Q&A with Jimmy Longoria: Always Say Yes
Not everybody (alternatively: nearly nobody) chooses to be in Minnesota between the months of November and March. These weeks after the new year begins are especially difficult—darkness, freezing temperatures, growing tiredness with the plain landscape of frozen snow. There are no more holidays to liven things up and spring feels like forever away. But these months—the months in which people across the country easily declare they will never visit—are part of why I love living here.
Not only is the unending coldness conducive to imagination cultivation and the making of stuff (how else are you going to survive?), it’s also important to the structure of the seasonal cycle, just as periods of stillness are important to the cycle of the creative life. As Elizabeth Gilbert writes in Big Magic, “You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living.”
Jimmy Longoria is an artist who is absolutely equipped for “the weird demands of creative living.” Originally from Texas and having lived in California and Chicago, Jimmy moved to Minnesota years ago for the space to develop his distinct creative voice, and he’s been here ever since. Jimmy is a Chicano painter and a muralist, but his creative voice is not confined to any box. He’s also interested in the making of Latino art music (his colorful paintings hang at Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis and he’s done set painting for Twin Cities Ballet), he’s created innovative artwork with new materials from 3M, and his ultimate creative goal is the betterment of his community.
Jimmy is known for his colorful, layered style created with thousands of brushstrokes. A recipient of the prestigious Bush Foundation Fine Artist Fellowship, his work is on permanent display in Chicago’s National Museum of Mexican Art. Jimmy’s work also hangs in the homes or offices of United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, Julián Castro, Keith Ellison, and other prominent politicians and community leaders. He is committed to serving the community, and for this work he received the Virginia McKnight Binger Award in Human Service from the McKnight Foundation, the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Living the Dream” Award from the Minneapolis Park and Recreation Board, and was featured by the Target Corporation in its national “Someone We’d Like You to Meet” campaign.
I agree with Target; Jimmy Longoria is someone you should meet. He is generous in his mentoring of other artists and in sharing his decades of wisdom from living the creative life. Chatting with him over Zoom for this Q&A was a warm escape from the winter tundra into the colorful world of his life and studio.
Q&A with Jimmy Longoria, artist
Q: How did you come to art-making?
A: I did not come to art through the craft. I didn’t start painting until I was twenty, and I didn’t do it because I had a love for the craft. In fact, initially the craft was just a bear. But I came at it with the idea that in the future—i.e. in 2030—Latino art was going to be profoundly significant because we would be the largest cultural community in the country. The propensity of Latinos to remain cohesive to their culture was fascinating to me. It was a difficult decision to make, because prior to that, I was surrounded by a mentoring circle in southern California. Their ambition was that I would be the first Chicano Governor of the State of California. From the sixth grade, they invested in developing my elected executive skill base. Every year I got better at making the argument to them that this wasn’t going to happen in my lifetime. So now I’m 67 years old and there’s still no Latino governor of California, nor is there one in Texas. I realized that the future for us was unification in a common language. Through the internet I’m actually connected to a lot of Latinos across the country who are no longer looking back, who are looking forward. This medium is changing the lives of artists in a way nobody could have predicted, because on the internet you don’t vanish.
Q: When did you know that you were an artist and decide it would be your career focus?
A: It was the winter of my sophomore year in college. I decided not to follow my mentors’ plan. I saw that art could be a way to unify diverse Latinos. I reached out to the art department heads of several colleges in Southern California. They all told me that there was no such thing as Chicano Art, which, for me, was like, “Oh, the wild west is wide open, I get to invent it!” Of course, there were several hundred—if not thousands of—other artists who got to say, “I get to decide what Chicano Art is.” But that was the moment.
Q: What is your creative process like?
