You have experienced art transforming and healing in your own life. How do you see it transforming and healing people’s lives and communities?

Art that is not commodified as entertainment has the capacity to guide and inspire us to question our inherited realities. Art that in its practice has the intention to deepen our understanding and heal can be transformational. I think this is why I am a self-taught painter, I leaned into painting as a path to make sense of the violence around me and then it guided me also into understanding who I am and my life beyond the impact of violence.

In my path I then found many teachers, some are people and others are books and places in nature too. I believe that art can be a path for people and communities to explore uncomfortable truths and histories, to find depth in this understanding and from there co-create more honest and liberated ways of being. For example, I always offer my paintings as mirrors, sometimes of beauty and joy and other times of the violence and harm in need to heal in this world.

In the video, you talk about art as a healing process in response to colonialism and the violence you and others in Guatemala have experienced and continue to experience. Can you tell me more about that?

There is really so much to name here, Coactemalan in nahuatl Indigenous language that means “place of giants trees” is mostly the area that today is known as Guatemala, although it also expanded to areas that with the imposition of colonial borders are now considered part of Mexico. Like many other territories and people around the world, Guatemala has been impacted by waves of invasion, plunder and oppression long after the initial invasion of Spaniard colonizers and the violent religious imposition of Christianism. Even after the so-called independence of our country, the colonial mindset continued to create a society where European knowledge and practices were deemed as superior in pretty much every aspect of our lives. This is not only in Guatemala, or even Latinamerica, but it is very much a global harvest we need to heal because it deforms the way that as people we relate to ourselves, between each other and with all living beings.

This is pretty much the constant conversation and reflection that together with my wife that is from Bolivia we keep coming back to, over and over, and over. For example in Guatemala, the ongoing colonial mindset made it that during the presidency of Justo Rufino Barrios immense extensions of land were gifted to German immigrants to so-called “develop” these lands, this is how the land of giants trees today has just 18% of its forests that have been mainly converted to coffee, banana and sugar cane plantations to feed mainly people in the western world starting with the United States itself. This president is known to state that “one German is worth at least twenty Indians”, this form of beliefs of internalized racism is still present today, not spoken about openly and whenever questioned received with superficial statements such as “that is in the past, we need to look forward”, “Indians need to stop victimizing themselves” and so on.

It is really very painful and it does not end here. Unfortunately, more recently the U.S. corporation United Fruit Company was given a very similar deal, agricultural workers that started to ask for better labor conditions were demonized as communists and then all three sectors: the United Fruit Company, U.S. government with Eisenhower as the president at the time, and the Guatemalan oligarchies saw this situation as a threat to their interests organized a brutal military repression that lasted more than three decades! The U.S. continued to back up military dictatorships that by the signing of the Peace agreement in 1996 had murdered two hundred thousand Indigenous people, entire communities massacred, approximately fifty thousand people disappeared and until today still no justice … And still it does not end here, during Clinton’s presidency a large number of L.A. gang members were deported to Central America, many of these men had lives impacted by racism and street violence. I don’t know if people understand that many of these men did not even speak Spanish and had never been in Central America before. These deported men were just released at arrival and started forming gangs known as maras in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. Since then the poorest neighborhoods basically live under their terror.

This is what people in the United States need to understand about the waves of immigrants to this country, people are escaping from violent situations that have been imposed on them and this is part of the harvest of colonialism in our shared continent of America. They are truly refugees and still mostly received with disdain all across their path not only in the United States. Colonization is not just a period in history but an ongoing reality in our mindsets, relationships, culture and societal structures. It is vital that as people around the world we own and understand this deeply, both people that have been socialized as dominant and benefit from oppression regardless of their values and will,  as well as people socialized as oppressed and that continue to be violented by oppression regardless of their values and will too.

One way we describe collective wellbeing is the coming together or interrelatedness of healing the relationship with our highest potential, healing the relationship with others, and healing our relationship with nature. There is both the healing at the individual level, but also at the collective level. Your current pieces reflect a sense of interrelatedness, can you share more about that?

Yes, this series is part of a long healing process for me as well as it is not the only expression of myself or healing. For example, for many years I could not see myself painting anything that did not denounce the political and societal violence that has marked my life and that of many people in Guatemala and later on also here in the United States. I believe a vital part of my personal and the healing of our communities is being able to visibilize, express and process our woundings. Usually because of how uncomfortable this is specially to dominant cultures, pieces that are about this part of an artist healing as well as part of our collective healing are met with discomfort and sometimes all the way to experience rejection and censorship. In my life, I have learned that I can only heal that which I am willing to see, and I see it is the same for our relationships and communities.

Now that I better understand my pain and I am feeling moved to explore beyond the harm from the societal violence that impacted life. This is how this series came to be, it is called “The Effects of Time on Memory” because I am interrelating different moments of my healing and creative process with the deliberate intention to visibilize the beauty of interconnectedness as a path and a practice. As a painter, I work by hand in all aspects of my painting, including the frames and preparation of my canvas. In every piece there are layers of processes of painting, sanding, scratching, each connected to a part of my story. For example, often when I am sanding a piece there is a connection with myself as a child that had to work sanding ornamental pieces for sale due to poverty, or whenever I am mixing colors there are memories of times at the markets of Guatemala and the abundance of colors, shapes and produce. This is how I am coming to understand that what we called past, present and future are really always present at every moment of our lives for us to integrate towards healing.

I think we need to understand more how important it is to support people and in having spaces and resources for these processes so that we can together to-create collective wellbeing within our communities.

How can people support artists whose work is vital to co-creating collective wellbeing?

Here there are also many layers, of course I want to say that financially supporting artists as patreons, purchasing pieces, with grants and others is very important. I live this reality by having two jobs apart from my painting, if it wasn’t for the support of organizations like Art and Literature Laboratory I could not enjoy the largely subsidized studio space that allowed me to paint the 40 pieces for this series. But financial support is just square one, very much appreciated and what makes it possible especially for human scale and community based artists to actually survive and sustain our practice.

There are also other layers of support, for me it means so much when people can be open to being impacted by my pieces and the message of each of my series. Even when that impact is sitting with discomfort in the series where I portrayed the impact of societal violence like racism and misogyny. I feel seen when people connect with my work, let it provoke a response in them and if they feel moved, amplify their experience by sharing it with friends, family, etc. 

To learn more about Richie’s art, you can connect with him through Instagram, Facebook, Behance, and Patreon.