Reflecting the street

Even as his work takes flight, Mario Ybarra Jr. keeps his feet planted in the neighborhoods he knows.

By Hugh Hart
Special to The Times

September 3, 2006

YOU might not guess it to watch Mario Ybarra Jr. sweating through the afternoon at the New Chinatown Barbershop, his tiny, un-air-conditioned gallery with its mismatched linoleum tile and dusty packets of prisoner art, but the 32-year-old artist from L.A.'s harbor region is rounding the corner on an exceptionally good year.

Seven miles west, Ybarra's "Belmont Ruins" tribute to graffiti artists can be seen at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's "Consider This … " show (through Jan. 15 at LACMA West). On Friday, he'll stage an "intervention" at London's Serpentine Gallery, where he's formed an ad hoc bird-watching club to educate the public about Hyde Park's nonnative parakeet population as a metaphor for immigrant cultures. By October, he needs to finish paintings for the Orange County Museum of Art's "2006 California Biennial."

And at Ybarra's bakery-turned-studio in downtown Wilmington, a 6-foot-tall cardboard cutout of Chewbacca awaits. The "Star Wars" creature is inspiration, along with Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata, for the "Brown and Proud" mural he'll be painting at the Institute of Contemporary Arts for that London museum's "Alien Nation" exhibition in December.

Fueled by a diet cola and dressed in an oversized T-shirt and baggy shorts, Ybarra, resting on an upended plastic bucket, acknowledges that he's still getting used to the art world's formal embrace.

"Things have kind of shifted for me now, in that I have become official in a way, like I have a title or whatever," he says. That title would be Artist, and though he's shown work over the last five years at a dozen smaller venues, Ybarra credits the two-year "Belmont Ruins" project as his decisive proving ground.

"I worked with LACMA administration, the curator of objects, the audio-video guys, the union of painters, the union of builders, the audience, the panel discussions," he says. "I learned from the senior artists in the show about how to navigate an institution, and now I feel like the museum is my arena. It is kind of a weird position for me, trying to hold on to some nostalgic sense of being on the street by doing a project like 'Belmont Ruins,' because the truth is I love the street."

Two tattooed twentysomething artists knock on the gallery door. Barbershop is between shows and is locked, but Ybarra lets them in and listens patiently for 10 minutes as they discuss their own upcoming works. He hands out a few gallery postcards, urges his visitors to check back in at the 930 N. Hill St. storefront in a few weeks and sends them on their way. Ybarra may be traveling in some lofty institutional circles these days, but he's still got the common touch and, as evidenced by "Belmont Ruins," he wouldn't want it any other way.

The LACMA installation pays tribute to a now-bulldozed vacant lot just west of the 110 Freeway near 1st Street that for two decades served as a near-legendary destination for graffiti taggers. Ybarra remembers his first visit to the site when he was 16. "Ten of us piled into the back of my friend's truck and drove all the way from the harbor area to Belmont Tunnel. When we got there, it seemed like a flashback in time where you're looking at some Mesoamerican temple underneath the skyline of Los Angeles, with the graffiti and the guys playing pelota. We took pictures of it like we were in front of the Eiffel Tower or Mt. Rushmore."

Ybarra mimics the site's tunnel opening with a graffiti-covered cave-like structure equipped with marking pens so visitors can draw on the walls. A video monitor loops a documentary on Belmont Park's history. A Maya sculpture from the museum's antiquities collection depicts miniature clay figures immersed in a pre-Columbian ballgame that predates by two millenniums the pelota played in Belmont Park. Glass vitrines display formally labeled spray-paint cans and nozzle caps excavated by Ybarra from the "ruins," along with Red Car ticket stubs from the downtown-to-Silver Lake rail line, served by the tunnel, which shut down in 1955.

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Mountains out of molehills

BARBARA KRUGER, the conceptual artist who designed "Consider This … " for LACMALab (the museum's experimental arm), notes, "There's clearly this confluence of a million things going on at once, but 'Belmont Ruins' is very particularized and very much part of his method. Artists tend to choreograph or categorize things already found within culture and transform them to mean something bigger than the way they're used in the vernacular, and that's what Mario did. He incorporated the imprint of social lives and how they manifest themselves, visually and historically and on an audio level too, because he's able to look at the big picture."

