Interview with Ana Serrano
May 4, 2021
Emily Babette:
Let’s start from the top. Can you start with a bit of a biography about yourself?
Ana Serrano:
I’ve always known I wanted to be an artist ever since I was young, and so I've always tried to take art classes as electives and all of that. But no one in my family was an artist. I always had this pull towards it, or at least what I thought art was as a young kid, you know? I think my introduction to it was always through craft…like just going to the craft store and doing school projects and that kind of thing.
Beginning in high school I got a little bit more serious about it and thought “oh, this could be potentially something I do for the rest of my life.” Still I was a bit blind to what it actually means to be a working artist. But I continued with it because that was the one thing that I was always interested in. After high school I went to community college and took classes there to develop my portfolio, and then went to Art Center in Pasadena. When I went there I actually went through the illustration department…I toured the campus and I looked at the student galleries and I was like, “oh, I like what all the illustration students are doing, so that's what I'm going to do.”
So that’s why I chose that path.
By the time I went in, I think it was 2005, an illustrator’s career had already evolved to be something so much different than traditional illustration like 20 or 30 years ago. Because of that the program was really flexible and helped students make their own path. I decided to work three-dimensionally about the last two years that I was there, as I had always liked building things. I took a “materials and process" class and I just loved it—learning about all the tools and all the different processes of making things and working. It was just like a nice departure from like drawing all the time. Luckily my program was really flexible and I was able to take an illustration assignment and then just fill it whichever way I wanted to, which was to make something three-dimensionally. So that's kind of how I started working that way.
Other simple bio stuff: I was born in LA, my family is Mexican and they came here in the mid-seventies. Slowly everyone has come over—my grandma came first and then saved money to bring over my mom and my aunt…Then four years ago I moved up to Portland, Oregon, so that's where I'm at now.
EB:
Did you did you move to Portland for any specific reason or just to get out of LA?
AS:
My partner got an opportunity here. He’s a glassblower and there’s a space in a shop here. We had come and visited before and we really liked it and just ended up moving. If it wasn't for that I probably would still be in LA. I've always liked it.
EB:
It’s seems like your work responds a lot to East LA and kind of area?
AS:
Definitely East and maybe Southeast and a lot of Latino neighborhoods…that’s kind of where they all fall, right?
EB:
Yeah. I live pretty close. I live in Pico Rivera which is close to Montebello, which is close to Boyle Heights. So I’m like two towns removed from East LA.
AS:
I grew up in Downey, right next to you. That's where most of my family is right now.
EB: Oh, wow, it’s a small world.
AS:
Where are you from originally from? You said you're a naturalized citizen…
EB:
Yeah, I'm Canadian. I moved to the US in the year 2000, but was up in Connecticut originally. And then my family and I came to California in about 2007. So a good chunk of my my life I've been in the US. One of the reasons I’m interested in ‘home’ is because I moved around a lot as a kid so the idea of a home, or a stable place where people live and grow up, is kind of an anomaly to me because that's not what I experienced.
Now I'm more settled here but just basically due to time. As an artist, I want to delve into those kind of concerns head-on, instead of it just being a part of my kooky narrative… it's becoming more of an interest and I'm finding it so rich. The more I'm delving into it, the more I'm discovering how much literature and how many other artists are concerned with it. It’s just becoming this really plentiful thing to engage with.
When you went to Art Center and you were transitioning into 3D sculptural forms, was home, the house and the built environment early tropes of yours, or did you develop into them?
AS:
I think it's always been there since the beginning. For me I saw it as a place—a physical location—which was very much rooted in Los Angeles. I think the very first project where I thought about the built environment, and specifically a home or residence as a physical space, I wanted to examine my childhood home. When I think about my childhood—like you say you moved around a lot—I only moved once, so when I think about my childhood it's like when I lived in this place versus when I was in that place. I feel it was a fairly drastic move even though we only moved from South Central to Downey. The move was literally like ten miles or something… a small move compared to my mom who had to come to a whole other country with a whole other language…and yet for a child, it felt like it was like a whole world away, you know?
EB:
Yeah, for a child!
