los Angeles. Their daughter, Maya, was born in 1983. The couple began to visit Hawaii regularly and bought property on the island of Kauai, which they visited each year for several months. In 1989, Carlos embarked on the most prolific time of his career, not only through his use of paint and pastels, but also through the creation of limited editions in both serigraphy and etching. He had been diagnosed with the AIDS virus in 1987 and was only too aware that he was in a race with time. In December of 1989, Almaraz died, leaving an unforgettable legacy to his craft and the world. His remains were buried in a small ocean side cemetery on the Hawaiian island of Kauai.