Daily Inspiration: Meet Victor Payan

Today we’d like to introduce you to Victor Payan.

Hi Victor, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
I am an award-winning writer, multidisciplinary artist, humorist, curator, arts administrator and arts advocate known best for my “By Any Memes Necessary” approach to art, performance and culture jamming. My work promotes social justice, community empowerment and tolerance through engaging and playful public performances that educate, enlighten, empower, and entertain. I’m also a California Arts Council Creative Corps Fellow and Individual Artist Fellow. Together with Pocha Peña, I created Aztec Gold with Lou Chalibre, a series of irreverent transdisciplinary interventions that utilize the iconography of Mexican wrestling to create cathartic “counter-absurdity” campaigns that inspire catalytic change. We also received a Creative Capital Award to create the Dreamocracy in America project and the VOTOS LOCOS video game, which can be played for free online in English, Spanish and Vietnamese at www.votoslocosgame.com.

This year, we received the Center for Cultural Innovation’s CALI Catalyst award and started a new silk screening project called Paleta Press. You can find info about my work and current projects at www.victorpayan.com.

I was born in San Diego’s East County and grew up in a small town called El Cajon, which is where iconoclastic writers Lester Bangs, the father of rock journalism, and Mike Davis, pre-eminent writer and urban theorist, came from. We all went to the same high school, which I didn’t learn until years later. It would have been nice to know that growing up. It’s also where the ’60’s group Iron Butterfly of Inna Gadda da Vida fame came from. There are actually a lot of great San Diego bands that came out of El Cajon, and I think it’s important for people growing up in communities like that to know what their cultural heritage is, so they can feel like they’re part of a tradition. A lot of iconoclasts have come out of El Cajon.

In college, I was Editor in Chief for the Stanford Chaparral, and this experience helped hone my sense of humor and absurdity to address the issues of the day. This became an important part of my work, returning to San Diego after graduating. You really need to master absurdity when dealing with issues in the San Diego/Tijuana border region, because in addition to its complexities and contradictions, the reality is always being warped, manipulated and distorted to score political points.

You have to learn to cut through the absurdity and also to reflect it back in order to expose it. It’s sad to see that this same kind of manipulation is now standard operating procedure for creating divisions in the U.S. We can’t underestimate the power of humor to help people navigate and see through it.

My career has covered a lot of ground, including writer, filmmaker, performer, songwriter, curator and culture jammer. I have also worked in public television, as Director of Programs for the National Association of Latino Arts and Cultures, and as a consultant, contributing to the arts master plans for Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Moorpark and Contra Costa County.

For people interested in seeing me in action, I will be presenting a Fashion vs. Fascism performance at Highways in Santa Monica on Friday, May 23.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
My path has been fairly smooth, and I have navigated between writing, performing, social practice, conceptual art, social justice work and arts administration for most of my career. It’s all been building a larger totality, and I see my journey as a larger conceptual art piece. I’m bringing all the pieces together now.

I think one of my biggest struggles has been overcoming shyness about presenting my work. In the ‘90s, performing live was always difficult for me, and much of my work was disseminated via the internet. I was primarily doing news parodies at the time, and my work was put out on my website, Between the Lines, and Lalo Alcaraz’s Pocho Magazine and pocho.com, where I was Border Bureau Chief. This is where I started to build a following. I had fans across the country who had never met me. People would meet me and tell me how much they loved something I had written like ten years before.

When I was writing news satire, I realized I had a knack for creating stories that people wanted to believe were real. After the Las Vegas Casino New York-New York opened, I wrote a story that the legendary Mexican singer Vicente Fernandez opened a rival casino named Guadalajara, Guadalajara, named after the popular song. It was obviously satire, with hourly displays of bravado and machismo, using pesos, because pesos were always a gamble, and rooster fights. And then we started to get emails asking where the casino was and how to book rooms. What was the website? It was crazy. We looked at internet stats and saw that there was a small village in Mexico that had the most hits. It turned out to be Vicente Hernandez’s home town, and they had put the story on their homepage. They were so proud of it.

The same thing happened when I wrote a fake press release about the creation of the poutine burrito in Montreal, during the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics’ Encuentro there. It was also obviously humor, very tongue in cheek with fake names of the interviewees like Maurice S. Cargot and Jean Claude Celine Dion Cohen. The next day, the story was retweeted with tremendous pride by the Canadian Consulate in Los Angeles. The poutine burrito is a real thing now, and a few years later, a food blog pointed to my article as one of the first instances of noting the phenomenon. I’ve had one. It’s quite tasty. L.A. needs the poutine burrito!

While many of my projects have managed to break the surface, there are many more that have yet to see light of day. I’m currently revisiting my body of work, poems, songs, scripts, graphics and performance ideas and plan to start presenting and performing them, kind of a career retrospective of unseen works. Keep an eye out for that coming soon!

A lot of my work until now has been ephemeral, digital and conceptual, and I just started a silk-screening project called Paleta Press with my partner Pocha Peña to start creating serigraphs and physical prints of our designs and projects to get them out more into the physical world.

