HOUSTON – Inside the Sawyer Studios and Gallery near the Heights, you’ll hear the sounds of history.
“I’m from the volcano,” Geraldina Interiano Wise said.
The co-owner of Sawyer Studios and Gallery uses a mortar and pestle for a century’s old practice.
“I say that my signature as an artist is the pigment is the indigo pigment,” she said.
Sourced from the ashes of our Earth and Wise’s Mayan roots.
“I was not meant to be here,” Wise said. “I was going to come and get educated in architecture and art and go back and help my people bring some good thinking around living.”
Then in 1979 while attending Rice University—
“The Civil War happened and many of the Salvadorians in this area are here because the Civil War broke us,” she said. “I was left without my land, without my home.”
The painting created purpose for Wise.
“I had to uncover who was I showing up in this culture and I had to go deeper into my roots,” she said.
Wise created a piece known as the Modular Woman.
“My modular woman, these in particular are in action because we are action, women, we are wonder women,” she said.
Wise is an environmental artist— sustainability and cultural empathy is the goal. This year she won Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Community and Arts Hispanic Heritage Award for her contributions.
“To take what is old but then make it fresh and relevant is super important as an artist because I am a recorder of time,” she said. “I am recording today.”
Whether it’s using flood water to show the impacts of Hurricane Harvey or hanging plastic gloves symbolic of the year 2020, each brush stroke is a step towards understanding.
“My blood is telling me I have to be one of the Maya that are working for life on the planet,” she said.
Wise is the founder of the Latino Museum of Cultural and Visual Arts & Archive Complex in Houston, Harris County (ALMAAHH), a 501(c)(3) organization dedicated to the planning and creation of a Houston-area cultural and arts complex that will showcase, preserve, and expand Latino arts.
According to their mission statement, the complex will support Latino culture, create opportunities for artists of all types, and elevate Houston as a national hub of Latino Culture.
They are currently asking for the community’s help for feedback on the project, click here to take the survey.