Chaz Bojorquez is a man in possession of a lifelong wander lust , traversing the globe in search of identity, culture and the experiences that lay within.
Having started writing and placing marks upon walls since the 1960’s, Chaz not only created his own signature style, but is also one of the founders of modern graffiti. With a passion and hunger to discover all he could about the world he lives within, as well as his own sense of personal identity, his work spurred on a movement that would eventually evolve into the Los Angeles ‘Cholo’ hand style.
When we caught up with Chaz, at this years Carbon Festival, he was animated and alive, relishing the surroundings of both his own solo show, as well as the Carbon event itself. When we asked what he thought of his Australian experience thus far, he replied with as much animation as he appeared.
“I’ve had a fascination with Australia since I was kid. I had friends and family who migrated to Australia in the 60’s who they’d disappear down to this place, before it was called Down Under or anything like that.”
“I also always had a wander lust,” he continued. “I went to Mexico by myself when I was 16. I was born in LA, but my grandparents had emigrated to Tijuana, so I used to spend a lot of time in Tijuana … which isn’t really Mexico.”
This journeying in his youth had a direct effect on the path that his life would lead. As a third generation Chicano, his family re-migrated back down to Tijuana and was immersed in its culture vibrancy, which included trips with his grandmother to the regular bullfights. From there, his experiences led him to seeking out new environments and cultures from which to draw inspiration, which, in turn, lead to the discovery of his own roots.
“I started finding my own culture through other cultures,” he said enthusiastically. “I didn’t discover other cultures like a tourist does – Samoan culture, Fijian or New Zealand Maori culture. I found families, I found people – and I realised that even though the accents are different, we all make fun of the same things.”
Eager to learn and experience as much as he could about the world, Chaz travelled to Caledonia, the Southern islands, Papua New Guinea, and Bougainville and other areas in the South Pacific. He tells us that at this point in his life, he felt as though he was truly multicultural, that he knew the corners of the world. He began to reflect inwardly, analysing his own identity, and the more he did so the more it became evident that the cultures he had witnessed were not his own.
“I started hurting and aching, and asking, who am I?” he lamented. “I had to rediscover my own heritage. Which part of is Chicano? Which part was American Mexican?”
The quest to identify himself with his own culture lead to to the walls of Los Angeles. In an attempt to express himself and discover meaning in what he did as an artist, and who he was, he threw himself into the world of art and graffiti with a passion that he felt he had only previously scratched the surface of.
“Even though I had been doing graffiti since ‘69, that was when I decided to really prove it, and start making graffiti as art. I started out as a tagger. People were always saying ‘It’s not art, its trash!“
“Yeah I’m a writer. I’m a tagger. That’s who I am, and I’m proud of it,” he proclaimed passionately. ‘You gotta be who you are. You gotta tell the truth, because in the long run, that’s all you’re gonna have, and you have to build from that truth. I could only build from the foundations that I created.”
Chaz sees graffiti as communication between people – for urban youth, in particular – but he also views it as a thing of absolute beauty and strength. He wanted to prove this to the world, to create a painting to show the people around him, and indeed, the world, graffiti meant to him. Having witness first hand the early New York style, he realised that at that time it was an entirely East Coast style and entity, as, even then, there was form of isolation between the East Coast and West Coast. In order, however, to show people the beauty and strength in the way he expressed himself, he had to take a different tack.
“I didn’t actually do my first painting until 1981”, he continued, “but I had all this dialog. There were only a few people who knew how beautiful graffiti was, ahow it meant so much, how it was a dialog.”
“So I had to go into painting to prove it, to get the top down and bottom up credibility from the roots of the streets, because real graffiti is in the streets. It’s on the wall. You have to put minimum of ten years into the streets before you can call yourself a writer. It weeds out the toys, the players, the posers, the fakers; it weeds all of them out, and you end up with those who have real passion,” he declared.
Through his many days and nights spent painting on the streets of L.A., Chaz finally bega to feel as though he had discovered his identity. As an individual who has always been a dreamer, he often saw things where other people didn’t see them. He saw, quite early on, and before many others, that graffiti was important, that graffiti it was a language, and that it was a history to be celebrated.
When we asked Chaz about how it felt, to know that what he had dreamed of back then, that the ubiquity and acceptance of graffiti in popular society is slowly beginning to permeate our cultures, that people all across the world now see his work and his place within that history, he, with all humility, put it down to luck. Little by little from his experiences he learnt what exactly what it was that he was not, and after heading to New York and spending time with Dondi White and Keith Haring, he could see that he was, most simply, Cholo.