The biggest struggle I think a lot of artists and arts organizations are facing right now is budget cuts and attacks on funding. This is especially true for people working in diverse and under-resourced communities. I still can’t believe the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is gone after 58 years of great work.

We really need to build the consciousness to support artists and organizations that are taking brave stands to defend the things that are important to us and working to uplift communities and save democracy. If there’s an artist or group whose work is important to you or your community, please consider donating to support them. You have no idea how important that is right now.

We also need to contact our elected officials at every level and advocate for more arts funding. The amount of money the arts contribute to the economy and the tax base is incredible compared to how little is given back in funding support.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
As a multidisciplinary artist, my work has been featured in exhibitions, screenings and performances at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, the Weatherspoon Museum in North Carolina, the Bihl House in San Antonio, Galeria de la Raza in San Francisco, the Centro Cultural de la Raza in San Diego, the Sweeney Art Gallery in Riverside, as well as Mexico, Bolivia, Chile, Montreal and Berlin. My projects include LAFTA: The Latin American Free Thought Agreement, Mexistentialism and the Keep on Crossin’ Project, a multifaceted manifesto on immigration and borders of mind, body and spirit. I am also a founding member of the Taco Shop Poets.

I am Founding Director of Media Arts Santa Ana (MASA), a community-based media arts organization, whose programs include the OC Film Fiesta multicultural film festival, Santa Ana Multi-Media Institute (SAMMI), Millennial Producers Academy (MILPA), SMART Walk (South Main Art, Retail & Technology) Resource Fair, the Curator Incubator Project and GrassRoots Garage Band class.

As an Orange County organization, were honored to have MASA selected for the Los Angeles Times’ inaugural De Los 101 list as one of the top 10 places creating community for Latinos in Los Angeles. We want to be a connector between LA and OC artists and their diverse communities. Our TVGB Digital Makeer Space and MASARTE Gallery are located at 1666 N Main in Santa Ana, and are conveniently close to the 5 freeway at the 17th St exit in Santa Ana, which is great for people coming down from LA. There’s even a 24 hour Norms across the street, and people can hang there out after our events.

MASA is also a co-presenter with ArtsOC of the annual free OC Día del Niño Festival, which takes place at the Hunt Branch Library in Fullerton on Sat., April 25 this year.

MASA works to create positive social change, activate historically and culturally marginalized communities and broaden and deepen equity, understanding and appreciation of our diverse multicultural communities and their contribution to America’s culture, history and social tapestry. MASA’s diverse programming serves established as well as emerging and first-time artists. To advance community building and strengthen relationships with local artists, MASA creates opportunities for social and professional intergenerational and interdisciplinary networking.

MASA actively seeks to combat historical erasure and provide critical instruction, production and presentation opportunities to artists, cultural practitioners and communities that have been historically under-represented or lacked access to technology as a means of creative expression, economic empowerment or civic participation. These include immigrants, working class families, youth, seniors, and people without advanced degrees. MASA is an important presenter of works by Latin@, BIPOC, AAPI, MENASA and LGBTQ+ artists, as well as youth, students, women, first time directors and artists from marginalized communities.

Artists and film makers we have presented include Guillermo Gomez Peña, Sergio Arau and Yareli Arizmendi, Alex Rivera, Phillip Rodriguez, Kristina Wong, former SNL head writer Harper Steele, Herbert Sigüenza and the band Piñata Protest.

We also have monthly meetups for songwriters, animators and video game developers. Our programs draw participants from throughout the region, including Los Angeles, Riverside and even as far as Bakersfield. Our Film Fiesta takes place every October, and most of the films can be viewed nationally as part of our virtual festival. This year’s festival takes place October 8-18. The OC Film Fiesta is a cinematic celebration of the nation’s diversity and multicultural heritage. You can learn more about MASA at www.masamedia.org.

Is there anyone you’d like to thank or give credit to?
I work in several different sectors, and I’m happy to have found a supportive community of kindred spirits, rebels, and changemakers in each of them. Whether performance, video, arts advocacy, comedy or music, there are so many phenomenally cool people who have been part of my journey, and whom I’ve had the pleasure to work with. I think central to that are the artists from the Border Arts Workshop and San Diego’s Chican@ art community. People like Guillermo Gomez Peña, filmmaker Isaac Artenstein, Herbert Sigüenza from Culture Clash, El Vez, Kristina Wong, people who blazed paths similar to the one I was on and showed me it was possible. I think seeing how these artists were mixing performance, social issues, politics, humor and community, inspired me to not hold back on my own work.

My partner Pocha Peña is also an inspiration and a key collaborator. She comes with a background in Spanish-language TV game shows, and I come from a background in PBS documentaries, and these two approaches really work well together to create the zaniness we are known for.

We’re going to be doing a performance called Fashion vs. Fascism at Highways Performance Space in Santa Monica on Friday, May 23, so if people would like a taste of our performance work, we invite you to see that. You can get tickets at https://www.highwaysperformance.org.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.victorpayan.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mediaartssa
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MASAdigital
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/victorpayan
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@mediaartssantaana
• Other: https://www.votoslocosgame.com

Image Credits
Victor Payan and Media Arts Santa Ana (MASA).