Professor masters art of recycling

Perry Vasquez has a degree from Stanford, is a prolific journalist, an advocate for immigrants’ rights and has had his art exhibited in a number of museums. Best of all, he insists, he still has his childhood sense of humor.

If he says he has completed an oil painting beware, he may have used motor oil.

In 2008, Vasquez began collecting comic book cut outs of super heroes to use in his oil painting parody of Auguste Rodin’s “Gates of Hell,” which he renamed the “Gates of Heck.” Vasquez substituted Rodin’s mythological figures with comic book characters.

Even Lucifer had to smirk.

“It seemed natural to have a post modern strategy with pop culture imagery and put them into a more classical context,” he said. “It was my way of updating the images.”

Next he wrote a rock opera for the “Gates of Heck” that was performed at the San Diego Museum of Arts in August.

All the while he planned another project that he hoped would make him an oil baron — and not an oil paint baron. His paintings exhibition at the San Diego Historical Society in Balboa Park were all created with used motor oil.

Vasquez said he had a beater car in college that was held together with paper clips and masking tape. One day, he had noticed a large puddle of oil beneath his car. Instead of worrying about how to repair the car on a student budget, Vasquez said he decided to bottle the remaining oil and use it as a medium.

“It taught me to think outside the box and think conceptually about art,” he said.

Another college experience led indirectly to his partnership with the gifted Chicano artist Victor Payan.

During the summer of 1981, Vasquez took an inpaid internship for Wet Magazine that he said helped him gain experience and get published.

“Seeing your byline in a newspaper for the first time is really exciting,” he said. “When it becomes nothing special, that is when you have really succeeded.”

At Stanford he became an editor of The Chaparral, the student newspaper. In the 100-year history of the Stanford Chaparral, there have been few Latinos, making it easy for Payan — a former Chaparral editor — to recognize Vasquez.

“The Stanford Chaparral taught us an irreverence and understanding that humor is an important part of global issues and what is important,” said Payan.

Besides Stanford, the friends share a love of this region’s border culture. They collaborated on the Keep on Crossin’ Project in 2003 as a submission for a California design competition. Their design did not win, but was incorporated into a critically-acclaimed patch.

A number of issues led to the birth of Keep on Crossin’. Besides immigration, the campaign was inspired by the North American Free Trade Agreement, a disaster for indigenous farmers and laborers in Mexico. Vasquez said people on both sides of the border were to going from full-time to indefinite part-time work, losing income, their right to organize and all benefits.

“There were things being taken away that we as Americans had taken for granted,” said Payan.

In 2006, Keep on Crossin’ was featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art and later purchased by the museum for its permanent collection for a national tour. It is still generating interest and museum exhibitions 10 years later.

La frontera is an endless source of inspiration for artists like Vasquez and Payan.

“To be in San Diego and ignore the border would be like missing the best part of what the city has to offer,” said Vasquez. “It is like a mirror. Everybody who looks at the border sees themselves reflected back.”

Payan agreed.

“There has always been a love and fascination for the border and Tijuana,” he said. “You look at current films and it seems like we are entering another area of cultural exuberance, acceptance and joy that we had before the wall of the border came up. Projects like Keep on Crossin’ really capture that spirit.”