Jose Cedillos
Nancy's Window, 2025
Mixed media on canvas
Curved wood frame: 26 x 25"

Artist Statement
Nancy is a fashion consultant. The black cloth material with the word Allure was a gift from Nancy. The piece is a bricolage improvisation of these two elements.

I am a practitioner of the Bricolage Arts, a folk model of universal creativity utilizing whatever is at hand to fashion, repair, and invent. I have used a "Bricolage Theory of Improvisational Composition" in some form all my life. I learned naive Bricolage by being born into a Mexican American migrant field-working family. We fixed everything with broken parts and pieces of other things. We made tools from discards and scraps. Poverty made us inventive. Naive Bricolage (also called "crude materialism") always breaks down because life for "the poor" is always breaking down. In their world of constant breakage, repairs are transitory, made only to succeed at the moment. Labor-saving ideas were quickly passed along and copied, anything to make work easier. Since necessity made us see value in everything broken, we could look past and through the wreckage of all broken pieces to find a whole piece, one part intact. It felt like magic, like a conjuration.

Artist Bio
Jose Hilario Cedillos received a BA in Studio Art with honors from the University of California in 1971, A Master's degree in Education and Counseling from California State University in 1979, and a PHD in Humanistic Education in 1984, also from the University of California. The day after he defended his dissertation, he mounted a gallery show in Santa Barbara, California featuring the drawings and paintings he had created as study aids during his 4-year doctoral program.

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