Mano-Made: New Expression in Craft by Latino Artists Jaime Guerrero

JAIME GUERRERO
MANO-MADE: NEW EXPRESSION IN CRAFT
FOREWORD
Carol Sauvion | Executive Director | Craft in America
In preparation for Jaime Guerrero’s Mano-Made
exhibition at the Craft in America Center, part of
our partnership with the Pacific Standard Time:
LA/LA Initiative, I revisited the catalog we produced
in 2015 for the California Handmade exhibition,
which featured the work of over eighty established
and emerging California craft artists. The
exhibition was my first opportunity to see the
work of Jaime Guerrero: his monumental sculpture
Farm Worker.
When I first stood in front of Guerrero’s towering
Farm Worker, created in hot-sculpted blown glass,
I experienced awe at the power of the message
and appreciation of the artist’s ability to create
life-size sculptures in the challenging technique of
sculpted blown glass. The combination of beauty
and social commentary in Guerrero’s work proves
his mastery of this demanding technique and his
dedication to advocating for the underserved.
When Craft in America Center Director Emily Zaiden
decided to curate three one-person exhibitions
for our Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA partnership,
we both agreed that Jaime Guerrero should be
given an exhibition. Guerrero responded enthusiastically
to Zaiden’s invitation and chose to sculpt
an installation of life-size children and a glass
piñata − incorporating a visual metaphor for
children being held at the border. In his words,
Broken Dreams installation
“I’m working on a new body of work right now
that’s children running or congregating around a
piñata, which is normally seen as a celebration.
The pieces are referencing refugee children who
are trying to escape persecution or violence.
When you’re a little kid and you’re hitting a piñata,
you want what’s in that piñata because it’s hope.”
Jaime Guerrero will be featured in the NEIGHBORS
episode of the Craft in America documentary
series, which airs nationwide on PBS. We filmed
at the Corning Museum of Glass as Guerrero
created the figure of a small child for the exhibition.
Susie J. Silbert, Curator of Modern and
Contemporary Glass at the museum, had these
thoughts about his clear glass sculptures: “What
makes Jaime Guerrero’s work unique is the way
that he’s using sculptural glass to talk about
issues such as race and identity and politics.
And, in particular, he is using the fragility and the
clarity of glass to talk about things that are often
concealed like the lives of immigrants and other
migrants coming over the border. We don’t often
see them, but in rendering them in clear glass, he
is allowing us to both see and not see them.”
My thanks go to Jaime Guerrero for his sensitive
translation of a societal reality into a glass
installation and to Emily Zaiden for her scholarly
work as curator of Mano-Made and writer of this
revelatory catalog. It is with great pride and
gratitude that I welcome Jaime Guerrero’s small
children and their piñata to the Craft in America
Center. Hopefully, the events surrounding the
exhibition will open dialogs and make a difference
for them.
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