Artist Wayne Perry Highlights Preservation and DispLAcement in Serigraph Print
By Jacqueline Aguirre
Wayne Perry is an artist from East LA who works mainly with ceramics and is also a printmaker and painter. Wayne’s artwork deals with concepts of memory. He has worked with the LA Metro Art Program as a consultant and holds a board member position at Self Help Graphics.
DispLAced is a serigraph print created in 2017, illustrating a rooster and orange tree in the foreground, represented with warm hues of orange, yellow, and green. In contrast, the industrialization in the background is depicted in a cool blue-gray tone meant to create atmospheric perspective while simultaneously serving as a color palette for the ongoing commercialization of Los Angeles. I found the colors and positions of the warm and cool to be interesting because even though the industrialization is mostly shown in the background, it slowly creeps to the front of the print with the freeway and the crane holding the house up almost as if the gray is moving towards the viewer.
Q: Can you share about the intention behind your work DispLAced and some of the symbols in the artwork?
A: This was actually my very first time doing a serigraph. I had never done one before. I worked with Oscar Duardo who was really helpful in teaching me how to do the separations. I knew that I wasn't gonna have very tight control so I wanted to make it look like a painting and that one just came out exactly how I wanted it to come out. Beginner’s luck I guess. Plus it was really meaningful at the time.
There was all this development going on downtown at the time of this print. All these galleries were opening up in Boyle Heights and there was an article in the New York Times where one of the gallery owners described Boyle Heights saying there's nothing there– sort of desolate. They said all that was there were stray dogs and tacos. That was the quote that sort of set everything off. We were furious so we started gathering information from the city about all these developments in the planning process that started way before we knew about it. Since then, all the galleries have disappeared and we’re still here.
The neighborhood has held together pretty well. The whole point of that print was to highlight the fight to preserve the neighborhood and keep people from being pushed out with all this development rolling over the river. We had watched this happen in Echo Park and it was scary seeing it coming. When all the dust settles, the heart of the community is still gonna be here. That's why the print has all these skyscrapers and development. As a result of the development, the dream of owning a house is removed in most of the community. In the middle of it, there's a rooster on a post between all this change. My grandma had roosters. She lived in LA and always had them. In every community I've lived in around LA, I would hear roosters;It's this idea that you’re bringing the rancho from Mexico to the middle of this major metropolis. I used to see roosters crossing the 101. All this is happening but the culture will survive.
That was the point. All these developments and changes. Everyone was bracing for it. Once the dust settles, I think a lot of that culture is still gonna be here. It's been 8 years [ since I did the print] and we’re still here. Self Help is still here.
I wanted to explore the world that exists east of the freeway. I would pull from tourism postcards and fruit crate artwork. This idealized vision of Los Angeles completely illuminated this rich cultural reality that exists and has been completely ignored by all media until recently.
At first glance it's this ideal image of the skyline of LA with palm trees and the orange tree. But when you look close you can see the displacement. There's always this underlined story that is usually overlooked and ignored.
Q: When/ How did you start making art? What's your art journey?
A: My mother took art classes at ELAC when I was a kid and she would always have paintings and drawings. So when I was a kid I used to paint with her. We had this one book, it was a catalog of the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art and it had prints of all the major artworks throughout the years. I would look at that book and memorize all the different artworks and artists. This was like the beginning of training in art history and I just– watching movies as a young teenager, that was the life I wanted to live and as I got older. I didn't know of any artists or art schools and that's why the Getty Internship was so important to me because it connected me to things I never ever encountered before and it really changed everything for me.
I took up ceramics when I was an intern and sent to work with an artist– Peter Shire in Echo Park. He does sculpture and tile murals and he asked me if I wanted a job doing ceramics, and we would do tile murals. So I worked with mostly chicano muralists. I did that for about 15 to 20 years.
