What is the Latino experience in the United States? Is it the farm worker unfairly paid? Is it the grandmother making tortillas for dinner? Or is it children gathering around the popsicle street vendor? For Colorado artist Tony Ortega, the Latino experience is all these things and much, much more. Ortega draws from individual slices of life to create artwork centered on family and community-what he considers the two major components of the Latino. Moreover, each piece of art he makes adds to the dynamic culture he works with exclusively, an active and vital part of American society that Ortega feels goes too unnoticed. Ortega brings these concepts of family and community out of the shadows and into this year's Serie Project with La Marcha de Lupe Liberty. In it, he digitally combined images of the Statue of Liberty and of Our Lady of Guadalupe, two of the most recognizable icons from the United States and Mexico. Ortega wished to create a figure with relevance to both cultures as a backdrop to a marching crowd in the foreground. The juxtaposition of the real with the iconic gives a view of the current state of immigrant relations in the United States. Ortega got the idea for the image when he attended a 2006 Denver rally in support of immigrant rights and in reaction to a proposed federal bill to deport illegal immigrants. His "marchers" are faceless to convey Ortega's concept of community because "we can put our friend's faces-our own faces-to complete the piece."
Ortega was born in Santa Fe, New Mexico and grew up between his birthplace and Denver. He received a Masters of Fine Arts from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1995 and is currently an assistant professor of fine art at Regis University.
