One of the first things that struck artist Shizu Saldamando upon meeting Los Angeles art dealer Charlie James was his curiosity about who the actual people in her portrait paintings are. That was more than a decade ago. “Charlie’s like: ‘Who are they? What’s their story?'” she recalled. “He understood that it was a really important part of the work that people understood who the person is and what they’re about. It adds a layer of content. I had a lot of other galleries and curators just approaching the work like ‘Oh It’s Chicano identity, and that was it.”

Saldamando offers one of the simplest and most direct explanations of her work. “I do portraits celebrating people, friends, and peers, many of whom are activists, brown, queer, trans, Indigenous, immigrants, femme, and the like,” she says. “[People] who exist regardless of legislation and historical erasure.”

That initial interaction between the artist and the dealer began a working relationship. Charlie James, her gallerist, also recalls that first memory of seeing the work at a panel at a Culver City gallery about Chicano art, where Saldamando was in discussion with film-star turned collector and museum founder Cheech Marin and collector Armando Durón.

Shizu Saldamando. Photo by Joaquin Higa.

“I was struck by her frankness and of course by the quality of her drawings that were shown during the talk,” said James. He noted that response to Saldamando’s work has been “wonderful.” Collections that hold her work include  LACMA, Crystal Bridges, Princeton University Museum of Art, and Oakland Museum of California.

This week, Saldamando is having her debut at Art Basel Miami Beach, in a solo presentation with the gallery. On view in the Nova section, Saldamando’s paintings stand out as a result of her unique style and working process, which involves working her portraits onto untreated plywood. This method allows for striations and markings that add depth and give them an almost sculptural quality that feels “more vibrational and more alive,” according to the artist. Prices for portrait paintings on view at the fair range from $8,500 to $18,000.

Early next year, Saldamando is part of a group show at Deitch Los Angeles scheduled to run during Frieze LA that she is giving the working title of “Brown Excellence” where she will be exhibiting alongside Rafa Esparza and others. It will be followed by a photorealist group show planned for MOCA later on in 2024.

Shizu Saldamando, Portrait of Artist Young Joon Kwak (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2023 Shizu Saldamando; Photo © 2023 Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio

Saldamando has also garnered considerable attention for her floral sculptural pieces, which are inspired by communal crafting that was done in Japanese-American wartime camps. In part because of the fact that her uncle was detained at the American Manzanar camp, she undertook extensive research into its archives. There, she found paper flowers and remnants of wire bouquets. “There wasn’t any flowers or vegetation, just barren landscapes,” she said. These floral bouquets were made for funerals or any other sort of milestone celebrations using ordinary, everyday material they could find—such as mail order catalogues.

In honor of this, Saldamando said she makes her floral works “as a pause for reflection and space for communal mourning.” She incorporates material like washi papers, a traditional hand-processed Japanese paper, as well as floral ribbons, gardening trellises, and found chain link fence parts.

The artist grew up in the Mission District of San Francisco in the 1980s and ’90s, and was heavily influenced by the figurative and mural work focused on social justice and Chicano culture that she observed all around her. She recalled attending events including major annual celebrations of Día de los Muertos well before it was the more widely recognized. “That was my earliest influence of exposure to art-making and and the idea of being a working artist. I always drew pictures of friends,” Saldamando said in a phone call from Los Angeles where she lives and works.

Shizu Saldamando, Untitled 1 (2023) Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2023 Shizu Saldamando; Photo © 2023 Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio

Her intimate portraits are accompanied with descriptions of the subjects that lend not only insight to Saldamando’s fascination and personal relationships with them, but also her wide range of interests. Take Prisca in GISM Shirt (2023), for which the artist writes: “Prisca Alejandro Rios is a creative, friend, and fellow music aficionado who went to one of my random deejay nights in Silverlake. I took a photo of them outside the venue and they happened to be wearing a t-shirt of the group G.I.S.M., an avant-garde Anarchist hardcore punk band from Japan. Prisca also manages one of the best places to get breakfast in Alhambra, Yang’s Kitchen.”

She studied at UCLA art school and CalArts. At UCLA, Saldamando’s teachers included giants of conceptual art such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden, and Allen Ruppersburg. “It was this weird culture shock coming from the Mission and then going to learning from these artists. It was very concept-based and laborious in its own way,” said the artist. She sought employment at the Self Help Graphics and Art Center in East LA, one of the first community art centers focused on Chicano art that later became nationally recognized. “It was a nice balance because I had all these different aspects of art-making and exposure. Back in that time, it was really not as diverse as it is now. It was hard to do work that was influenced by activism or the Chicano movement.”

Though her time at CalArts was in some ways “alienating,” she persevered with her experiments in portraiture, concluding her thesis show of work made with ballpoint pen on stretched canvas.

Shizu Saldamando, Prisca in GISM Shirt (2023). Image courtesy of the artist and Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles. © 2023 Shizu Saldamando; Photo © 2023 Yubo Dong @ofphotostudio

A key development in her plywood portraits, which are now done on pricier material that she special orders, came when she stopped treating them with a substrate like gesso. As a result, the artist said, the paint now “seeps into the wood and blends in with the grain. It becomes something really ephemeral and subtle but then like fluid too in terms in terms of how I think about identity or subject in terms of how people are constantly in flux. Like identity is never fixed, so it took a while for me to get there.”

That fluidity extends to how she thinks about her skilled blend of biographical and background influences. “I’m a whole person. I get asked about what aspects of my work are Japanese-American or Mexican-American but as people we are all constantly influenced by, not only our own personal cultural identities but by the larger world,” she said. “They’ve all become kind of mediated and just melted into each other. I can’t draw a line between the two. For me it makes complete sense.”

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