Shaping clay, connections and narratives

Photos by Mike Reza

Stephanie Hernández thought she wanted to be a stone carver. She envisioned herself moving to Italy and learning how to carve perfect people. She wasn’t expecting that in the final year of her studio art degree at Cal State Long Beach, she’d take a miscellaneous ceramics class—an offhanded recommendation from a friend—and her life would transform completely.

“As soon as I touched [the clay] I was like, I don’t want to do anything else,” Hernández said.

The Guatemalan artist was drawn to how environmental-oriented the medium was; all you need is air, dirt, water and fire. The more Hernández learned about the clay—how mud clay is essentially recycled clay and has a smooth finish while Dixon is red and rough with sand and small pieces of rock that leave a groggy finish—the more fascinated she became.

“What you’re doing is alive; it keeps shrinking, it keeps moving…and you have to learn its personality,” Hernández said.

The art of ceramics has helped young Latinx artists like Hernández connect to their culture, process their emotions and create visual representations of their experiences. However, they must still balance the complexity of creating art that vastly differs from the Eurocentric art style taught in their classes and reflected in the major museums to make art more accessible and representative of the diversity of CSULB and beyond.

Ceramics have been part of the Central American indigenous traditions for thousands of years. Archaeologists date the earliest Mayan pots to nearly 3,000 years ago. Most of their work was for utilitarian purposes like pots, pans and bowls but they would also create small, carved ceramic figures. Mayan culture has been influential in Hernandez’s work as she explores her faith through an ancestral perspective.

Ceramics major Angel Prudencio is in his last year at CSULB and has first-hand experience receiving mixed reactions to his art. He describes his art as “very figurative,” often creating sculptures that reflect faces and emotions. He said others describe it as “very dark” which has both garnered praise and hesitancy from people interacting with it.

“I had a series where I was making all kinds of faces but all the faces that I was making were either gruesome or they were very scary for some people, especially when you think about it like, ‘Oh, we're gonna go see ceramics’ [they] don't expect this type of content to pop up,” Prudencio said.

Born and raised in Jalisco, México, Prudencio immigrated to the Coachella Valley when he was 15. Having to essentially restart his life was hard on him; he felt lonely and sad. Prudencio began creating these types of faces as a representation of his own insecurities with the English language.

“There's often a little anger, a little anguish, and then I think that reflects just how frustrated I was by that language barrier,” said Prudencio. “I get mixed reactions. I think a lot of people are shocked or a lot of people are scared. But even though that might be the case, they still recognize the craftsmanship.”

For Jas Alas, who’s in her second year at CSULB, her art creations may not explicitly incorporate her culture, but doing ceramics has helped her feel connected to her family back in El Salvador. Her family has been doing ceramics work for decades–although she did not know that until a couple of years into her ceramics journey.

Alas creates large vessels that are altered in some organic way. She said her process has become much more intuitive; each idea begins with an emotion she is trying to process. It has made her work more vulnerable and emotional and has made the process therapeutic.

One of her favorite pieces is a large sculpture with scattered hollow cavities with a crimson ooze coming out of them. It has an airbrushed gradient of purple and pink hues reminiscent of bruises. She made it her first semester and titled it “Sure, I can take a few more hits.”

“I don't plan anything. I just alter it as I go, whatever feels right in the moment, kind of like how we are as humans, our emotions can be so sporadic,” Alas said.

Continuing this work is important to Alas because it helps diversify ceramics and offers representation for artists who come from backgrounds like hers. Both she and Hernández talked about how underrepresented Central American artists are even within the Latinx diaspora. They mentioned how while there needs to be more diverse art, a lot of spaces seem to focus solely on Mexican and Chicano art.

“I feel like just presenting myself as a Central American artist or like a Salvadoran American artist is just a little push into more representation for everyone,” Alas said.