The Exorcism of KCF

 I’m working on an artist statement related to my Kitchen Saints that will be hosted soon on an online space connected to a larger project where I am exploring Latinx foodways in my rural Minnesota county. Today, I share some preliminarily thoughts on how I’ve been exploring Kitchen Saints I worked on the series, and in the context of my broader artistic goals. Consider this a little bts (behind the scenes) on how I work on my series artist statements and how I focus on a series approach for my paintings.

The painting you see here, St. Tajín of the Borderlands is the eleventh of thirteen explorations of the sauces that spice up our lives. I’ve been working on this series for the last year or so, the idea popped into my head after seeing one of the first paintings I made in the home of an IG friend who traded me a book for it. She had the painted bottle of Valentina hot sauce artfully arranged at the top of a peg board holding her pots and pans collection. I don’t know if I used the words at the time, but I saw that arrangement of the painting with the pots and pans and thought, wow, that hot sauce bottle is like the patron saint of the kitchen. As soon as I thought that, I began imagining what hot sauce bottles as saints would look like, and then began thinking about why I would want to make them.

I was raised Catholic. Saints have been a part of my life since taking first communion, and attending Catechism which began when I was five and continued through high school. Catechism was another educational site where I got to play teacher’s pet. I would love being first to recall the lessons, or to share loudly what the moral of the the story was whilst shaping pretzel dough for Lent, or putting my shoes out for candy in December. I liked singing and was a part of the youth choir. I had my group of friends at the church who I didn’t go to school with, so it was novel to learn about their lives that seemed so different from my private school education that shaped my middle-school and high school experiences. My friend Jennifer was a gorgeous Chola chingona and wow, I loved everything about her. St. Bernadette’s Parish in Albuquerque was a home for me. Dare I even say, a sanctuary. It was the site of so much learning about the world, about class, about race, about identity, and culture. And of course, gender. It was where I first fell in love with La Virgen de Guadalupe. Outside of my Abuela's home, it's where I felt most brown. It was also, outside of my family home, the site where notions about who could and could not have authority and power connected directly to one’s presumed biology. It was a site where limits were clearly defined. As so many young, curious, ambitious girls relate, we made friends with the nuns, and dreamt of our future possibilities of becoming one. It was where we idealized and concocted a romance of the convent, and where we conducted thought exercises of devoting our lives to God and the church. It was the first time I can recall hitting that wall of, no, that is not for you, when asking why women couldn’t be priests. A clear, no. A limit because of my gender.

So much of Western art history is rooted in the Catholic Church. Rome serves as such an important point in time for the rise and fall of architectural marvels (like concrete), and civilizations (hello empire). But if not for the Catholic Church, the Western art history arc would be vastly different. The Catholic Church was a patron of the arts acquiring biblical scenes represented in the frescos within churches and other holy sites. Relics crafted by artisans and shrines of religiously significant icons were the drivers of tourism where people would make pilgrimage to touch or be near. Clearly lasting the test of time, Catholics still have the commitment to create sites of worship through constructing churches worthy of a visit from god that truly are marvelously decadent places that inspire wonder and awe. From this rich history of Catholicism’s patronage of the arts, I salvaged wood boards for the sites of these paintings. Alluding to history of wood as it emerged via altarpieces, and to nod to the lineage of carved sculptures of Spain that traveled to the US via Spanish colonialism that ultimately merged into the retablo paintings of Northern Mexico and the US Southwest. Growing up in Albuquerque, and in the Catholic Church, saintly iconography was my visual home. These visuals were my first opportunities to recognize art as something powerful. 

When I gave up on my dreams of becoming a nun, it was about the same time as I started wondering if the church had a place for me. As a feminist concerned about women’s reproductive freedom, bodily autonomy and desire for gender equality, the Catholic Church’s stance on those topics (at the time of my coming of age) directly conflicted with what I came to believe were integral to who I was as a person, of who I wanted to be in the world. This became even more complicated for me when I embraced my queer identity. LGBTQ people are not inherently banned from the building, but they’re not welcome as full people. I’ve found that for me, to be queer in the church, one has to give up a part of yourself to be a part of something else. “Love the sinner, but hate the sin” is a delicate balance that cannot function in an institution bent on upholding hierarchies that inevitably create a who is fully allowed in and who is not allowed fully into the faith.

