I call myself a sculptor primarily. I think it’s the choice of other people to decide whether you are an artist or not, and everybody has an idea about what an artist should be, right? But I think that if you have that specific [artistic] talent, that you can do any medium you want so long as you learn to control the medium.
With that, Luis turns off the lights and locks up the shop. We hop back into his Ford, wind down a few back roads, and before I know it, we are headed south on Interstate 25 to Albuquerque. Luis informs me that we are going to the National Hispanic Cultural Center to view a major sculpture recently purchased with State of New Mexico public art funds for the permanent collection of the center’s art museum.
HAYES: What are we going to see now?
TAPIA: We’re going to show you the Cadillac, A Slice of American Pie. I think you’ll enjoy it. It took me about a year to make, and it’s an actual ’63 Cadillac. It was kind of crazy, because I always thought that somehow I wanted to bring lowrider imagery into the household. I do wood carvings of cars, but I wanted something that was more full scale.
So I was sitting one day with a welder friend of mine, Bill Van De Valde, having a couple of beers, and I asked Bill what he thought about cutting a car in half. I guess he’d had a few too many, and he started thinking, “I could do that!” So we went to take a look at a ’63 Cadillac four-door out in a junkyard . . . and it was trashed, man. I ended up buying the car without realizing it was over seventeen and a half feet long! It took about a whole year to complete the project by the time we cut it down and did the bodywork, and we had to rebuild the frame because it rolls. And then I had to do the mural painting. A year into the project, it was one of those things like, “Whose idea was this?”
HAYES: You had made wooden cars before?
TAPIA: Yes, I had made a few Cadillacs out of wood, and they were pretty popular, right, and they were fun to do. I’m sort of a car guy myself, and I was really intrigued by the lowrider theme, especially in New Mexico, because they use a lot of religious iconography on the cars. Historically, that’s right in line with when the Spaniards came. They had images of the Virgin Mary on the conchas [silver adornments] on the horses and the decorative parts on their saddles. So it’s translating that tradition from one moving object to another, right? One hundred years later, we’re doing the same thing, decorating our rides.
HAYES: Other Chicano artists have made lowriders out of wood, such as Frank Romero or Magu. How are yours different?
TAPIA: I think mine are more realistic. I really try to make the car look like a real car. If it’s a ’63 Cadillac, it looks like a ’63 Cadillac, but with New Mexican details. With Frank or Magu, they change up the car. You get the image, but you don’t specifically get the model or make.
HAYES: What’s your process?
TAPIA: My cars are made in a traditional method. You have the wood, and you prime it with gesso, which also fills in the cracks. You know, with a lot of my work, especially if you look closely, I’m not shy about leaving marks behind. I don’t sand everything so it’s totally cherried out. I like leaving chisel marks, or grass marks, because that gives the viewer the idea that this thing is actually handmade. It’s not from a mold. Texture is really important to me. I love adding extra texture, even though you can’t tell from a distance. It’s something you experience closer to the work. It gives the work more depth.
HAYES: When did figures come into your work?
TAPIA: I was self-taught, right, so everything was trial and error. There was nobody to show me how to do the traditional santos. I knew they were carved, and then I found out they were gessoed, and being . . . in the learning process, I stuck pretty close to the tradition of religious art and just dealing with santos. I didn’t last
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