AS:
Yeah, so I wanted to make a project based on that; based on the house that was in South LA. I started working in that way…using more personal history to inform the work. While I was in school I was guided to move away from that and to make work that was a little bit more…universal to people rather than using my own story. I don't think that was a good thing for me. And that's when I started thinking about these things… the home…it was very much about my personal history and the exact location. Like being able to pinpoint on a map “this happened here, and that happen here”. So [for me] it was more about an exact location rather than the metaphorical idea of the home or something like that.
EB:
So you started by thinking about memory and the past, but then you transitioned into building more public places with Homegrown, The Built Environment, and Salon of Beauty… would you say that those works still have a connection to the past, because that’s where you started from, or would you say it's more about the present or future? In other words, as far as a temporal situation I'm wondering where you position those structures?
AS:
I think each one is different. For Salon of Beauty, I definitely saw that as present and as a reaction to the current environment I was in. I was inspired by Los Angeles—the city I lived in and grew up in—and looking at the built environment of LA. And not looking at the historical places, built by famous Architects. But rather looking at these humble places like vernacular architecture or buildings that are really utilitarian… Not necessarily “designed” by designers, artists or architects, but these places that have…come alive just by the people that live in them. Like the small business owner who chooses what color their building is going to be… they’re not hiring a designer. So for Salon of Beauty that was very much what I was referencing: the present environment.
But for Homegrown I was trying to connect the past with the present. I was really looking at how my family [in] just one single generation went from a rural lifestyle in Mexico to a very urban setting in Los Angeles. My mom was born in this rural area in Mexico, she wasn't born in a hospital, she raised pigs and chickens. [My family] raised their own food—that sort of lifestyle. Then one generation [later]… I grew up in Los Angeles in a very dense urban environment. Now that I'm older I can see how, even though they were in this really new drastic place, they were still trying to hold on and make use of the land the way they did back in Mexico, but in Los Angeles. You use whatever land [you can], so that’s why in Homegrown there's these plants growing out of this rigid brick structure. It was a way to combine this need and want to grow things, while being in this environment.
EB:
You said your grandmother moved here to California first, and then your mom, and then your aunt. So it seems like there was a maternal pull in your life. The females bringing you…connecting you to Mexico from here. I'm wondering what your thoughts are on the role of women and home and/or domesticity in your experience?
AS:
You know that's not something that I usually look at in reference to my work…[it’s] present every day…I noticed how much more is expected of women and all this invisible labor that women have to do and are responsible for just because they are women. It's not something that I reference in my work, but it is something I think about a lot because…I am a woman and I see it all the time around me and of what is expected of us. I mean I definitely try to push back on that within my own home…
EB:
In your “bio” on your website you say that you’re “captivated with how residents alter and adorned their dwellings” and I'm wondering how you choose the color palette for your work—some being more realistic than others in the areas that you're referring to?
AS:
So with the color, I always looked at it as this rejection to class and class superiority…With color and architecture there seems to be an idea of a perceived value [represented through color]. We see it in things like homeowners association, where there's definitely going to be a list of colors that you cannot paint your house because they aren’t like, classy isn't the word but…there’s this perception that the brighter the color, the more saturated that it is…
In historical buildings and in buildings that famous architects [design], they're not going to make them bright pink. They’re never going to use these highly saturated colors.
EB:
It's almost too ‘ethnic’, like whether it's Latino or Filipino or… there’s a lot of color in working class ethnic neighborhoods that maybe they're trying to remove themselves from?
AS:
Exactly. Yes. So when I think about color, that's always the way that I'm thinking about it. “Why are these colors perceived that way?” “Why are they perceived as less than less?” Less formal, less designer…
EB:
Yeah, there’s a reason that galleries are white cubes because it's like “strip away the color, strip away any signifiers of working class…” It also mimics the modernist impulses of minimalism to strip away.
AS:
[In] low socioeconomic neighborhoods, not just in Los Angeles but around the world, we see that a lot too. So, when I'm thinking about color I'm thinking less about the actual hue and more about the saturation and how if it's a bright blue versus a ‘sophisticated color’…like some colors are just perceived [as] sophisticated colors, right? Especially in architecture.