“Is it sacrilegious for me to make these hot sauces into saints,” I asked Vaimo while driving one day. She is not Catholic, though grew up in a Christian faith, the daughter of a minister, someone much more well-versed in the Bible than the average Catholic. Given my estrangement from the Catholic Church, I was wrestling whether or not this would be offensive to some. In the end, as is clear from the series, I forged ahead. I guess when your very existence as a queer person is offensive to your religious upbringing, what’s a little extra sacrilege thrown in on top of the list of one’s sins? What is the role of the artist, if not to push the boundaries, to encourage questions from the viewer? And isn’t it so lovely that queerness and liberation have already entered the public discourse through saintly iconography? On my Instagram feed digital artists are sanctifying cultural workers, activists, artists, writers, and thinkers of the past and present. Artists like Gabriel García Román whose Queer Icons Series uplifts and highlights living queer folk in particular, does the important work of finding ways to honor queer folk as they thrive now, instead of only retrospectively. How queer a time we find ourselves in that we reach back to the past and historical iconography for representations of resilience in our present.

My Kitchen Saints are a way to explore the themes in my work I am called to better understand, the public and private considerations that we make related to our food consumption. While these hot sauces are commodities purchased in public, they adorn our private eating spaces. They represent convenience (not having to make your own), our global capitalist moment in time (exporting of foods primarily, but not exclusively, from Mexico), and most surprisingly are not simply benign ingredients. Instead, hot sauce is filled with cultural meaning claimed by those whose cultures eat and enjoy spice as a part of the cuisine but also imposed upon them by broader political, cultural and social forces. Think about the ways claiming the odor of the beloved Sriracha sauce in Irwindale is a public nuisance (and litigating it in 2013) is structural violence and our current moment where we see the increase of violence and hate crimes against Asian Americans. Think about how easily a bottle of Cholula or Tapatío can travel across the US/Mexico border compared to people. Spicy food gets racialized in the US that requires us to think about how those forces then get mapped onto people, and communities. When street vendors in California are targets of violence as they attempt to navigate economic criminalization for the products they provide the neighborhood, these Kitchen Saints do not only operate in the private sphere. When I use Tajín, I am connected to those vendors whether I am consciously thinking of those connections or not.

1000 news cycles ago (more specifically, a month ago) Pope Francis spoke out and definitively reiterated that priests cannot bless same-sex unions. Despite signaling earlier support for same-sex marriages to be supported through civil means, the upholding of doctrine reaffirmed that the church believes you can be a practicing Catholic or a practicing queer but not both. Given I’ve made my vows to a woman I love deeply on the side of a cliff in 2013, I’m going to keep practicing queerness in all I do. Which means, while my Kitchen Saints may be sacrilegious, they’re also part of a queer lineage that blesses my food, and spice up my life. My Kitchen Saints are healing me, which I hope in part heals you.

What I’m Reading

Catrachos Poems by Roy G. Guzmán

Have you ever read a collection of poetry and not wanted it to be over? Have you ever sucked in your breath because a turn of phrase hit you in a part of your soul you didn’t know needed to be seen? Roy Guzmán’s collection of poems sings with a delicious queer sparkle. The glimmers emerge from the thirteen different variations on Queerodactyl a gloriously queer mashup of pop culture references, reptilian feats of wonder, and the best, weirdest connections of language making sense of prehistoric histories, the present condition, and imagined future interiorities. It’s almost difficult to describe in my words, what makes these poems so great, which I will argue helps Guzmán’s poetry earn that nomination for a Minnesota book prize; that the body feels these words with our hearts and souls instead of only our heads.

