"rat/art” — Patti Smith

Since childhood I have been moved by all that is visual. All that is avant garde stimulates my artistic twist. When I was nine years old I found a Jackson Pollock catalogue in a burned-down house in Santa Fe — amazing! When I was eleven I discovered Yoko Ono — Wha-hey!

My artwork is a virulent and healing bag of memories, photographs, found objects, and luck. If I can provoke the whimsy in people when they look at my artwork and put them in more than one place in time at once — I have done my job.

I HAVE KNOWN Bobb NEOBOY Maestas, one of the featured artists in Leslie-Lohman’s fall 2000 show Hard Heart, Cold Hands: Sculpture Now [Nov. 14 – Dec. 22, 2000], for the better part of a decade, and during that time he and his art have never ceased to amaze me.

"A virulent and healing bag of memories, photographs, found objects, and luck” is how he describes his work in the artist’s statement quoted above. I would describe it as playful, but with deeper implications. "I’m a trash collector from way back,” he once told me, and his 3D constructions and assemblages are likely to include a wide range of materials, from carved stone saints, seashells, neon lighting, and elegantly chromatic photographs of naked males to plastic bird whistles, marbles, barbed wire, rusted bottle caps, and discarded costume jewelry, among many other items. His pieces are fun to look at. They can also be viewed as an indictment of our throw-away culture and a reworking of its cast-off objects aimed at reclaiming — even redeeming — those objects for renewed life. Life from death. Not a bad goal in a world threatened by AIDS, ethnic slaughters, and the ever-present possibility of humanly engineered ecological disaster.

A native of New Mexico, where he currently resides, NEOBOY has lived for long periods in southern California, Atlanta, Georgia, and south Florida. His inclusion in Hard Heart, Cold Hands is his first appearance at LLGAF, but his art has been exhibited all over the United States, and as far away as Japan. His nom de art NEOBOY is taken from a lyric poem by rocker Patti Smith, whom he regards as one of his personal heroes. He has quite a few personal heroes, and has memorialized many of them in his art — not just Smith, but Robert Mapplethorpe, Liubov Popova, Klaus Nomi, and Yoko Ono, to name a few.

It should be noted that music has been a big influence on him, especially the music of pop singers like Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Joni Mitchell, Siouxsie Sioux, Buffy St. Marie, Laura Nyro. He calls them his "lady singers,” and generally listens to their music while doing his art.

It should also be noted that, like Patti Smith, he’s a published poet.

I caught up with NEOBOY before the opening of Hard Heart, Cold Hands. Here are some of the comments he offered in response to a few questions:

How would you define yourself as an artist?
Definitely multimedia — a visual, performance, poetry, and spoken word artist.

How would you describe your art?
I explore what’s going on in me, what’s going on in my life, through my art. A lot of the pieces are self-portraits, self-revelations. Even if they’re not directly about me, they include something about me.

How would you describe yourself?
I live in the Southwest. I’m Hispanic by background, with a dash of Native American thrown in as well. I’m an out gay/queer artist — out to the world, and supported in that by my friends and entire birth family.

That doesn't seem to describe your art.
I love the Southwest, but I’m not a regional artist. I respect the Hispanic and Native American traditions, but I don’t feel like I have to own them in my art. Still, you can see traces of my background in much of my work. I think that by looking at my art anyone could easily guess I’m gay.

Do you have any favorite artists?
I like many artists. At the moment I’m thinking of Cindy Sherman and Alice Neel. In their art they’re so honest about who they are.

Could you say something about the erotic pieces you created for the Leslie-Lohman show?
They’re 3D visuals that include words and numbers. Whenever I do erotic art, it expresses my own sexuality — sometimes it’s masked, sometimes it’s more open. Sexual fantasy can be fun, and I have fun creating pieces that help others enter that world.