Victor Cartagena — Galería Quarentena

Víctor Cartagena /San Salvador

My work is a response to my daily encounters - as an immigrant, as a citizen, as a human being, as an eye-witness. I leave an imprint of what I recollect, both literally (found objects, homeless signs, any type of written or visual testament, that speaks to me) and emotionally (the thoughts and memories I carry with me) on pieces of paper, canvas or within space itself. On these I transmit the images of those, who allow me to enter their world and share in their captivity. I add to this my own memories and a socio-political responsibility.

Victor D. Cartagena

Victor Cartagena was born in 1965 in San Salvador, El Salvador, and currently lives and works in San Francisco. In 1985 Cartagena fled El Salvador due to the violent civil war and moved to California. Cartagena’s highly accomplished work is known for opening a dialogue about challenging issues. Work created during the early-mid-90s dealt with the violence in his homeland of El Salvador and the separation he felt after immigrating to the United States, primarily as a member of Tamoanchán (a collective of Latin American printmakers), having received the CAC Fellowship at Berkeley's KALA Art Institute, sponsored by the California Arts Council. Since then his work has transformed from the personal to the universal, exploring contemporary issues that are integral to society's fabric, be it visible or invisible, of local or global impact, such as homelessness, the death penalty, exile, forced migration, identity, de-humanization.

Cartagena received the competitive Art Council grant in the year 2000 (currently known as ARTADIA), Pacific Prints awards (1996, 2000), A Visions from the New California grant in 2004 funded by The James Irvine Foundation, 2004 when he pursued a month- long residency at 18th Street Arts Complex in Santa Monica, the San Francisco Arts Commission's Cultural Equity Grant, 2005; the Creative Capital Award, 2009, the Creative Work Fund, 2010 and the Phyllis C. Wattis Foundation Grant, 2011 for his work with the performance art group Secos y Mojados. Cartagena was also nominated for the Eureka Fellowship/Fleishhacker Foundation in 1998, 2002 & 2005-07, the 2006, 2004 & 2002 IN/SITE (formerly SECA) Art Award, the Diebenkorn Teaching Fellowship from the SFAI 2000 and the 2003 Adeline Kent Award .

In the Bay Area, Cartagena has exhibited at the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, the San Jose Museum of Contemporary Art, the Santa Monica Museum of Art, the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History, the Oakland Museum of California, the University Art Museum at the University of California, Berkeley, Sonoma Valley Museum, the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Ampersand International Arts, Catherine Clark Gallery, Galeria de La Raza, Southern Exposure, the Mission Cultural Center, African American Museum and Library, and MACLA (Art Movement and Latin American Culture), SOMARTS. In 2006, Cartagena collaborated with Campo Santo and Octavio Solis at Intersection for the Arts. Internationally, Cartagena has exhibited or presented his work in Argentina, Belarus, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, France, Greece, Japan, Mexico, Portugal and Spain. Cartagena’s work is included in the collections of the Honolulu Museum of Art, the Mexican Museum, San Francisco, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art, Thessaloniki Greece and the Oxbow School of Art, California and the San Jose Museum of Art, Stadt Ingolstadt.