A: I went to the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, but I used a creative way to get in. It was very competitive. So, I figured, “I’m applying for painting—if I give them a painting I’m going to get lost in the crowd, so I’m going to give them drawings.” I was applying as a Chicano, and the most distinctive Chicano art I had seen at that time (this was mid-70s) was called “pinta” art. It was art that was being done in prisons, and it was done on college-ruled paper with ballpoint pen. I did ten pieces in that material and applied to be a painter. I was admitted with a full scholarship. When I got there, I went to my Intro to Painting class with my little paintings and my little paintbox and my smock and the instructor came over and he said, “Oh, put that away, you’re not ready to paint, you need to go to the store and get some paper and some charcoal and some pencils, and then we’ll start you there.” And I was kind of like, “Whoa! That’s crushing to my ego.” But then he went around the room and did that to everybody. About a week later, we went to coffee and he said, “You’re the son-of-a-bitch that gave us ballpoint pen drawings for a painting admission. I had to argue really hard that you’re the only artist applying.”
So, the creative process starts with understanding the situation in which you’re making an art piece. What comes first? Well, “Where is this art piece going?” is the real first question. And then it’s easy to answer all the other questions. Tragically, a lot of artists are brought up with the “What is your shtick?” question. If you’re a watercolorist, you never touch any other material. If you’re an oil painter, you have to study the masters. And it goes on and on—all these prescriptions which, in my brain, become the definition of “terrain,” or where an artist is working. Pick your favorite period in art history, pick your favorite artist from that, and look them up. You see that the artists who really accomplish something throw themselves into the deep end, they work under the most oppressive conditions. So, when artists say, “I can’t get inspired,” I always think, “Oh, you poor dear.”
When I was at the School of the Art Institute, I was running through the museum one day to go to lunch, and on the floor was The Blue Guitarist by Picasso. The person handling it flipped it over, put it face down on the cart. It’s quite literally stitched—badly—together from different canvases. They have to periodically refresh the threads. I said, “My god, I can’t believe I’m so close to this seminal painting that inspires everybody to want to do their ‘blue period.’” The conservator laughed and said, “Do you know why Picasso had a blue period?” I said, “It was a very difficult time and he was very poor,” and she said, “Partly correct, but it was the cheapest color he could get.”
So, again: if you start with the destination of the piece and then you go with the material available to you, then you take on the real challenge. For me, my next process is to bring in the spirit of the dead artists that I’m making a reference to. Everybody is always saying, “Oh, I’m so inspired by Diego Rivera” or whomever. I don’t think you understand what Diego Rivera would say to you—the ghost of Rivera would come here and say, “Don’t be inspired, do something different.” The danger for most artists is that they become craftsmen. If you know your history, you know innovation—the new great interpretation of something—is always done by the violator. It’s always, “You’re supposed to do it this way!” and then the innovator goes and does it a different way and it works. And that’s kind of the thing here. It takes twenty years to know what the heck you’re doing, twenty years for the rest of the world to catch up and realize you’re doing something interesting, and then twenty years to reap the benefits. So, you’d better eat your Wheaties in the morning and exercise and give up the hedonistic life—because it’s a marathon, it’s not a sprint.
Q: You bring strong business acumen and community stewardship to your art life. How do you organize your time?
A: The key word if you’re in this business—and it is a business—is to say yes. When young artists ask, “Can I buy you a coffee and pick your brain?” I say, “Shut up. Come to my house. Budget half the day. I’m going to feed you and take you down to the studio.” Every young artist who comes in realizes that I work three or four pieces at a time, I have two banks of computers, I have an iPad, iPhone, so I’m in all dimensions. I have a drafting table and a blue couch with a fireplace and two big windows that look out at wild turkeys. And they say, “This isn’t fair,” and I say, “It never is fair. The art world is not fair. If you’re expecting it to be fair, I can’t help you.” I keep getting bombarded with ads like “How to sell your art,” “How to do this,” and it’s funny because—I’ve read them—they suggest maybe 15% of your time to go out there and be seen, 15% to see, 15% to study, find out what’s going on, and 15% for business. Well, where are we? 60% of your time you’re not in the studio? That is a perfect way to fail.
