Eddie Dominguez Retrospective on display in New Mexico celebrates his 30-year career

(clockwise from top) Eddie Dominguez with Lucy R. Lippard in a conversastion for the exhibition catalogue; "Rain Cloud," 2009, ceramic; "Anton's Flowers" (detail), 2005-2012, ceramic and mixed media assemblage. Photos courtesy of the Roswell Museum of Art
(clockwise from top) Eddie Dominguez with Lucy R. Lippard in a conversastion for the exhibition catalogue; "Rain Cloud," 2009, ceramic; "Anton's Flowers" (detail), 2005-2012, ceramic and mixed media assemblage. Photos courtesy of the Roswell Museum of Art

A retrospective of the work of Associate Professor of Art Eddie Dominguez titled “Eddie Dominguez: Where Edges Meet” is on display at the Roswell Museum of Art in New Mexico (http://roswellmuseum.org/) through May 2013. The exhibition gave Dominguez a chance to look back at his 30-year career as an artist.

“The first feeling I got was a feeling of a youthful energy in that early work,” Dominguez said of seeing some of his earlier work in the exhibition. “The way I was handling the materials was more casual, like a man in a hurry. Or maybe I just didn’t know how else to put them together. I lacked facilities that would have been useful for those early trials of the work.”

Sixty-three pieces are included in the exhibition. The earliest piece dates back to 1981 to his Bachelor of Fine Art exhibition at the Cleveland Institute of Art. The exhibition includes mixed media, photography, works on paper and even performance, as well as his ceramic work.

“I’m pretty connected to my work,” he said. “It still feels like I made it the other day, some of that stuff. It doesn’t feel like 30 years ago.”

Dominguez grew up in Tucumcari, N.M., in a family of eight.

“At one time it was very active because it was on Route 66,” Dominguez said. “People were driving more, so it was a different kind of scene.”

He worked in a motel, so he saw different kinds of people coming through. He was also always involved in creative activity.

“I think that speaks to the influences I had,” Dominguez said. “I was seeing people make things and that seemed like creative artwork for me. I didn’t know the difference. I didn’t know there was this ‘higher art.’ I was just making stuff—building, restoring, reupholstering, drawing when I had paper and pencil. After a while my family started buying me some supplies, so I could work with more serious materials like oil paints on canvas.”

When it came time to apply for his undergraduate work at the Cleveland Institute of Art, Dominguez had a unique portfolio—he built a crate and filled it with his artwork and sent it to them.

“That’s how I applied. It was difficult for me with the culture I was around to have the kinds of things that these schools were requesting. One of them was a portfolio. I just didn’t know how to put one of those together. And there was no one there to assist me. I knew no one who had a camera. When I finally found someone who had a camera, it wasn’t taking the right size picture. So I built a crate, and I just wrapped up original art and I sent it to that one school,” he said.

Dominguez said his box contained very “regional flavored artwork,” such as a drawing of a kachina doll and an adobe house, as well as pottery.

“Probably just what I was seeing other people in town painting,” he said. “This stuff was not very sophisticated. But when I look at that work, I think this shows a kid, just even putting the crate together, who showed a certain kind of promise.”

He got accepted and was proud to study there.

“I think it was a pretty adventurous move for a Hispanic kid from a small town,” he said. “I had no real money for an expensive education like that at a private arts school. But I was in school after all. I played catch up, and I loved school.”

Dominguez then completed his master’s degree at Alfred University in 1983 and returned to Tucumcari to set up a studio and begin his life as a professional artist.

“I just moved forward and just started making things and trying to market it,” he said. “And in a regional kind of way, I’ve never been the kind of artist who pushes his work in every direction. I’ve been fortunate to have some success in that regard, but I didn’t ever indulge it. I was really interested in what surrounded me and where I was working and working within a region.”

In 1998, he began his first and only teaching job at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

“I had always been interested in teaching. I just didn’t know where that would finally happen,” he said. “I’ve never been one to apply for jobs. I figured when the right one came, it was going to feel right.”

He says Lincoln felt similar to New Mexico.

“I felt a common link to New Mexico, in terms of culture and place,” he said. “It was different—the reflection of it was different, but there were things about it that made me feel comfortable. And when I met the students, I felt a connection.”

