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calling them Josés y Marías. If you look at my early work, from the early nineties, I took José y María, which means Joseph and Mary [the biblical couple], and I put them on the streets. So they became this gang guy with his chava with big hair, tattooed. You know, they’re portraits.
HAYES: What about the backyard scenes, like that poster on the wall of one of your clothesline sculptures [Northern New Mexico Clothesline (Two Weeks of Laundry)?
TAPIA: My mom washed our clothes in a tub, and we’d go hang them on the clothesline. Even at a young age, I realized you could tell the history of a family by just looking at their clothesline . . . if they had fancy sheets or whatever. Somehow that came back to me as I hung clothes out to dry one day because my dryer went out. To this day I have this clothesline at my house. Haven’t used it since then, but I started thinking how that was telling a story, because I used to wear these T-shirts with imagery, and it came to me that that was my portrait. I had T-shirts with Guadalupanas, with Catrinas, with Budweiser on them, so that’s what I incorporated. And as a joke, just one pair of chones. Hopefully nobody believes I have just one pair!
HAYES: Is there something particular about your northern New Mexican culture that you identify with, beyond the santero influence?
TAPIA: There is a real strong spiritual connection, maybe even more so than in any other Latino community. I guess because we’re such a small area and sort of socially . . . how do I put it? . . . socially isolated . . . that the religion really stuck close. So there is this really strong spiritual aspect to northern New Mexico, especially in the Latino and Chicano culture, that I think comes out in my work. And there is a unity, maybe not so much today as there used to be when I was growing up, but we always stuck together because most of these places were ranchos, so you had to take care of your neighbor, and your neighbor took care of you, and if somebody needed help, we all came out to help. Today, very seldom do you see that happening, so that’s a part of it too.
Growing up on a rancho, it’s all still imbedded in me, to this day. I still chop my wood for heat for the house every year. I’ve been doing it since I was a child. So I still keep a lot of our tradition of daily living within myself, and I think that tradition comes through in my work.
HAYES: There’s an undeniable connection here. You are a sculptor making wood carvings, and you’ve been chopping wood all your life.
TAPIA: Yeah, it’s kind of sad sometimes because there is a piece of wood there that you could probably carve, and you need it for heat!
HAYES: I notice, in the work you are creating here for the exhibition, the homage to Magu [Cruising Hollywood: Homage to Magu]. There is a radio carved into the center of the dash. It makes we wonder if music is a part of your work at all? What kind of music do you listen to?
TAPIA: Oh yeah, I have the radio on all day, a variety of types of music. I like the Chicano music a lot. They have a program on Saturdays that plays on KUNM, the University [of New Mexico] station. I like everything. You know, I’m a sixties guy. But I like the Americana music more than anything anymore. . . . Something I wish I would have caught onto when I was younger was music. Learned something about it, right? But I never did.
HAYES: This carving also has a good amount of two-dimensional painting, perhaps more painting than carving. How did you develop both skills?
TAPIA: Well, I don’t consider myself a painter, to be honest with you, man. I mean, it’s a very difficult thing for me to do. I am dyslexic, and so sculpting really works well for me because of that three-dimensional contact. Then, when we get into the painting skills, I work really hard. Obviously, I paint my sculptures, but I shy from two-dimensional painting.