I was always drawing as a kid– I took up painting and drawing. I went to Pasadena City College and graduated from there. I never considered ceramics but when I transferred to OTIS, I got to know Ralph Becero who's the head of the ceramics department and he convinced me to attend OTIS for ceramics. I was there for the first year. This was when it was still Downtown. They eventually told us they were moving and they were getting rid of ceramics. So I left after that.
It's really difficult to make a living with art. It's sort of an impossibility, being an artist and making a living making art. I found a little niche making ceramic murals. All these opportunities kept coming to me and I learned a lot about portrait making, tile making, and public art.I didn't really pursue ceramics but these opportunities kept coming to me.
Eventually, Metro approached me about working for them doing conservation on existing projects. Now I manage restoration and advise on materials for new projects.
Q: You work as a consultant for the Los Angeles Metro Public Art Program. What is the importance to you of showcasing and having these artworks accessible to the public as a day to day visual or auditory landscape?
A: The purpose of the program is to create an environment that somehow involves and communicates to the immediate community about their own community. A lot of these artists are from these communities. There has been a challenge bringing in artists from the community to apply because without resources you might not get through the selection process. This has been a challenge to bring in people from the community. I saw this experience when doing the Crenshaw line in South Central.
The selection panel is not from Metro Art, it’s people from the community; community art organizations, leaders, and artists from the communities. But the pool of artists is sometimes very narrow because it requires you to have certain resources to put together a portfolio, a proposal, and go to these meetings to do all the admin stuff. A lot of people get left out because they don’t have the capacity to do that. That's where a lot of the selection of artists on the Crenshaw line did not accurately reflect the demographics of the community. They would bring me into these meetings and I was in the forefront of the pushback from the community.
So, that's the challenge- how do you reach people in the community to get involved in a lot of these programs and opportunities? They do the bare minimum of outreach and it doesn't reach everybody. Your outreach is everything. If you struggle with that you’re not gonna have an effective program or organization.
A lot of the arts institutions are off putting. When I was younger going to museums, I was waiting for security to kick me out. I still worry that security is gonna ask me what I’m doing or ask me to leave even when I go to The Getty to give workshops. I never felt welcome. That's the point of me being there now. I want people to see me there and understand that this is for everyone. For people that look like them.
When I was younger, the artwork absolutely did not reflect my experience or my community so these programs are important for that reason. That's the nature of public art. Everyone gets to see it. You don't have to go into these institutions. You can see it in your community.
Q: Most of your work, whether it's a print or ceramic, explores community, history, and memory. When did you begin to become interested in the history of the people around you?
A: I started doing this series of unglazed terracotta and because artwork from communities of color was not regarded in the same way, I was finding it hard. In ceramics, porcelain was the only thing that mattered. Terracotta was Mexican folk art, working tile. I had other people ask me why I would use terracotta. Sort of looking down on it. The same way they disregard these communities who have rich ceramic history. All these ceramics studios are opening up– not people of color.
I used to do workshops at Self Help in 2014 and it would be $10 per person. People would come and tell me how out of place they felt in those studios. When I first got an instagram. I realized that I never see black people doing pottery on Instagram. So, I typed the hashtag black potters and I would only see teenage boys dressed as Harry Potter.
There was an obvious problem. Why aren't these communities engaging in this practice? It's because it's deliberately exclusive. That's why I started taking my wheel out. I've had thousands of people have their first experience on the wheel through all of my workshops.
Q: Do you have any upcoming work or anything that you’d like to share?
A: After George Floyd, my phone started blowing up. I was kind of under the radar before that. I refer to them as post black square opportunities. There was all this push for equity and inclusion and I would always start off the meeting saying ‘I know I’m here because you have a diversity problem’. And I would tell them that I know why I’m here. I know what you're doing. And, I’m gonna take this opportunity to do something with it rather than staying out of the conversation like we’ve been.
Jacqueline Aguirre is the Getty Marrow Documentation and Archives Intern at Self Help Graphics & Art. She is a lifelong art enthusiast and an undergraduate student at UCLA studying Linguistics.