At this point in time, Chaz also began to fall in love with the ancient art of Calligraphy. It was his respect and appreciation of Asian artwork and illustration, as well as other traditional fonts, that involved intricate flowing letterforms which also lent themselves to developing his beautiful and unique script.
“I could see the influence of the letters, I could see the image and the letter shapes actually bouncing off each other. I could describe what it was doing to the birds, and the wings looked like the letters,” he expressed, “I started to see combinations, started to see images – that calligraphy was all about imagery.’”
Chaz felt at that point that he knew almost nothing about Cholo graffiti; only that it was made up of symbols, and he pondered upon how he could make it into a language that he himself could understand. He decided to begin a study of language itself, and spent a lot of time looking at these ancient forms of script, as well as collecting newspapers from all over the world in order to study the way in which themselves were presented. That newspapers also held a common thread, a common form of communication within the way in which they are presented. Messages laid out in blocks of text, fonts and images.
He also spoke to old time Cholos in LA, men who had seen the passing of years and who held the traditions of their people in their hearts. He asked why they had chosen Old English as their style, why it was so ubiquitous in their communication, and they had remarked that it was because Old English was made from the most prestigious of letters, “it’s on your birth certificate, on your death certificate, it’s used for your graduation…” and that it was this, and familiarly enough, the influence of growing up reading comic books, that led to the creation of the old Cholo style.
As this quest for identity began to form a cohesion around him, Chaz began to ruminate on the almost imperceptible disappearance of the old Cholo-style writing from around the LA neighbourhoods, and the beauty of the Gothic and Old English fonts amongst the Chicano culture. It was then, when he began to reflect his own inward discoveries outwards to the world via both writing upon the walls as well as his work in the galleries, that he evolved his unique interpretation of a letterform; one that he felt best represented his people.
As he did so, he remembered feeling as if nobody really respected his work, or his letters, and asked himself, “How can I respect my own culture? How can truly make graffiti important enough that people can understand it?”
So he continued to focus on creating, drawing and writing it out, using “… beautiful, clean, straight lines. A line to a line. Centre to centre. Flush right, flush left,” he described. “Making the whole unity of the letters become poetic. To find rhymes reasons and echoes in the entirety, and then to try to make something of beauty, but still something that is hard, and sharp…”
When he first took his paintings to Chicano galleries in East L.A, Chaz remembers the general dismissal of his work. At the time, the resounding response was that that Chicano was all about “family, religion, border issues, immigration, suppression…” and that his “bad boy art” and reinterpretations and evolution of the letters of his culture would undermine the subjects that were deemed most important.
Finally, tells us, and thankfully, he was embraced by other artists who saw his work as new and invigorating, and met such luminaries as Robert Williams and Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, who both helped Chaz to put on his very first show. His work was displayed alongside tattoo tribal artists, artists who worked on surfboards, cartoonists and hot rodders and it was through that show, and many more in future years, that he discovered that that the differences between their various cultures and styles had begun to fade away.
“We all showed together, and we discovered that we all had the same lines. We had the same stroke – the West Coast stroke.”
From there, one of the many epiphanies in his life occurred. He discovered that he was a blend, that something else, something new, something distinct was being created. Whereas that before, he had thought that the artists and their work had seemed to be separate, but that things had begun to coalesce
Whereas before, things had seemed to be quite separate, he came to the understanding that the communication and languages expressed by the artists and creative individuals around him had begun to coalesce – that they were all inherently drawing from the same well springs of influence. Their city, their culture. Their home – their place.
Speaking to Chaz Bojorquez was a profound experience; he is a man who has carefully explored the world and the treasures of human culture. By drawing on the echos of the past and the traditions of old, he has created his own sense of identity and style through a belief that within life you must stay true to yourself, that great things will come from building upon your own foundations. Chazs dream of transforming something that was forsaken as garbage and wilful vandalism into something that sought – no, demanded – importance has bloomed into the multiple facets of abstracted acceptance in our modern lives. His style is poetic and speaks in the hidden language of philosophy; his art is beauty, strength and identity.
From his signature Señor Suerte, one of the first true icons of graffiti created on the streets, now found tattooed on thousands of individuals, to his letters and artwork both inside and outside of the gallery, Chaz has created a legacy, one that we have no doubt will continue to stand the test of time. His hard work, perseverance and explorations have forever enshrined him as a true pioneer – not only of the LA street style, but of a beautiful, all encompassing, global graffiti culture.
Interview and article by Jess Brohier & Fletcher Andersen. Check out all the photos from the exhibition Chaz held in Melbourne for Carbon Festival, L.A. Handstyles, here, and the live paint session he did whilst he was down here.
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