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“We Can Transform Our World”: Feeling the Love for the People in Kalli Arte’s -Sueños Real- Exhibition Nuestros sueños Portraits of community Poetics of the flesh Remembering of people Memories and spirits Marking of histories and place Bright colorful lines A place of home Manifestations of life Living entities —Gustavo García It’s July 23rd and we are here in Los Angeles for a temporal moment of gathering, especially for the opening of the Kalli Arte Collective exhibition at Self-Help Graphics & Art called Sueños Real. The morning sun and clouds suspended over our bodies was a welcome of a new day. Our bellies were filled with Porto’s pastries and coffee. A spell was in the air, on this long summer Saturday, at the tail end of July. Our short writing and pool retreat converged in the geography of North Hollywood and our few days were spent laughing, reading, touching up on projects, and grading. One might find Maritza on the Nintendo Switch playing Fortnite with their sister; or maybe Gustavo in the pool relaxing, trying to tread water; or Natalia on the phone while she is grading her students’ papers; and I am reading Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe in the hot sun. The compas and I have been waiting for this exhibit for weeks now, as we have been following and collecting the beautiful artworks (of serigraphs, stickers, etc.) of Kalli Arte for years. This was our moment to not only experience the world and home of the Kalli Arte Collective, but to also reflect and feel the aesthetic of this humble family of artists from Boyle Heights. As we are swimming and having fun in water, we make our plans to travel to Boyle Heights and map out our day: 1) checking out the literary space called Re/Arte Centro Literario for the Zine Fest Bilingüe; 2) eat lunch, which we did at Guisados near the new Kalli Arte mural for the community of Boyle Heights; and lastly, 3) experiencing in the flesh the Kalli Arte Sueños Real exhibition. I am toasted with hours in the sun beaming on my fair-skinned body, a belly full of tacos vegetarianos, and feeling a unique soreness from not having swam in water for years. I felt a bloatedness in the gut from the queso, as we made our way to the Self-Help Graphics & Art space. Arriving a little after five in the afternoon we approach the parking lot and entered the building. Greeted by nice people and those working for this opening day, I felt an immediate convivial welcome to the space full of artistic energies and desires to make images for the world of Los Angeles and beyond. The compas and I enter the exhibition room and are in awe at not only the magnitude of what hangs around us but the substance of emotion that entered the body. Here stood the Kalli of Alfonso Aceves and Adriana Carranza—two self-taught artists and two minds, bodies, and emotions converging into one, a duality of hearts beating together to the cosmic rhythms of their community, Boyle Heights. Entering the main room for the exhibition, I felt a deep joy for witnessing and being affected by the art. Many scenes and performances of Kalli unfolded in the room: the family, the community, our people, our hands, our home, and so on. The exhibition felt like a prayer, an energy radiating from dreams and hands, from long days of sweat and short breaks for rest. I gazed at images that ranged from La Virgen de Guadalupe and Coatlicue, from the everyday señoras and community people being represented as sacred bodies between water and seeds, to the maguey that juxtaposed scenes of moshing, accordion playing, and burning police cars. You read poetry in the serigraphs from the poet and zinester Alma Rosa Rivera, “Mi Pueblo” and “Ode to Women Named María.” Each scene becomes a performance of home, of Kalli, the representation of one’s community, their people. Sueños Real came alive with color, suspension, mirror, and transformation. The crowd of people present flowed with love, an ocean of collective feeling. Dreams came to life. As the afternoon into the evening progressed, I asked the friends for their notes, thoughts, ideas, feelings, and experience of the exhibition. Without haste, Gustavo had given me a representation of his feelings in poetry (found in the epigraph). His description of the art as “living entities” moved me immensely, as I sat with the idea that these pieces of art are living gestures of the body made into sacred objects. As Gustavo describes it further, they are a “poetics of the flesh” that embody the artists’ animated prayer as material substance for us to feel. Gustavo’s poem reflects a visceral reaction to Sueños Real, and how it prompted him into a poetic language. Natalia recalled with me her experience, which was an embodied reflection of space: “As I followed the little white arrows into the exhibit, immediately a shift of energy is felt. A wave of love, commitment, joy, and catharsis moved from throughout my body. With a shiver I experienced prayer materialized. From the many altars to the visualization of family portraits I was embraced by Kalli Arte’s home.” The joy and catharsis experienced in the spatial location of the exhibit prompted Natalia to see Sueños Real as a materialized prayer before her. The embrace of a visualized home affected Natalia to feel her body in this space, where she felt the energy of love and community. Her description here speaks to the power of visual art in affecting the senses, how Kalli Arte was able to generate a prayer of home that channeled throughout the body of Natalia. Her visceral note of a “wave” of commitment in the exhibit is the blood, sweat, and hands crafting such a scene of beauty and homage to the intimate geography of Boyle Heights. Maritza shared their reflection with me about the stories created here: “The exhibit called Sueños Real; a coming together of two seemingly opposites, but a reminder that our dreams can be made real and that our reality can also be dreamy. The space was filled with love that radiated through the pieces. Shapes melded together to make story. In this story we find each other, place, spirit, kalli.” The function of duality emerged as a central visual in many of the pieces, and as Maritza shares here, they are reminders that “dreams can be made real” or that “our reality can also be dreamy.” This observation points us to the interaction of the real and the possible, the material and the imaginary. It demonstrates how visual art transports us into the “radiance” of such a space. The exhibition itself becomes a story of this struggle of “seemingly opposites” of moon/sun, water/seeds, La Virgen/Coatlicue, and masculine/feminine. Colors crashed and collided, and “shapes melded together” in this story of duality, of friendship, of community. For Maritza, Sueños Real was a story for the spirit and place: the aura and conditions of home called Boyle Heights. Zacarías (a compa from Montebello), shared his emotions about the aesthetic of the exhibition: “I felt out of place. Reminded of the deep assimilation I’ve been trying to get myself and my family to undo, but also how I’m constantly looking for somewhere to start. I was moved by the beauty and intimate work of the imagery, symbolism, and poetry, but I found myself wishing I could relate. Nevertheless, I felt the sense of Kalli that the collective intended to create knowing that I was surrounded by people who likely understood the wound of losing your culture.” The tension of relating to this exhibition was found in a colonial wound—that despite Zacarías’ immediate reaction to the pieces of art as “intimate” and “beautiful” he struggled with alienation. This generative point of contention urged in the reality for the search of home, family, and “poetry” in geographies where these kinds of exhibitions do not exist in the same way. It was Zacarías who reminded me that the specificity of Kalli Arte is rooted in a long tradition of Boyle Heights and East Los Angeles art-making that expresses a deep ancestral desire and connection to create the art that they do. I, being from Southeast Los Angeles, did not grow up with Xicanx or Chicanx art, but was instead exposed to the Chola/o aesthetic, the rising third-generation Mexican American culture of the zillenial generation, and the American aspiration for assimilation that also took hold of various family members. Kalli Arte digs deep in their art practice to show teachings that are at once ancient yet urban—connecting the family of today with the families of yesterday. Its emergence from its specific context urges us to think and feel from our own proper spaces and to imagine home with them. It is so that we all too can feel “the sense of Kalli” in our own home-making practices, whether in art or in poetry or in the survival for another day. Sueños Real was a personal reflection of the long art practice shared by Alfonso and Adriana. For them to open their hearts in Boyle Heights was to give a piece of themselves as an offering to a community and people they cherish, like family.
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November 2022
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