How to Make a Paint Bomb: Alex Donis Recalls My Cathedral and WAR

The following is a transcription of a talk artist Alex Donis gave at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art on April 3, 2015. The original transcript was amended by the artist on July 10, 2015.

Thank you Jennifer, and to my peers and colleagues for joining me, all of us, on this panel. And, of course, to the staff here at the Leslie-Lohman Museum, who have treated me in such a divine manner. It’s been such a wonderful privilege to be part of this exhibition, and I personally feel that I’ve been working all of my life to get to this point, to be in this setting. It’s really a great honor.

In the past, I have experienced an explosive reaction to my work, even prior to the WAR exhibition, which is now being shown here at the Leslie-Lohman Museum. In 1997, I did a project at Galería De La Raza in the Mission District of San Francisco called My Cathedral. At the time, I was very interested in joining characters from opposing political and religious backgrounds that may not see eye to eye and bring these personae together into queer embraces and queer kissing. The exterior part of this project was displayed onto the gallery windows right on the street level, as light boxes, while pedestrians would walk by them. After about a week and a half of the exhibition being up, two of the works were smashed in and destroyed by vandals. The first light box to be destroyed was of Jesus Christ kissing the Hindu god Lord Rama. Less than a week after, a second window work was destroyed featuring Cesar Chavez and Che Guevara kissing each other. After these acts of violence occurred, the administrators of the gallery and I decided to bring the remaining works inside and had the windows boarded

Figure 1.

Che Guevara and Cesar Chavez, 1997, Oil & enamel on plexi light-box, 36 × 24 in. (Both nonextant, destroyed onsite by vandals). Courtesy of Alex Donis.

Figure 2.

Young Crip, Young Blood, 2001, Oil and enamel on plexiglass light box, 82 × 28 in. Collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Courtesy of Alex Donis.

up. Afterwards, out on the street a makeshift altar was constructed where the works had been vandalized, pedestrians wrote comments of tolerance on the sidewalk outside the gallery, and over 200 people attended a roundtable discussion at a local theater where members of all communities could vent their frustrations around homophobia. After this incident in San Francisco occurred, I continued to think a great deal about this whole dynamic of what happens when queerness collides in the realm of public space.

From about 1995 to 1999, I worked as an art instructor at the Watts Towers Arts Center, in Watts, California. The Watts Towers, as they are locally known, were created in the 1920s by an Italian outsider artist named Simon Rodia. He left the Towers to a neighbor in the 1950s, and after many trials and tribulations it became a California monument, so to speak. After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the Towers were closed to the public to be retrofitted. It wasn’t until 2001 that the Watts Towers were restored and the city planned to reopen this landmark as part of the Watts Day of the Drum Festival and the Watts Jazz Festival. While the Towers had been closed for years, the Watts Towers Art Center had grown, and an art gallery blossomed under the curatorship of the art center’s director Mark Greenfield, who was also my ex-boss. It was 1999 or 2000, when I asked Mark Greenfield if I could have an exhibit in the art gallery. He looked at his calendar and said, “Well, why don’t you be the artist that is scheduled to reopen the Watts Towers in 2001.”

We agreed that I would be the artist to show in the art gallery as...