EB:
Your structures are mostly built with paper and cardboard, and I was wondering what your thoughts are on building with such an impermanent material? You’ve said on your website that you use post office materials because they’re free and easy to come by, and they play into that socioeconomic idea that you're talking about. So apart from that I'm wondering what else those materials signify?
AS:
I think you mentioned all of it. The use of cardboard is important because of the subject matter that I'm referencing. There’s always this idea that cardboard is a throwaway material; that it is not worthy. I also like using it because it's not a formal “art” material. I think it throws people off a bit, thinking about the preservation of it.
But the reality is that there's works on paper that are thousands of years old and we're still able to preserve it. If people find it worthy then we will preserve it and we will find a way. It’s interesting because people that buy a drawing on a piece of paper, that same questioning of the longevity might not necessarily be brought up because people are used to buying works on paper. But essentially it's the same thing. It's just that [my work] is out of cardboard and three dimensional…If you are willing to take the time and use the resources you have to preserve works on paper, you're going to be able to preserve my work too.
EB:
I could you talk more about your your artistic process?
AS:
Every project it's a little different in terms of inspiration or the ideas for it. A lot of times, like for Homegrown, I looked at my family pictures and family history, and I talked to my mom and my grandma. For other works where I'm referencing the built environment of a particular place, I like to go to that place and photograph it. So a lot of the process is taking reference shots. Now that I live in Portland (I did this in LA too) I use Google Maps a lot. [There’s] this great feature where you can go back to like 2005 or 2007, and look at how the place has changed. I look at either my own reference pictures of places, places online, or experience the places in person. If the project has a familial connection then…luckily I still have my grandmother and my mom alive, so I talk to them a lot.
EB:
Since your family has been here in the United States since the 1970s, have you and your family noticed any major changes in the neighborhoods that you’ve lived in?
AS:
Oh yeah, absolutely. I feel like South LA hasn't changed that much, at least the area we were in, but when I moved to Downey it was a predominantly white neighborhood. I think that's why it seemed so shocking to me when I moved, because I moved from a neighborhood that was all black and brown to a neighborhood that was predominately white. But within the time when I first moved there, in the mid-90s, to now there's been a lot of white-flight. A lot of the white residents Downey have moved away. Now Downey is definitely predominantly Latino—probably mostly Mexican. And the same where you’re at too, Pico Rivera, all of those areas were very white until the mid nineties.
EB:
Yeah, I'm still trying to wrap my head around the gentrification that's happening in LA and how the neighborhoods are changing in the surrounding areas. All the economic reasons and all that stuff, it's a really complicated puzzle in my mind.
AS:
Yeah. When did you move to LA again?
EB:
I’ve been in this neighborhood since about 2011 or 12, so not too long. But I’ve noticed changes. Even, for example, my boyfriend had been living in Echo Park for about ten years. And he’s told me how when he first moved there homelessness was there, but much more subtle. Now you go anywhere in Echo Park and the homelessness is breathtakingly shocking.
AS:
Especially since the pandemic hit, I'm sure it's gone out of control.
EB:
I'm sure. Yeah. I try to think about the structural reasoning behind it. What’s forcing people to move? I think that's kind of a sub-interest of mine. Similar to [your work] I started quite personal, but now I'm zooming out and trying to figure out some patterns. I think ‘home’ is interesting right now because there is so many differences in experience between people, and a lot of it has to do with class, ethnicity, race and gender [which is] highlighting the systemic problems in our in our society.
AS:
I think Covid-19 has brought an intense light [on] how people live in their homes, and who has access to even to be able to stay home, you know? Some people cannot work from home, they physically have to go somewhere. I know the Latino population in LA has been hit by Covid really hard because there's a lot of multi-generational families living in one home. That's very common for Latino [families] to have your grandparents still living with you and small children, and so you have more people living closer together where it’s literally not possible to social distance.