He enjoys teaching.

“I like the idea of education and how it feeds everything. I love that I’m going to have memories about this place when I finally get to a place where I need to have them. I’m going to have these memories,” Dominguez said. “And I get to see my students go out into the world and succeed, and I’m proud to be a part of that.”

Dominguez says his creative process has a personal connection.

“I look at things in nature, in my home. I’m aware of the whole contemporary art scene and people making this or that. Those feeds are good. But I still study things more that are close. My creative process is being fed all the time by what I do because of that. If I’m in the classroom, I’m thinking of about my own creative process, too. I can’t resist it. And then even if I’m in the kitchen, I’m looking at vegetables or food in a kind of beautiful way like that. It’s pretty simple,” he said.

He’s been drawn to clay because of its basic nature.

“I think clay is a very humble material,” Dominguez said. “It’s so basic. It can’t get more basic than dirt in that you can use this material to do all sorts of things. It’s a fascinating kind of material. On the scientific level, it’s used on so many things. And in industrial levels, it’s used in so many products. And in agriculture, it grows food. In art, you can make a cup or some useful object. In a way, the earth is a useful object. So that just was a basic calling. When I touched it, it felt correct. It felt wonderful, really. Every other thing that I had attempted to do before that fed into that. All the formal thinking, all the ways painters had influenced me, all the things that I had studied, histories—it all started to be fed into that one material.”

Bold colors are a hallmark of Dominguez’s work.

“It is bold, and bold, I guess, I would translate as direct,” Dominguez said. “And that was true in the very early work. It was just direct. So I think when I work with color I often think, ‘I want to seduce you, or I want to repulse you.’ Because I know it works in both ways. Some people just can’t stand to look at it because it’s just too much color. It’s hard to use that kind of primary palette.”

His favorite piece in the retrospective is a tombstone he made for his niece in 1982 when she died.

“The reason it is my favorite is because it was so packed with emotion and reason and purpose and place. I was finding answers to questions I had asked but never really could answer. Everything was so specifically tied to a moment. It gave me permission, in a way, to believe that emotions I was having were going to be fruitful to the artwork. It was easier after that to discard formal influences or influences that were given to me. So when I look at that piece, it happens when we bury people that I get to see it or go visit my family, I see this thing that I made, and it’s shocking to me that it’s sitting out there in the cemetery still. And it’s a functional object just like the dishes I was making. It’s a very common, ordinary object that everyone knows what it is. You can see that it’s handmade and it has that quality. Those are big lessons,” Dominguez said.

Another piece that has special meaning to him is a tablecloth he made with his mother for an installation in graduate school.

“It is my greatest treasure,” he said. “I wanted to make a tablecloth when I was in high school, so it took years to get to that project. But it looks like a garden. Flowers and leaves, very influenced by quilt patterns—that simple graphic design and all my favorite colors. And my mother embroidered it. I pieced it, and she embroidered it. We’ve used it ever since to cover the dead in my family, so it has become something other than a tablecloth.”

He has actually worked with textiles longer than any other material.

“I’ve probably been working with textiles the longest,” Dominguez said. “Because I was sewing when I was a little boy. I was making stuff out of fabric—furniture, curtains, pillows. That was available, and my mother sewed, so she taught me. At the same time, I was discovering other ways to make art with traditional materials because that was how people were using that as well. And I’ve been printmaking since I was in college, as well as drawing and painting. Clay came after all that. And none of the other materials went away because clay came in. All of them go on at the same time—always have and probably always will.”

Dominguez said his more recent work is leaning toward more minimal thoughts.

“I’m trying to get it to a more universal place,” he said. “I’m thinking of storms as a metaphor for feelings. And water as a metaphor for like tears and emotion. And they’re dark. One’s black. One’s white. One’s terracotta red. So color is just the color that they are, very simple.”

Following this retrospective, Dominguez said he needs time now to determine what’s next in his work.

“I don’t know [what’s next]. I feel like I need time now,” Dominguez said. “I’ll just keep making.”

One thing is certain—art is important to Dominguez.

“Art is one of the things that has been around forever, and I just want to continue to add to that,” he said. “Adding beauty to the world is a good thing to do.”