Nehemiah Cisneros

Legend of a Wicked City

- Evan Pricco

What captures you at first is the density of information. On each canvas, you are immersed in an imagination that is devouring every detail of the subconscious and attempting to make each painting an entire story of both place and person. It's as if there won't be another painting ever made in ode to Los Angeles ever again. It was Van Gogh who once wrote, "I dream my painting, and I paint my dream." In the case of Nehemiah Cisneros, he is painting his dreams and making us see what dreams can be. There is tragedy, romance, and history. A Cisneros painting is Shakespearian, and he is the maximalist director of this play.

On a sunny winter day, I visited Cisneros at the UCLA Graduate Art Studios, just as the night before he sent off his graduate thesis, and was surrounded by two massive works for his MFA show. I knew Cisneros for years as just AUGOR, the prolific, enigmatic, and comicby-way-of-horror inspired graffiti artist who took over billboards in the same way he is now taking over canvases: with every attention to maximal detail. Like fellow MSK writers REVOK and POSE, Cisneros has transitioned his tenacity for graffiti into something with equal energy but studio-bound. Now working on a series he calls Wicked City, these monumental examinations of street life in Southern California are informed by both immersion and distance, a view of Los Angeles as a city with layers and characters that the Hollywood sheen does not reach. Wicked, as both a word of evil and surfer charm, is at play here, and we begin our conversation with dichotomy and balance.

Evan Pricco: Okay, so you are on the last legs of your MFA at UCLA. How are you feeling? What is sort of in the headspace of Nehemiah Cisneros right now?