"La Inmensidad/Immensity" Paintings by Maceo Montoya at Davis Community Gallery

The Davis Community Gallery announces the opening of “La Inmensidad / Immensity,” an exhibit of acrylic paintings by renowned artist Maceo Montoya. “La Inmensidad / Immensity,” opens on Friday, February 12, 2010 at Davis Community Gallery with an Artists’ Reception from 5:30pm to 7pm and will be on exhibit at the Davis Community Gallery through May 28, 2010.

Maceo Montoya grew up in the small town of Elmira, California. He comes from a family of artists, including his father Malaquias Montoya, a renowned artist, activist, and educator, and his late brother, Andrés Montoya, whose poetry collection “The Iceworker Sings” won the American Book Award in 2000. Montoya graduated from Yale University in 2002 where he majored in History and Ethnicity Race & Migration. He also received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2006. He has completed several public art commissions, including murals with the Eastside Arts Alliance in Oakland and Taller Arte Del Nuevo Amenecer (TANA) in Woodland, California, where he has worked as an instructor. In addition to several solo exhibitions, Montoya’s work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including Caras Vemos, Corazones No Sabemos: The Human Landscape of Mexican Migration to the United States, which has traveled to museums throughout the country, and Inter-viewing Paintings, a survey of contemporary Eastern and Western painters at the SOMA Museum of Art in Seoul, Korea. He presently lives in Woodland, California where he paints and writes. His first novel, “The Scoundrel and the Optimist,” is forthcoming from Bilingual Review Press at Arizona State University.

More information on the artist and his work is available online at www.maceomontoya.com.

Artist’s statement:

“Art has the singular ability to represent society’s intricacies in ways that other fields cannot. Its main concern is not the ever-changing tide of systems, policy, and socioeconomic structures, but the exploration of the human condition - an elusive and complex yet always reliable constant. The artist’s most important function is to facilitate this search, and in the process help forge a more clearly articulated understanding of humanism. Of course, what is truly depicted in any work of art is the artist’s own grappling with a particular existence, in this case, my own relative reflections on hardship, displacement, and loss - at best a faithful translation. But it’s done with the hope that viewers of my work make a connection to that which is different, misunderstood, or altogether unseen; and ultimately, that certain truths are revealed about the moments and movements that define all of our lives.”

– Maceo Montoya