EB:
Yeah, and not work…
AS:
Yeah, and not work. It’s really interesting, I was reading something about this whole thing with [the Covid-19 pandemic in] India happening. Some of them live so close together and not only that, but they don't even have access to like water. They can’t wash their hands. And they definitely don't have money for disinfectant and all that. So, class [disparity] is definitely something that’s [becoming] more obvious to some people…how much of a gap there really is in class.
EB:
I'm curious what your grandma, mom and aunt do for a living?
AS:
My mom and my grandma, when they moved here, they basically were machine operators. They worked in a factory doing electrical parts—what you would consider ‘low-skill labor,’ doing like repetitive motions in a manufacturing plant. My grandma's retired now obviously, and my mom ended up getting rheumatoid arthritis, so now she's disabled. I think her disease was exasperated by doing this repetitive labor day in and day out, forty hours a week, the same movements in her hand. So she developed rheumatoid arthritis which left her without the ability to work…she’s been disabled now for about ten to fifteen years.
My grandma was a teacher in Mexico, so she had a pretty good job. But she, like everyone down there [in Mexico], just wanted to get out and try to have a better life, you know? So she moved here and started working at the factory. My mom worked at the same [factory] as my grandma, and then same thing with my aunt. Basically everyone within my mom and my aunt's generation are all in low-skilled labor [jobs]. And then my generation…we’ve got nurses and me, an artist… we have more variety of work.
EB:
I’m interested in the idea of the “American Dream” as this kind of illusion that people have when they first immigrate here, thinking it's the land of opportunity. Do you think your grandma and mom’s expectations were met or not?
AS:
I think they were [met] in a sense, because when I look at the way they grew up…they didn't have running water at their house in Mexico. I would go back and visit often when I was little; we would go back in the summers because my great-grandma was still alive until the 90s, so I know they didn't have running water until the mid-1990s in her house. When you look at just basic survival needs—water, shelter, food—they were much better here. Mexico isn't exactly this idyllic place either, there’s a lot of corruption with the government.
I think over the years, yes we're doing better, but especially with my mom…she’s not naive to the reality of the US. It's bad everywhere, it's just here there's this illusion that people are doing better than they are—people are in debt…it’s really hard to do simple things like buy a home and stuff. I think in [my family’s] eyes they probably see it as successful because their situation has improved. But…I always talk to my mom about it, how the American dream is an illusion.
I feel like if you came here in the fifties, maybe even the sixties, and were already an adult and were able to get in the job market… you would be okay right now. But all of that shifted, the prices of everything have gone up and people are not getting paid enough. For example, my partner's family came here in the early sixties and his dad was able to buy a house with just being a waiter. There's no way a waiter on their own could buy a house right now. I think there was a short period of when the American Dream could have worked, and actually did work very well, because there was a thriving middle class. But I think anytime past the seventies [things became more] difficult, and now it's just impossible. I think people are still looking at that very idyllic idea of the US of those years, in the fifties.
EB:
Yeah, I just read an article in the Atlantic where this writer was talking about the cartoon The Simpsons, and the character of Homer. The show was released in 1989 and at the time it became popular in the 1990s Homer was considered this really blue collar working class—verging on low class—kind of guy. But he was able to support himself and his whole family (as Marge Simpson didn’t work) with one job. And be a homeowner…
AS:
Yeah, and [Homer’s job] was just at a nuclear plant and it looked like he didn't do anything important, right… (laughs)
EB:
Now in retrospect we're aiming for that. Compared to these days it seems like he's killing it. It's kind of funny how in the short period of thirty years or so—not even a whole generation—that simple goal of owning a home and supporting a family is seemingly impossible now…
AS:
Impossible, yeah. You need to have a CEO husband or something for that to work out…
EB:
I check out the house prices around here in Pico Rivera every once in a while because I’m curious. This is a very working class community, but still you need at least, bare minimum, six hundred grand to own a house that’s not even a thousand square feet in size… it just seems so crazy to me.
AS:
And then we have student loans stacked up against us too. It's really hard.
EB:
I hear Portland’s pretty much the same as it is here now.
