Today we’d like to introduce you to Arnie Campa.
Hi Arnie, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in the early 2000s. It feels like such a dream to have been able to live and learn in such a rich, generous community. My neighbors would climb over the walls that cut through our backyards to join us for dinner; my grandma would trade fruit from our trees with the other women in the neighborhood. There was always a wealth of knowledge and resources to share.
I’ve been creating visual art since I was old enough to pick up a marker and scribble on my mom’s dull closet doors. I always credit my parents who would drive my brothers and I across Los Angeles County to different libraries and recreational centers for programs. In this way, the city was both my playground and classroom.
I craved more but unfortunately was constrained by financial circumstances. I remember one summer, I wanted to attend an art camp my elementary art teacher was leading. My mom was hesitant to give a firm answer to whether or not I could attend. One day, my teacher, Mr. Loya, came to class and congratulated me for winning a scholarship to attend the summer art camp. The “scholarship” was him personally paying my cost of attendance so I could spend my summer immersed in a creative community. My community is truly the reason for who I am today, so I use the resources I have to uplift the people who uplifted me.
During high school, my practice expanded as I explored a variety of materials. Art became a way for me to manifest the society I had dreamed: a place where we could exist with empathy and equality while nurturing joy and justice. I created cyanotype collages of worlds where we dissolve borders and ignite change. I memorialized my childhood memories into large primary-colored printmaking installations to celebrate everyday life.
As a teenager, I was swept up into varying politics of visibility. I believed that art was most useful when it was seen by a large audience. I made work that was consumable, angry, and loud (which was still valid for my growth but was largely influenced by adults). I traveled to the United Nations to read poetry, designed a birthday cake for Sister Corita Kent’s 100th Birthday, and had a plethora of other opportunities. Yet, I found myself feeling like something was missing. I was visible, but my work and what I really wanted to say wasn’t.
Now I work largely with textiles and fibers, specifically in weaving and printmaking. I am also a poet and the former Los Angeles Youth Poet Laureate. I use my imagination to heal, to illuminate resilience, and to reinstate hope. I’m still as fierce and loud as I was in high school, but I move with more intention. I aim to make myself laugh, to be gentle with my world, and speak with the community I come from.
My most recent project, Memory Thread, is an artist book that thinks about rectifying my relationship to archives and history. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my family’s ephemera; I wanted generations of knowledge, pictures, and stories but I often come up grasping straws. My physical archive consists primarily of my parents’ ephemera. I have their pictures, yearbooks, and stories to hold tender. The way I see it, the archive begins with my mom & ends with me (for now). My mom immigrated to the United States from El Salvador as a child. She grew up in the San Gabriel Valley in the late ’80s and ’90s. In this project, I organized my mom’s photos and mine to reflect and compare our experiences of teenagehood. I know the archive holds no future for me, but this project was my attempt at excavating some misplaced gifts.
My work has been largely supported by organizations across California and most recently installed at Grand Park in downtown Los Angeles, but none of that would have been possible without my community. Without the hands passing plates down the dinner table, my grandma’s yerba buena plant, and all the love I wouldn’t be an artist.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I’ve definitely learned how to build my own table. The worst creative experience I’ve ever had was being invited to a space as an intern and then being denied entrance because someone decided there was physically not enough space in the room for me (spoiler, there was). Building your own table does not mean that you forget the people and places that have laid the foundation for you to work, though. I am so grateful to the people who have taken a chance on me, my work, or my ideas because they’ve seen something special.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I am an interdisciplinary artist working in textiles, fibers, and poetry. I’ve been fortunate to learn most of my skills from mutual exchange in the creative communities I belong to. I learned how to weave by incessantly asking everyone around me if they knew how until my boss from Self Help Graphics and Art, Natalie Godinez, invited her friend, Jackie Amézquita, to teach my friends and I.
My practice is really rooted in communal knowledge exchange and speaking with the stakeholders of each project. For Memory Thread, my mom wrote a piece in the book about her “archiving practice” and I wrote a response piece to it. Last spring, I had an installation at the Logan Center for the Arts in Chicago which was a seven-foot house woven from community dreams. My friends and I ran communal dreaming workshops with students and families on the Southside of Chicago. This abolition practice asked participants to think about what they loved about their community and use that to dream for more just, empathetic, and ice-cream filled world.
Contact Info:
Image Credits
Tony Valentino
