20% of sales from this exhibition will be donated to ALAS (Ayudando Latinos a Soñar)
Oscar Lopez: Admirados y Borrados / Admired and Erased
February 22 – March 30, 2025
Public opening reception Sunday, February 23, 1-4PM
Artist talk Friday, March 7 @5:00 PM
M Stark Gallery, 727 Main Street, Half Moon Bay, art@mstarkgallery.com, 415-407-8743
Pacifica artist Oscar Lopez explores the importance of cultural history and resilience, presenting our complex society through a Mexican immigrant’s lens.
The Pre-Columbian clay figurines in this series of paintings represent centuries of beauty, history, traditions, and culture; as well as members of our community who are viewed as immigrants but not as native peoples, the first inhabitants of these lands.
For centuries, collectors and museums have accumulated artifacts to hold in admiration long after the creators and their cultures have been erased. We admire the evidence of people’s lives through glass exhibits while simultaneously treating their descendants with indifference or worse, while our current politics threaten to erase them again.
Oscar Lopez was born and raised in Mexico City, where he first encountered art through the world of urban graffiti. Lopez received an AA in studio art from Foothill College, a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and an MFA in pictorial arts from San Jose State University/San Francisco Art Institute. Lopez is a 2024 SFMOMA SECA nominee and received the 2019 AXA Art Prize for emerging figurative painters. He received a 2022 Creative Work Fund Grant for Your Food, My Work, Our Land, a monumental scale mural project installed at Fort Mason in 2024. His newest mural, Without Them Is Not Us, is on view now at the Institute of Contemporary Art San José. He lives and works in Pacifica.
