Lauro Flores just wanted to see that a deserving artist got more recognition. That’s all the professor of American Ethnic Studies had in mind when he approached the 天美影视传媒 Press two and a half years ago with his idea for a book on Alfredo Arregu铆n.
“I think he’s an extraordinary painter,” Flores says of Arregu铆n. “And just the body of work that he has amassed deserves a full-length treatment.”
Now Flores’ book, Alfredo Arregu铆n: Patterns of Dreams and Nature, has been published. Later this month, there will be a retrospective of Arregu铆n’s work at the Bellevue Art Museum, a collaborator on the project. And another collaborator is El Colegio de Michoac谩n, in Mexico, where the book will get wider distribution than the UW Press alone can give it.
For Flores, it’s a satisfying way to conclude what he has termed a “labor of love,” worked on mostly in his free time while he continued to teach classes. The book includes more than 100 photos and illustrations, Most of them reproductions of Arregu铆n’s paintings.
It should be a book of keen interest on campus because Arregu铆n earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the UW and has lived in Seattle for more than 40 years. The subjects of his paintings include such Northwest icons as poet Tess Gallagher, her late husband, short story writer Raymond Carver, and the environmental activist Hazel Wolf, who died last year at age 101.
But the most typical subject of his paintings is the natural world, especially the rain forest that he came in contact with while growing up in Mexico. An early life in Mexico is just one of the things Arregu铆n and Flores have in common. Both spent important years of their childhood in the city of Morelia, both were born of single mothers and both came to this country as adolescents.
“Once, when I was talking to Alfredo, he asked me where I was from,” Flores says. “I told him I grew up in Morelia, but that my family on my mother’s side is from this tiny little village, Las Canoas. When I said that his eyes got round, his jaw dropped, and he said 鈥榃hat?!’ I repeated, 鈥楲as Canoas.’ And he said 鈥極h my God, I can’t believe it.'”
It turned out that Las Canoas was the site of a very important experience in Arregu铆n’s life. He lived with his grandparents at the time and his grandfather was setting out on a business trip. The 5-year-old Alfredo was taken to the train station to say goodbye and he began to cry, so his grandfather impulsively took him along. It was on this trip that Arregu铆n went to Las Canoas and had his first direct contact with the forest.
“The thick vegetation, which scarcely allowed them to see the village from the top of the hill when they first arrived, made a powerful impression on the boy’s mind,” Flores writes in the book. He goes on to describe how the local trees, insects and birds were things that stuck with Arregu铆n and later appeared in his paintings.
It was a spooky coincidence for Flores, who wondered if, while on that trip, Alfredo and his grandfather had met his relatives before he was born. The intersection of their lives only strengthened Flores’ resolve to create a book that would do justice to Arregu铆n’s work.
A scholar formally trained in literature, Flores might seem an unlikely candidate to do a book about an artist, but he says he has had a passion for art since junior high school, when he began to do a little drawing and painting himself. And he is not a newcomer to this aspect of cultural studies either. Over the years his research has become increasingly interdisciplinary. Among other things, he has been the editor of two journals that included both art and literature, and was one of the organizers of a 1984 traveling exhibit of Northwest Latino art that included work by Arregu铆n.
And as he studied Arregu铆n, Flores began to see a parallel between his work and that of the poet Pablo Neruda, who was also influenced by the rain forest in his native Chile. So as part of his research, he re-read Neruda’s work and translated some of his poems even as he pored over about 3,000 Arregu铆n paintings.
The end result is a bilingual book (Flores wrote it in both English and Spanish) that includes some Neruda poems along with the Arregu铆n paintings. It also includes a foreword by Tess Gallagher, who has been a friend of Arregu铆n’s for many years, and an afterword by Agust铆n Jacinto Zavala, a scholar at El Colegio de Michoac谩n.
“I wanted a collaborative work from the beginning,” Flores says. “And it was through Zavala that El Colegio de Michoac谩n agreed to be a co-publisher along with the UW Press and the Bellevue Art Museum.”
Flores hopes the joint publication will give Arregu铆n more exposure in Mexico, where he is mainly known only in his native city of Morelia, and perhaps in Spain as well. The exhibit, which will include more than 60 of Arregu铆n’s paintings, will be at the Bellevue Art Museum March 23–June 24, and there are plans for it to travel afterward.
“I’m extremely happy to see that this project went beyond what I had imagined in the beginning,” Flores says. “Alfredo spent a good part of his life being a 鈥榮tarving artist’ and I’m glad that the book and the exhibit will introduce him to a broader audience.”