We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Patrick McGrath-Muniz a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Patrick, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?
As an artist living in Texas, with a Roman Catholic background and growing up during the 1980’s and 90’s in the island of Puerto Rico, the oldest colony in the Western hemisphere, my work responds to our globalized neo-liberal consumer society and its environmental indifference by tracing its origins to the time of Columbus. Adopting Renaissance pictorial techniques on canvas and retablos reminiscent of Spanish colonial art, allows me to emulate earlier indoctrination strategies and devices from the time of the conquest of the Americas.
After losing my home and studio in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of hurricane Maria in 2017, I felt a personal sense of responsibility to re-tell our current global paradigm the way I know best, through drawings, paintings, altarpieces and in the form of tarot cards, inspired after one of the few personal items I managed to salvage before the storm. Tarot, a deck of cards and visual tradition derived from Renaissance culture, offers lessons from the past, while attempting to forecast the future through the use of timeless allegories and occult symbolism. Beyond that, they also point towards a universal set of archetypes that allows us to re-interpret our current age, from a holistic perspective, viewing world history as cyclically interconnected.
Through satirical narratives, anachronisms and a re-contextualization of history I’m able to explore and shed light on the colonial roots of the ruling Corpocracy with its Neo-colonial ramifications. By appropriating figures and icons from History, Mythology, Tarot, Spanish Colonial Iconography and Pop Culture, I recreate scenes that mirror my own experience living in a country torn by a polarizing mass media in an age of information technology, climate change and global pandemics. The result is a set of two dimensional contemplative sanctuaries that blend personal myths and memories with modern history and religious icons in order to reflect on how our capitalist doctrines, corporate ideologies, and consumerist habits have modified our appreciation towards spirituality, history, nature and ourselves.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’ve been painting since I was 15 years old when I started taking private art lessons. In 2003 I obtained and BFA (Magna Cum Laude) in Fine Arts from the School of Fine Arts of San Juan, Puerto Rico and an MFA (Suma Cum Laude) from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006.
My work consists primarily of oil paintings on canvas and retablos. The work is inspired after Old Master and Spanish colonial paintings while addressing issues such as colonialism, consumerism, climate change and global pandemics. I’ve also created a Tarot deck inspired by the same issues, titled: Tarot Neocolonial de las Americas, published by U.S. Games.inc.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
When I make art, I find myself in a mission, first; as a way of knowing myself , second; as a means to understanding the world around me and third; as an antidote to our intolerable collective amnesia and superfluous distracted media that keeps us disconnected from reality.
What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?
I guess one big lesson I’ve learned in recent years is to take good care of my work and document everything I make. This doesn’t only apply to art I make but to memories and photos as well. Unfortunately I learned this the hard way, after losing most of my personal belongings, family photos and work in the aftermath of hurricane Maria back in 2017. And here’s the thing: I did have a chance to save these things a year priot to the hurricane but I didn’t. I did manage to save my drawing journals and some family photo albums thanks to my cousin Alba and her husband Nestor. Now I’m making sure I digitize everything I find and taking good care of what I’ve been able to save. I’m aware that we should not be too attach to things themselves, but sometimes, things carry personal meaning and history and this is what Im interested in as it informs and inspires my work as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.patrickmcgrath-art.com
- Instagram: www.instagram.com/patrickmcgrathmuniz/
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/patrick.v.muniz/
- Youtube: www.youtube.com/channel/UC_4z0j4JHo5fe_MF7XQ0hOQ
Image Credits
All photos of work are copyright of Patrick McGrath Muñiz