Chico Sierra’s Language

Local artist Chico Sierra comes to East throughout the year and helps teach advanced art classes focused on his artistic theme of cultural identity

A woman of color navigates through a cluster of twisting cacti, the needles representing the struggles she faces as an impoverished immigrant. She holds a knife, slicing the head off of a snake intertwined amongst her and the cacti. Its gold scales reflect greed and colonialism.

Chico Sierra’s painting shows his style of artwork centered around cultural identity, which inspired the “Objects of Connection” exhibition in the Crawford Gallery at East. After advanced art students voted for Sierra out of three potential artists, he now assists in teaching advanced art classes at East, funded by an East Fund grant.

“[Art is] a form of communication,” Sierra said. “I think it’s just like the alphabet. I want to communicate [that] you don’t have to be good [at art] for what people perceive as a good artist.”

Art teacher Adam Finkelston started the submissions for professional artists last year. The grants are always approved a year in advance and a few weeks ago, East Fund approved the grant for next year’s professional artist to come to East, but they haven’t decided on who the artist will be.

“I like having visiting artists come and work with students, and I’m familiar with artist residencies, [though] I’ve never done one myself,” Finkelston said. “It gives students a chance to work with a professional artist and kind of see what their process is like.”

Sierra’s residency requires 10 hours of work in total with students, so he comes to East periodically to help them create artwork that will be displayed in the exhibition. 

Senior Mimi Suptic, a student in AP Art, voted for Sierra last year and met him for the first time this year on Nov. 4 when he came to help Mr. Finkelston teach the class.

“From what I picked up [from Sierra] is that art is its own language, and then there’s sub languages within that language,” Suptic said. “Kind of how we have American English, but then there’s also Australians who also speak English, but they have different slang words. So there’s different ways of interpreting things.”

Sierra incorporates his own language into art by combining themes of colonialism, spirituality and mythology after moving to the Midwest 20 years ago from El Paso, Texas.

“[I’m] sort of trying to grasp an understanding of what home is now,” Sierra said. “Moving to the Midwest, and then [being] so far from where I was from, [I] wanted to reconnect with that part of my identity [by creating art].”

Sierra has also done workshops before with the Youth Ambassadors program and taught students who didn’t have much access to art programs. He emphasizes the importance of constantly trying to create art when it comes to creativity.

“[Students would usually say] I didn’t do it right, this sucks [and] I’m not good at this [because] they were so used to pass-fail,” Sierra said. “That’s not how art works. That’s not how creativity works.”