Black Futures - by Kimberly Drew and Jenna Wortham

What a gift and offering of brilliance this book is for the reader. Not simply art catalogue, but rather a genre-defying attempt at living archive captured by a moment in time, through the contributions of several artists, thinkers, writers, performers all curated by Drew and Wortham into themed sections that read like resilient love letters to the community Drew and Wortham gather to speak among each other and with a broader reader. I did not think it was possible to capture the essence of a twitter movement, or the cultural magnitude of a meme in the most sacred of written forms - the book - but I have been gladly proven wrong. That Drew and Wortham include their origin story for the book/friendship alongside digital organizing alongside contemporary Black artists’ work, alongside interviews, speaks to the power in reimagining sites that are often constructed as disparate (the Twitter feed vs. the museum for instance) and instead highlights how interconnected these spaces truly must be considered when attempting to archive in the 21st century. This book should serve as beacon for those of us who care about legacy-keeping, and we must honor their contribution for sparking new ways to create more complete archival sites for those historically and continuously kept apart by the traditional archive.

What I’m Watching

The Whistle I wish this film was available for everyone to screen, I caught an online event a couple of weeks ago where this film was screened with a discussion facilitated by Dr. Annette Rodríguez with the filmmaker Storm Miguel Flores, and one of the subjects of the film. Dr. Rodríguez called this “such a sweet piece of lesbian Albuquerque history” and she was so correct. The film does this amazing job of centering the whistle as a community building aspect of young Latinx lesbian life in my hometown. As someone from Albuquerque I was both saddened by my lack of knowing this history while I was there, and also hungry for more stories that share the resilience our communities. What a beautiful love letter to Albuquerque. Gorgeous, heart warming stuff. If you have a chance to see the documentary, do it!

Artist Offerings

• Check out the glitter and textile brilliance of Moises Salazar
• I learned of their work via the highlighting this show Cruising the Horizon: New York that riffs on the late José Esteban Muñoz's work and newest posthumous book that I can't seem to get to yet.
• As part of my efforts to always remind us of the Latinx communities in the Midwest that have been there for generations and the hope for more Latinas to dream of being painters, check out this interview with Monica Curiel
• Love the storytelling and community highlighting that happens via Stories From Unheard Voices - sign up for their newsletter and these stories will come right to your inbox about BIPOC experiences of living in Southern MN. 
• Remember that cool show I mentioned I was in that had a screening drive-in movie style of all the work submitted? Well, if you couldn’t make it to Vermillion, SD to see it, you can watch it on YouTube. Another one of my Kitchen Saints is highlighted at 6:15!

Creative Ritual

Wow, how are we in mid-April already? I organize my artistic goals by quarter and given that we are definitely fifteen days into Q2 I am finding that my days are filled with grant reports, administrative tasks like updating my resume, record-keeping, taxes (SO many expense tracking and inventory check-ins), applying for shows, dreaming about new work (when it starts to haunt your dreams you know it’s time to start making it), and marketing. As someone committed to always peeling back the curtain to see what the Wizard is up to, sometimes the work is boring behind the scenes stuff. And all of this has made me really marvel at the small business artists making it work out there, those of us who are in charge of creating the product to be sold, marketing it, packaging and shipping it, and that these cycles never stop even as some tools come in to help the process. This one person operation is at max capacity. And yet, I still pumped out some paintings - I am two paintings away from completing my Kitchen Saints series which has been a true learning journey for me. Because these paintings are in oil, they will be posted for sale, no earlier than nine months from now because of drying time needs. In the meantime, I did officially launch my Ko-Fi Shop, so if you're looking to purchase my work, you can find what is available there! I’m itching to start some different work in my studio and, as always I hope you will come along for the journey. The other win I have to share is that I recently learned I was accepted as one of eight artists for an artist residency in Kansas. I am so excited to spend 10 days of July in the tall grass prairie, and I trust you all will be the recipients of my on-the-ground thoughts because I will be there while my newsletter is scheduled to go out.

Questions to Ponder

Who are your kitchen saints?
What do you need to exorcise?
What connections do you see between the food you eat and our contemporary moment?

Thanks for journeying with me. I hope, as always, that you take what you need and leave the rest for someone else, or for another time. 

-KCF

Tip Jar: Special thanks to a patron who bought me a meal last weekend. Want to join the patron club? Not in your budget? Forward this newsletter to a friend you think will like it!