Today we’d like to introduce you to Edgar Fabiàn Frías.
Hi Edgar Fabiàn, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
My life has been truly magical and blessed in so many ways. I was born in East Los Angeles, in Huntington Park, to be exact. At the time, my parents were both undocumented, having come from Mexico at an early age. Although we loved living in Los Angeles, we had a few traumatic experiences in our neighborhood that scared my parents and they decided to move our family out to the Inland Empire when I was around 5 years of age. We moved to an unincorporated rural community north of Riverside and south of Fontana and Rialto named Bloomington. We were raised within a Spanish-speaking Jehovah’s Witness community and most of our neighbors were Spanish speaking and of varying residency and immigration statuses. From an early age, I have felt a deep connection with spirituality but have often felt alienated and othered by the teachings I found within the conservative Christian community I was raised in. I don’t know if I necessarily knew I was a queer & nonbinary brujx at the time, I just knew that my path was going to be different, although I had no idea what that meant or how I would find it.
It was at the age of 14 that I had one of my first transcendental experiences during a middle school field trip. Our class was brought to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and for the first time in my life, I was exposed to contemporary art practices. Growing up, my parents never took us to contemporary art museums, so you can imagine the level of confusion, curiosity, and disorientation I felt when I saw contemporary art for the first time. I remember arriving back home from the field trip and begging my mom to take me to our local library, the Central Library in Riverside, California. I remember walking into that library and seeing a book on Andy Warhol on one of the tables set out for people to sit at. It felt like an angel or an ancestor had left it there for me. Pretty quickly I also found books on Duchamp, the Dadaists, Freud, Jung, and more. And thus began my lifelong fascination and love for art practice, mysticism, psychology, and cultural production. It also was the beginning of my relationship with what I have now come to know as my ancestors and spiritual guides. They have guided me in my most darkest moments and shared their insights and visions in a myriad of ways.
In what can only be described as a full circle moment, I am doing this interview a week after I just moved back to Los Angeles, having been gone for four years. In those four years, I completed an MFA in Art at the University of California, Berkeley as well as finished a two years artist residency in Oklahoma. And as fate would have it, the first project I am working on after arriving back to this city is an altar installation in honor of three Wixárika Goddesses for the upcoming Mexicali Biennial, which will be taking place at The Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture, which happens to be inside the same building that used to be the Central Library in Riverside, California. And, as if that weren’t enough, tomorrow I am going to have a walk-through at LACMA to discuss an exciting collaboration we’re working on together!
In between these moments, I have lived in several different cities, connected with artists around the world, and have built webs of resiliency and connection around me. A few of the places I’ve lived in are: abroad in Leeds & London, England, Berlin, Germany, and here in the U.S.A in Portland, Oregon, Oakland, California, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
I am now entering my fifth year as a full-time artist, I have a thriving private practice as a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist (MFT), and I’m an internationally known brujx or witch that gets asked to speak on panels, write for publications, read tarot for entire cities, and more. This is a life I never thought I’d be living! I have exhibited my work around the globe and have also had my art and words appear internationally, published in books, magazines, and online publications. I firmly see myself as a part of a vast network of creatives, witches, activists, & visionaries. My journey toward this way of living has definitely not been a linear path nor has it always felt like it was going to lead me to this destination.
I am proud of myself for believing in my dreams and in my vision of myself as someone with an important message to share with the world. I am proud of myself for the courage, it takes to put yourself out there, again and again, in the face of ridicule, rejection, disinterest, and hate. I am also incredibly grateful for the countless people who have believed in me and supported me along the way. I would not be here without the support of other artists, curators, witches, arts administrators, healers, friends, and community members.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Not in the slightest! It’s been a road filled with many detours and moments of frustration and feelings of hopelessness. To become an artist means to fail over and over again, it means rejection after rejection, redefining yourself, starting over, falling apart, doubting yourself, and, if you keep at it long enough and the circumstances come together and you meet the right people, you can start to have some success. Even then, it’s always uncertain and there are moments you’re overwhelmed with how much work you have and other moments when you have no idea what you’re doing. There are cycles and there are voids. More than anything, there is the possibility of forging meaning out of your life in the most visceral, vulnerable, and transformative ways.