In 2002, after earning a bachelor's in fine art from Otis College of Art and Design and a master's in fine art from UC Irvine, Ybarra joined classmate Juan Capistran to form Slanguage, a workshop aimed at developing young Latino talent. Early this year, to extend that effort, Ybarra and his wife, Karla B. Diaz, opened Barbershop, which recently hosted an "Insider Art" exhibition of drawings produced by inmates at Pelican Bay State Prison.

On the international front, Ybarra's profile got a boost last fall when his "Dance to the Beat of a Different Drum Machine" piece debuted at "Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium." The group show originated in Oslo and this fall is scheduled to travel from New York's Bard College Center for Curatorial Studies, where it will be on view through next Sunday, to Iceland and Denmark. One of 48 young artists selected from about 1,500 applicants, Ybarra devised a multimedia installation made up of 2,000 fliers and mix tapes collected in the early '90s by his DJ friend Haven Perez at the all-night dance 'n' drug spectacles known as raves.

Jens Hoffman, the Institute of Contemporary Arts director of exhibitions, believes that pieces like "Dance" and the forthcoming ICA Chewbacca-meets-Zapata mural demonstrate Ybarra's talent for fusing playful pop-culture references with subtle political undercurrent.

"For me, right now, Mario is the most interesting artist in Los Angeles because he's well-read and really knows his stuff about the whole history of conceptual art," Hoffman says. "At the same time, he's very familiar with West Coast Mexican American culture because he lives it. Mario brings it together quite beautifully because he reflects upon all these elements from a different perspective, almost like a form of anthropology."

For the OCMA biennial survey, Ybarra spent several months in his Honda Civic foraging through Orange County subcultures for inspiration. He came up with "Sign Language," a series to be installed in the museum's cafeteria. The trompe l'oeil enamel paintings are modeled after a former Pioneer Chicken franchise retooled as a Chinese restaurant in Westminster's Vietnamese community, a handmade placard advertising the shaved-ice raspas treat that he spotted outside a swap meet popular with O.C. Latinos and a neon sign for a retro diner in Anaheim's Lab Antimall.

Even as he prepares for out-of-town commissions and new shows — including his 2007 debut at London's Tate Modern, his first local solo show at Anna Helwing Gallery next year and a return to LACMA in 2008 for the museum's "Phantom Sightings: Art After the Chicano Movement" exhibition — Ybarra plans to stay rooted in the decidedly untrendy working-class port city where he grew up. "Wilmington," he says with a laugh, "is one of the most toxic areas in California in terms of carcinogens in the air. But to me, it's this small, funky town, and it's where my personal ghosts haunt me."

That's a good thing, he says, because those ghosts keep him honest. "On the wall of my favorite pizza parlor on PCH is this picture of the 1984 All-Star Little League baseball team," he says. "In the center is my friend Richard when he was 12 years old, about five years before he starts doing a life sentence in prison."

The usually voluble artist pauses. "Every time I go into Red West for pizza and see Richard's photograph, he never lets me forget where he is and our life together as kids. I have to address that, because the way I make art isn't just about me. Frankly, I'm not that interesting. I was the runt that got protected by all these kids that I think are way more interesting than me. But since I got saved, I get to tell the story. So I stay in Wilmington. I ride my bicycle and I ride my skateboard, and I see what's going on."

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'Consider This ...'

Where: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd.

When: Noon to 8 p.m. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays; noon to 9 p.m. Fridays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays

Ends: Jan. 15

Price: $9 adults; $5 students and seniors; free for children 17 and under and museum members; free to all after 5 p.m. and on the second Tuesday of each month

Contact: (323) 857-6000 or www.lacma.org

Also

What: "2006 California Biennial"

Where: Orange County Museum of Art, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach

When: 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Wednesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays; 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays

Begins: Oct. 1

Ends: Dec. 31

Price: $10 adults; $8 students and seniors; free for children 12 and under and museum members; free to all on Thursdays

Contact: (949) 759-1122 or www.ocma.net<252>