There was a time when I became the center of a bunch of Latino artists in Minnesota. We set up a communal studio and had all those little stalls like they do at art school. The other artists were surprised that I didn’t show up until they were leaving at eleven o’clock at night, because I would work undisturbed through the night. They were shocked that they were working on one painting for two months and I had twenty paintings done—big ones—in that same time. The night before a show, I went through and destroyed everything that wasn’t going to be in the show. They were horrified. I said, “What? That’s how an artist works.”
Q: What led to you founding Mentoring Peace Through Art?
A: From the very beginning, Chicano art—the Chicano mural movement outside of East LA—was about beautifying the barrios. The cheapest and easiest thing to do is to paint a mural. It’s also territorial marking—“This is where the Mexican people live.” That’s what it is. And I started in that. But when I came to Minnesota, I actually came here to do a “Vincent van Gogh.” Which means I wanted to get away from southern California, I wanted to get away from the LA crowd, and I wanted to develop a Chicano aesthetic in the barren winter desert. I wanted to develop a very distinct hand. I thought, “I’ll sit here for five years, then go back.” But I ran into the realization that there were a lot of Latino communities here. The movement was here, the idea of beautifying the community and community art was here. What really got us started with Mentoring Peace Through Art was the arrival of rival Latino gangs from California and Chicago. The gangs were setting up their territories to sell drugs. We went to the owner of a building that was horribly gang-tagged and said, “We will paint this wall.” When you put up a Chicano mural at an intersection, people driving by look at the painting. If you’re a buyer of drugs, you don’t want to be seen, so if you see everybody looking in your direction you just move on. We weren’t stopping the drug deals, but we were dispersing them and preventing gun violence. Suddenly it went from “Jimmy Longoria volunteering to do good community service” to “we need an organization.” And then we exploded, we wound up with thirty-something kids, and we went after a grant that had just become available. We got $100,000 to do the activity, including employing youth to do the murals. The back of our T-shirts say, “MuralWorker,” because we don’t need mural artists, we need mural workers. Because 90% of it is work. It’s not munching on apples and contemplating your navel, it’s about working with the community, cleaning the wall and getting it done.
Q: What advice do you have for other artists?
A: However preposterous and however strange the offer is, say yes. If you fail, “Well, I learned something,” and if you succeed, “oh my god.” The secrets to my success are “yes” and the fearlessness to say, “I could die here, this could be not good” but still doing it—because if you don’t do it, you don’t set yourself apart from everybody else. Also, you have to have ethics. One of the problems in our society is that we’ve lost our sense of honor. We have to have people who stand up to do the right thing as opposed to doing what they think is going to be good for them. For example, there are a lot of Longoria pieces that have not come to the forefront. Once, the Bush Foundation called to say, “We would like to collect one of your pieces. Which gallery do we go to?” I said, “Chicano muralists don’t have galleries, you know, I can send you to an alley.” So, they invited me in to look at the offices. They said, “Well, we were thinking the conference room, this hallway, or the entryway to the offices.” I said, “Those are all fine, but the art belongs in the bathroom.” There was one man who said, “I’m really uncomfortable that the only Chicano artist in the offices is in the bathroom.” And we all started laughing, like, “Dude, it’s the point! We’re not relegating me to the bathroom. We’re giving me the biggest wall that everybody can see.” And every time I’m invited there, I check out the new hires and say, “What do you think of the bathroom?” And they’re all, “I love it! I go there when I’m depressed!”
So, the key things are to say yes, go where no one else wants to go, have integrity, deliver more than you agree to, play the long game, and be helpful to a lot of other people. It’s a great time to be an artist; it’s a horrible time to be an artist. As Dickens said, “It’s the best of times, it’s the worst of times”—but that’s no different than it’s ever been for artists.
Explore Jimmy’s art further at his website or watch him talk more about it in this spotlight video.
For the visual artist readers, Jimmy recommends using Artwork Archive to manage your work. (You can view his archive here!)
Still not getting the “say yes” thing? Check out Shonda Rhimes’s TED Talk, “My year of saying yes to everything.”
Read more Wild Minds posts here.