Today we’d like to introduce you to Andres Arauz.
Hi Andres, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
I was born in New Orleans, LA. My parents immigrated from Nicaragua in the 80s, so I am what would be considered a 1st generation American “Dreamer”. I studied Graphic Design at Loyola University New Orleans and shortly after graduating in 2017, I relocated to Memphis.
After about a year, there was a period of time where I was feeling a bit unfulfilled while working as a freelance designer and an artist assistant to Carroll Todd, so I decided to work toward a master in Art Education at the University of Memphis which I received in May of 2021.
Since then I have been a part of building the culture of Crosstown High School located in the Crosstown Concourse. Crosstown High first opened its doors in the fall 0f 2018 and the following year I began teaching for my very first time as a graphic design teacher. My experience with my teachers in high school and college had a large influence on my decision to be a teacher.
Additionally, my mom has been a teacher longer than I have been alive and as I was growing up, my parents emphasized education as the key to realizing what some would call, “The American Dream”. My work as an educator has allowed me to explore many approaches and concepts for my own art-making.
Currently my artistic practice centers around photography, photo montage, and more recently street art in the form of wheat-pasted collage murals which is a collaborative project with my partner. Along with these murals, I am currently exploring found object sculpture.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The road has never really been smooth and this goes as far back as when my parents left Nicaragua due to the Sandinista Revolution. My mother gave birth to my oldest sister and my father could not be there because he was forced to hide from the Sandinista government to avoid conscription. Once reunited with his wife and daughter, he was forced to cross into the United States by way of swimming across the Rio Grande. I was about 7 years old when my dad told me that he was a “wetback”, a word a have never heard before.
My second sister was born in Canada, where they tried to create a life and just after 2 years there they were denied citizenship and forced to leave the country. They eventually settled in New Orleans where I was born. We never had much money or possessions, but we had everything we needed. In 2005 when Hurricane Katrina landed, we were once again reliving the refugee experience, but we were fortunate enough to return after a year of displacement.
I went skateboarding every day, I made art, I graduated from high school, and I got a full scholarship to Loyola. My parents did not pay for a cent of my education. By the time I made it to Memphis, I had this predetermined idea of what my life needed to look like and it was all charged up with this history that I have tied to me.
This clouded the fact that I didn’t even like my job doing web and graphic design for this small company in Cooper-Young. It clearly came forward once I was fired after a month of working there, but I was so determined to not leave Memphis and make it work. There were times when I had very little to eat and barely made it by enough to pay my rent.
I never complained, I just made plans so that I could pull myself out of a situation. I pushed myself to go back to school, while I found work as an artist assistant. Eventually, I was able to begin teaching but I had to do it with very little knowledge of how to do it well. The Covid-19 pandemic cut my first year of teaching short and before I could even get a handle on how to do it in person, I had to figure out how to teach graphic design and photography skills over Zoom.
Things were never really easy, but the people that I come from have distinct qualities of resilience, pride, and perseverance. I deeply cared about each project I pursued, and my family taught me to always pursue the things that matter to me with as much passion as I can muster up. These experiences humbled me and helped me quiet my mind so that I could pay attention to things around me with patience.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
It’s hard to talk about being an artist without talking about my work as an art teacher. It has helped me develop as an artist and even though I am the one teaching these kids, I am learning just as much as they are. I always try to lead by this idea that, we should always try to be students. I believe this is what actually sets me apart from others.
I personally do not believe that anything that I do is rather extraordinary. I suppose that maybe I am most known for taking pictures and making collage art, but I have no interest in creating a style or branding myself; I’m more interested in the explorative process of the art that I make and seeing how far they can go or what I can teach myself.
I never formally call myself a photographer and maybe that’s because I have no formal training. I simply took an interest and decided that I wanted to learn. From there, I taught myself how to develop my own film. But that all started with curiosity, not because I thought that I was necessarily good at it or because I wanted to elevate my status in some way. It came out of wanting to stay creative and continue to play.
The work that I am most proud of came from having this kind of attitude, which would certainly have to be the street murals that I collaborate on with my partner. She is a writer and I am a collagist, so we generally circulate the work around those two outcomes. We never really intended to end up doing street art – it just came out of a project that had been 5 years in the making.
When I first moved to Memphis in October of 2017, I hadn’t even unpacked the junk that I brought with me from New Orleans. I didn’t really know anyone, and I was feeling desperate to stimulate myself creatively. I hadn’t made a collage in like six months and felt that urge, but the only thing I had to collage on was a pack of unopened index cards. Ever since then, I have been making collages on index cards. In the beginning, it was just a way for me to move my hands and put my thoughts out of my head.
Then I started to wonder what my partner would see if she looked at them, so I began giving them to her so that she could write down her own thoughts in relation to the juxtaposed images. Eventually, wheat pasting came into the mix, again out of pure curiosity. We wanted to go from the extremes of really small art to the extreme of really big art with these collages and writings. I had always known that I wanted to delve into street art, but we didn’t really know what we were doing.
We were just trying things in an effort to explore how we can expand this project that we had worked on for so long and see if there was a way to engage others with the experience that we were having with one another throughout this art-making process. So far, I have made 43 miniature collages. I’m not sure how many I will make or if I will eventually stop at some point.
What does success mean to you?
It’s about living in a moment for me and celebrating the victories when they happen. I don’t think that I or anyone knows better than the next person, we are just trying to figure out how to make it to the next cathartic moment. No one has the answers, we are all here creating our own survival guides. There shouldn’t be a reason why anyone cares if I have made a collage on a 3-inch by 5-inch index card.
In the grand scheme of things maybe it’s not that special, but I feel successful when I make one or when I explore a new idea or learn something that I didn’t know before. I want that feeling for myself, my partner, my family, my students, and my colleagues. We deserve that feeling, especially if there is hard work that has been done to earn it. I personally have never wanted to be a master of anything, there are more ways to define success if you are always allowing yourself to feel like a student.
Contact Info:
- Website: andresarauzdesign.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ae_arauz/
- Other: https://www.instagram.com/_a_correspondence/
Image Credits
Abby Meyers (@krebstarcreamedcorn)