To be an artist means to keep the fires of your passions & dreams going, no matter what your life circumstances look like. Even if the fire is a small kindling that is barely being kept alive, it means to keep it going and to keep finding ways to feed it. It means trying out mediums, practices, and circumstances you never thought you’d do, it means being a novice again and again, and it means always learning and also growing.
I grew up in a small rural town in Southern California. As I shared before, I never even knew what “contemporary art” was until the age of 14. I rarely, if ever, saw people like me or my family in museums and galleries or even represented in the media. I was the first in my family to attend a four-year university, the first to study abroad, and the first to earn a Master’s degree. My first Master’s degree was in the field of clinical mental health counseling with an emphasis on interpersonal neurobiology and somatic psychotherapy. I spent over a decade working different positions as a therapist, from running a domestic violence counseling program to working in a “luxury treatment” facility and from providing counseling to Spanish-speaking people who had been victims of crime to being a case manager for over 80 people as a social worker for folks with developmental disabilities. Throughout all of this, I have had many moments where I have wondered if I should let my “art dream” die and if I should just “focus” and “get a real job.” I have heard from countless people in my life, including various mentors and adult figures in my life, that “art was pointless”, a “dangerous profession,” “unsustainable and unattainable,” a “pipe dream”, etc., etc. You name it, I’ve heard it.
And some of these things are true. It takes courage to be an artist, endurance, and a willingness to sacrifice other aspects of your life to make your visions come true. It also comes in waves or doesn’t come at all and requires you to show up and put yourself out there and face rejection, radio silence, and/or rare moments of praise and success. And on top of that, there are real ways in which queer and trans artists, women artists, artists of color, disabled artists, and non-traditional artists have been gatekept and excluded from art history and art museums and galleries.
But then, you have moments that transform your life. That makes it all worthwhile, and that helps you realize that there is a bigger calling here and that following your dreams and passions is worth it, regardless of the rewards or responses you receive from the world. You’ll have a day when you’re walking with some friends to dinner and someone will stop you on the street, with tears in their eyes, to share with you that your art and your presence in the world has changed them, inspired them, given them hope and allowed them to dream. It is in these moments that you know it’s all worth it. Your personal journey, your struggles, and your triumphs are about much more than just you. You are changing culture and consciousness, you are impacting the collective, and you are transforming reality.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I contain within me a unique blend of art, magic, spirituality, mysticism, and mental health practices. My family is from Mexico, Zacatecas, and Jalisco, and I am a descendant of the Wixárika and was raised in a Spanish-speaking and Latinx community. I have been told countless times in my life that I needed to “choose a path” or “settle on a career,” but I have refused to do this and have decided that my life is meant to be one of change, flow, liminality, and joyous, boundless interdisciplinarity.
I am a visual artist who creates large-scale installations, public art, performances, photography, video, and workshops, and, has a prolific and expansive presence online. For example, at this moment, my GIFs on Giphy.com have received more than 290 million views and my memes, videos, and artwork are shared across the globe. Most recently, I have begun to edition my artwork to be collected in its digitally native format on platforms such as Superrare, Foundation, Rarible, Teia, and more. My art explores themes of Indigenous Futurism, queerness, alterity, dislocation, resiliency, hope, joy, play, animism, absurdity, technology, and more. My most recent installation, Hixiapa, 2022, was at the Berkeley Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) as a part of the 52nd annual MFA graduate exhibition, curated by Claire Frost. For this installation, I created an 8-foot by 8-foot polyester tapestry, a shaman’s chair, and a multi-channel video installation that played both in the gallery as well as throughout different video displays in the museum. This artwork was meant to represent a “waiting room” for a healing center in the near future and was made in response to the rise of Qanon and alt-right misinformation campaigns targeting communities of color in predominantly rural areas.
