Viewing page 30 of 45

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

One Man Exhibition Opens

Born in El Paso in 1929, Melesio "Mel" Casas taught high school art in El Paso and San Antonio for three years, and since 1961 has been a professor of art at San Antonio College, including being chair person of the SAC visual arts and technology department for 12 years. His academic credentials include a bachelor of arts degree (1956) from Texas Western College at El Paso (now the University of Texas at El Paso) and a master of fine arts from the University of the Americas, Mexico City. He is married and is the father of five adult children. He fought in the Korean Conflict and is a disabled veteran.

Casas has an impressive list of awards, dating from a 1956 National Association of Arts and Letters second prize to the "Barbara Jordan Award" from the Texas Governor's Committee for Disable Persons in June of 1989, an award presented in the Governor's Mansion. He has won artistic and academic prizes in El Paso, Forth Worth and Mexico City as well as in San Antonio.

His work has been exhibited in many solo, two-man and group exhibitions in important galleries and museums throughout California, Texas, and Mexico, including cities such as El Paso, San Antonio, Seguin, Mexico City, Forth Worth, Houston, Beaumont, and Lubbock. In 1988-89 his work toured in "Mira!: The Canadian Club Hispanic Art Tour III," which exhibited in the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, the Base Museum of Art, Miami Beach, and museums in Chicago and New York.

Casas is also a prolific art reviewer for "Choice Magazine: A Publication of the Association of College and Research Libraries, a Division of the American Library Association. He has published 72 reviews for "Choice" from 1964 through 1989.

An enthusiastic proponent of Chicano art, Casa set the following goal for himself: "To combine language and image in such a way that we might see more articulately and speak more imaginatively."

In the catalog for his 1988 Laguna Gloria Museum exhibition in Austin, Casas diagrams the relationship among Art as Language, Art of the Southwest, and Art of the Border. He includes seven answers to the question "On the Border of What?" One is fringe art, two marginal art, three, ornamental art, four art on the verge, five art on the brink, six art on the rim and seven art of the ethnic minorities. His diagram concludes by asking "Do negative word factors produce negative image responses?"

Laredoans and Nuevo Laredoans can answer the question for themselves when viewing his exhibition which begins with the Feb. 4 opening and reception, and runs through Feb. 28 at the Nuevo Santander Museum Chapel, LJC Campus.