AS:
Yeah, property prices are definitely going up. I feel like it's crazy here, but it's insane everywhere. I don't know where you can find something that's [affordable]…maybe in the Midwest, in a really small town—but then you're not close to anything.
EB:
Especially as an artist, you wouldn’t have anything to react to…
You use a lot of gates, bars and security doors in your work. I'm wondering if you’re responding to what you see or if you think about them in any other way than that?
AS:
I do find it really fascinating…not just the one window on it’s own… but I’m really interested in the layers of security. There’s not only the bars in the windows, but there’s also a fence and multiple locks and the metal door. I’ve always been interested in the layers [of protection] people have to put up to feel safe in the space that's supposed to be your house where you're supposed to feel the safest.
It's always ironic to me that these are the places where there's probably the least amount of valuable objects inside of them. It's not a house in Beverly Hills where there’s probably millions [of dollars worth] in just jewels or something. They have to protect the small amount of assets they have, like a TV. Also the aesthetics of it— [it seems that] they don't care about the way things look. There's less of a [desire]…to make things aesthetically pleasing.
A security system in an affluent neighborhood is going to be made to look like it's not even there, right? If [they] have a fence around the house, [they’re] going to grow a hedge so that it’s beautiful, so there’s always this disguise of security…or even those TV satellite dishes on homes, in a working-class neighborhoods they’re sometimes right at the very front of the house where you can see it from the street. Whereas in an affluent neighborhood that satellite dish is going to be pushed to the back where it’s not going to be visible.
I think [security systems] bring out more questions than [answers] for me. What’s considered an eye-sore in the built environment? Why is there more of a lack of trying to disguise things in one neighborhood and not the other?
EB:
Yeah, but somehow they're still faux-decorative because they have scrolls or swirls, or little flowers. So it's kind of funny because they’re bars, but then they’re decorative.
AS:
Yeah, that idea also. They’re going to serve a purpose but [people] try to beautify them and add floral patterns.
EB:
It is interesting. I'm wondering if you have a relationship with your dad and the paternal side of your family?
AS:
No. I was raised by my mom—single parent. My dad, I have met him, but I don't really have a relationship with him. He's Mexican too. I do have a relationship with my aunt from his side of the family, but not him so much.
EB:
Yeah, I'm pretty similar actually. My dad lives in Australia so I talked to him like three times a year, but I’m a closer to his sister, my aunt.
Is there any literature, pop culture or cultural theories that inform your work or what you’re interested in?
AS:
I started rereading this author Mike Davis…I love looking at other contemporary artists and hearing about their work, so I watch a lot of Art21 and documentaries on artists.
EB:
Well, this has been a really fruitful conversation…Thank you for letting me pick your brain…
AS:
You said you were a student right? Is it art practice you’re studying?
EB:
Yeah, I’m a first-year MFA student at UCI. Our program is really interdisciplinary. Right now I’m wanting to delve deeper into my own understanding of contemporary art, and situating myself amongst other contemporary—mostly female—artists, mainly because the motif of the ‘home’ in art by female artists is quite a historical one (for example Louise Bourgeois and her Femme Maison series from the 1940s). I’m interested in the historical, but also the contemporary, and how female artists are reacting and responding to our current situation within our built-environments.
AS:
There’s definitely a strong tie between the female, the home, and free productive labor—which is a new term I learned recently. It's almost infuriating because the labor that women do in the home is just expected. It’s not even a question. So it’s always interesting to rebel against it or to question it.
EB:
Exactly. I was watching some intros to 1990s and early 2000s TV shows and one after another they’re re-establishing and strengthening that idea; the females are always at home, the men are the breadwinners, and they have two kids and a dog. It's all very hetero- and white in this nuclear family… After years and years of seeing that stuff, no wonder it's seeped our culture. And it’s still there.
AS:
It’s still there. But it's really interesting, I feel like social media has played such a huge part in shifting that narrative so quickly, because things have changed so fast within our generation—Millennials and Gen Z—especially… I think the older people still very much in need of catching up. But it’s really promising…how much our way of thinking about gender roles and heteronormative stuff has shifted in the last few years.
EB:
It is inspiring.
Thank you so much for for the conversation.