My first-ever solo exhibition was curated by Pilar Tompkins-Rivas and debuted at the Vincent Price Art Museum in 2019. The exhibition was called Perpetual Flowering and was an installation that featured a single-channel video projection as well as video interviews with queer and trans artists who lived, at the time, in Los Angeles and Tulsa, Oklahoma displayed on different monitors. It also featured shower curtains, pillows, and a rug created by me as well as photo prints made in honor of the sacred directions and with questions that evoked contemplation and reflection. Visitors to the exhibition were greeted by a flower essence I created in collaboration with an herbalist named Saewon Oh and invited to ingest the flower essence, take time in the space with the artwork, and leave their reflections in journals that were provided for them in the installation. I was happily surprised at the end of the exhibition when I looked through these journals to see that every single page had been used and filled with drawings, stream-of-consciousness thoughts, journal entries, and words of care and affirmation from visitors.
I am also a practicing brujx or witch and have had my art and words featured in Taschen’s Witchcraft, the third volume in The Library of Esoterica series, was invited by the Los Angeles Times to do a tarot reading for the City of LA, and have been highlighted in Cosmopolitan, Bustle, Vice News, Mashable, and more. Most recently, I was invited to be a 2023 Contributing Artist (aka Artist in Residence) at The Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles and will be working with them to develop public programs, events, and potentially a group exhibition. My mystical practice is called Our Sacred Web and I offer one on one as well as group tarot readings, officiate weddings, host workshops, and provide spiritual guidance and consultations.
Last but definitely not least, I am also a somatic psychotherapist who was trained in the Hakomi method of mindfulness-based and embodied psychotherapy as well as received a graduate certificate in the field of Interpersonal Neurobiology. I earned my Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling from Portland State University and became a licensed therapist in the state of California back in 2018. I currently have a small private practice that is full and I am not taking new clients or referrals. I feel very blessed to work with the people I do and it feels so good to be back doing therapy again after having been away from the practice for a few years while I focused on my art career.
We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up?
I have beautiful memories of visiting my grandparents who lived in Huanusco, Zacatecas as a child. They lived on a farm in this small town in a house made of mud bricks with no windows and curtains for doors. There was one phone in the whole town and people would line up all day to receive or send calls to loved ones. I remember vividly my grandmother and aunts preparing nixtamal to make tortillas on a wood-fired stove and my grandfather being out on the farm either caring for the animals or tending to their crops. My father would share stories from his youth, often recanting the days when his brothers would go out to work in different people’s fields to bring back home money for his family or of finding food out in nature and making elaborate feasts from the bounty that is shared by our natural world. I also remember buying sodas in glass bottles and having them poured out for me by store owners into plastic bags with a straw in them and eating freshly made duros with chili, lime, and salt.
My parents often remind me of a time when we went fishing together and I was put in charge of holding on to some of the fish that had been caught. I have a horrifying and vivid memory of seeing the fishes struggling to breathe and feeling called to throw them all back into the river, much to everyone’s surprise and disappointment. I am sure it didn’t surprise my parents too much when, a couple of years later, I stopped eating animals and became an ardent supporter of animal rights. In fact, I have been vegan now for over 20 years and have been amazed by the innovations I have seen in plant-based food and how widespread it has become. May our empathy continue to grow and grow and may we include more people, plants, animals, and life within it and spread compassion and kindness wherever we go.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.edgarfabianfrias.org
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/edgarfabianfrias/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edgarfabianfrias
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/edgar-fabi%C3%A1n-fr%C3%ADas-ma-mft-mfa-2b325b11/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/Edgar_Frias_
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/edgarfabianfrias
- Other: https://linktr.ee/edgarfabianfrias
Image Credits
1. Documentation by Rafael Hernandez and MOCA. 2. Documentation by Julianne Clarke. 3. Documentation by Impart Photography. 4. Documentation by Southern Exposure and Minoosh Zomorodinia. 5. Documentation by Chani Bockwinkel. 6. Documentation by Monica Orozco. 7. Documentation by Josh Vasquez. 8. Courtesy of the artist. 9. Documentation by Jordan Pena.
