Consuelo Soto Murphy studied Art and Art Education at Eastern Washington University and Spokane Falls in Spokane Wa.
In second grade, her teacher declared her an artist when she brought Consuelo up to the front of the class and she held up a drawing of a twisted and very large and brightly colored octopus. Consuelo believed her and from then on she was an artist.
Consuelo graduated from Sunnyside High School in 1979 and Graduated from Eastern with degrees in Art Education, Studio Art and K-12 Education. In 1989 Consuelo began teaching Art at Richland High School in Richland, Washington where she taught Art for 32 years while continuously pursuing her painting career.
Consuelo Soto grew up as a child migrant worker along with her family, doing field work across the United States, season to season, before eventually settling in the Yakima Valley of the Pacific Northwest.
Despite the grueling, backbreaking work, Consuelo’s art pieces are inspired by the positive memories of the beautiful landscapes, the flourishing crops, and the love and relationships forged with her family and friends. Consuelo was the seventh child of nine children. While the older ones worked all day in the fields, Consuelo was able to go to school during the day, working before and after school and during the summers.
While Consuelo works primarily in acrylics on canvas, she is far from limited to this medium. The magnificent pieces produced by Consuelo Soto Murphy have gone to homes all over the world. Her work has been featured in publications and galleries as well as featured on television productions.
The question I’m asked most frequently is how a black doctor in his 50s working on the Navajo reservation started doing street art on said reservation. In retrospect, it was only natural for this evolution to occur.
I started working in a small community between the Grand Canyon and Monument Valley called Inscription House in 1987. I’d always been drawn to photography and built a darkroom shortly after my arrival on the Navajo Nation. My passion photographically is shooting black and white in a documentary style inspired by people like Eugene Smith, Eugene Richards, Joseph Koudelka and others. By going out and spending time with people in their homes and family camps, I have come to know them as friends. Interestingly, these home visits enhance my doctor/patient relationship by helping me be a more empathetic health care practitioner.
I’ve always been drawn to street art, graffiti and old school hip-hop. I was attracted to the energy of the culture in the 80s and though I was miles away from the epicenter, I thought of myself as a charter member of the Zulu Nation. I would travel to New York City to see graffiti on trains, on buildings and in galleries. I did some tagging in the 80s before coming to the Navajo Nation and participated with a major billboard “correction” on the reservation shortly after my arrival. My early interventions on the street were largely text based saying things like “Thank you Dr. King. I too am a dreamer” or “Smash Apartheid” and so on.
In 2009 I took a 3-month sabbatical to Brasil which coincided with a difficult period in my life. Though I wasn’t looking for an epiphany, I was fortunate to stumble upon a passionate group of artists working on the street who befriended me. It was during this time that I appreciated how photography could be a street art form. Inspired by Diego Rivera and Keith Haring, I’d become disinterested in showing my photographs in galleries isolated from the people I was photographing and wanted to pursue a more immediate relationship with my community reflecting back to them some of the beauty they’ve shared with me. And in truth, I was infatuated with the feeling I got being with the artists in Salvador do Bahia and wanting to find a way to keep that vibe going I started pasting images along the roadside in June 2009.
My early photographic influences include the work of Joseph Koudelka, Garry Winogrand, Charles Moore, Robert Frank, Eugene Smith, Gordon Parks, Larry Towell, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meisalis, Roy DeCarava, Sebastio Salgado and Eugene Richards. I was blown away by Richards’ work in the late 80s and early 90s for Life Magazine and had an opportunity to spend 5 days picking his brain at Santa Fe Photographic Workshops in 1991. It’s this one person with one camera, frequently with only one lens shooting black + white film in ambient light aesthetic that informs my eye as well as 25 years spent in my home darkroom pursing the zone system. It’s been an interesting challenge attempting to bring that look to black and white prints on regular bond paper coming off a toner based plotter. I’d like to think that my vision is a part of the storytelling, first person, humanist tradition of the people I look up to mixed with a healthy dose of Diego Rivera + Keith Haring.
Regardless, I give thanks that the journey continues.
Art Institute of Chicago / University of Chicago BFA: Studied Art History, Painting, and Printmaking; Lone Mountain College / University of San Francisco MFA: Studied Aesthetics, Art History, and Printmaking
Information Made His Life Matter By Robert Lloyd
In elementary school when your skin is dark and your nose is broad and your hair is kinky, your peers don’t think your life matters. So, you find a sanctuary in the library. No one beats you up. No one calls you names. You read. You discover how much there is that you don’t know and you can find in a book. A teaching career. A military career. An artist’s career. A medical technical career. A career as a professor of art in Nigeria. African history, philosophy, literature, world travels. Information made his life matter. Charles made his life matter.
Artist Statement
I am interested in bringing into focus a particular space of time which most Americans have avoided. I suppose one could say the idea is not to tell a story or narrate history but rather by presenting fragments of history in visual form, ignite thoughts of history in the viewer’s mind at several levels, conscious and unconscious.
The Nigeria Series
The series of paintings and collages is based on my time living and working in West Africa. To express the feeling that Nigeria evokes in me, visually, I use musicians and scenes of everyday life as representational elements with color and movement as the abstract elements overlying the representational ones. Kind of a theory much like music theory can be viewed as cultural constructs. In Western thought, color is described in visual terms, such as pigment or light. In Nigeria, particular in Yoruba land, where I lived, color was described in terms of temperature, from hot to cold, with various colors also having religious connotations. In Nigeria, art is meant to be multiple, multi sensual experience, not simply a matter of sight, something you look at. This series of art represents a distillation of the many feelings I have for West Africa.
My name is Carl Richardson and I have lived in Spokane for the past 25 years. I am a practicing artist and an Instructor of Art at Spokane Falls Community College. I moved the Northwest to pursue my MFA from Washington State University. Prior to moving to Washington, I lived in Florida. I completed my Bachelor’s degree from the HBCU Florida A&M University.
Artist Statement
I am a 2D artist with a primary interest in printmaking and drawing. The subject and content of my work varies and is influenced by music, conversations, observations, and the state of the world. The consistent thread in my work is my love of formal structure and design. I often use the golden mean or other geometric layouts as a foundation for my compositions. Through the act of creating I am able to express thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain silent.
