Art

Blue Room Impact has invested in the work of contemporary artist and community builder Eduardo Sarabia, who leads a profit-sharing studio dedicated to making art and creating a livable wage for fellow artists. 

Sarabia was born in Los Angeles to parents who immigrated from Mexico. His mother lacked documents at that time (though today she is an American citizen). He grew up in a rough, inner-city neighborhood but at a young age found that art could be a means of surmounting challenging surroundings. When a teacher noticed Sarabia’s talent, she pushed for him to be allowed to attend Saturday art classes being given on the California State University campus, and Sarabia quickly began winning prizes. One award included a meeting with the mayor of Los Angeles, but Sarabia was afraid to share the news with his parents, as he knew his mother would be intimidated. When the teacher told his parents about the award, his mother indeed berated Sarabia for attracting such notice. Happily his parents later came to take great pride in his talent. 

After earning a degree in fine arts from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, Sarabia went on to become a hugely successful figure in the art world, and then returned to live in the country his parents were from originally. From his studio based in Guadalajara, Mexico, he makes ceramic pieces, paintings, and installations, all of which explore the U.S.-Mexican border region, Mexican cultural stereotypes, and his own identity as a Mexican-American who feels at home in two countries. His work often blends fact and fiction, and he infuses his ceramic work and his paintings and installations with references to traditional Mexican folklore, as well as contemporaneous issues such as drug violence, contraband, and illegal activities that take place in the border region. His work has been included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and the 51st Venice Biennale.

In recent years, Sarabia found himself amassing a significant backlog of orders for his work. Especially popular are his layered paintings, called “intrahistorias,” in which he creates a photo-realistic painting of a real person or scene, and then layers patterns of abstract images over top, complicating and occluding the original work. It typically takes Sarabia between three to five months to complete one work. Realizing that he could never catch up with the ever-increasing demand for his work from collectors unless he transformed the way that he operated, Sarabia teamed up with Blue Room to rent a larger studio space and to hire ten fellow artists to become part of his team. At the moment when Sarabia solicited help, many other artists were simultaneously experiencing a significant drop in their activity and income, as galleries and museums cancelled shows due to the novel coronavirus. 

Sarabia was able to attract top-level talent and quickly assembled a team that he hopes will be able to help him produce forty paintings in the next sixteen months. To show how much he values their work, Sarabia brought the painting team on board with both a salary and the promise of profit-sharing in all revenues that the communally produced works will earn when they are sold to the collectors who eagerly await Sarabia’s latest paintings. Sarabia hopes that this will permit him to grow as an artist and at the same time will provide profit-sharing funds in an amount significant enough to allow each of his team members to take time away from their jobs to focus on their own work in the future. In this way Sarabia is creating both his own oeuvre and a stronger art community at the same time.