Frank Blazquez on the New Mexico PBS series, ¡COLORES!

Frank Blazquez on New Mexico PBS series, ¡COLORES!

Introduction by Pete Warzel

Sometime during the Thanksgiving holiday 2018, I read a fascinating article in The Guardian newspaper about a photographer in Albuquerque who had overcome bad personal choices and graduated from UNM with a degree in history, magna cum laude, but also was causing a stir with his portraits taken from experience with people in the ‘War Zone’ (now the International Zone) in Albuquerque. The portraits were stunning, riveting, unapologetic. They presented gang members, drug addicts, ex-inmates with their gloriously inked bodies and faces, up close and fearless. They presented people.

I knew we had to have an exhibition at El Zaguán of these photographs, as acknowledgement of a culture so alien to Canyon Road. 

Frank Blazquez came to visit us at our office and we quickly decided he would print and we would hang an exhibition for January 2019. We helped with the printing cost, but neither of us, Frank or HSFF, could afford framing, so we decided to make something raw of it and hung the large prints from industrial wire, secured to the wall by large iron nails. It worked. The sala at 545 Canyon Road came alive with the edgy energy of the War Zone.

Frank is a wise, focused, caring man, with huge talent. He has since won prizes at the Sangre de Cristo Arts Center, Pueblo, Colorado, shown at the History Colorado Center in Denver, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and will be part of an exhibition at the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery during 2022 as one of the finalists in the triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Cempetition. He deserves it all. 

Below is a link to a segment from the New Mexico PBS series, ¡COLORES! Broadcast on January 22, 2022. The subject and interviewee is Frank Blazquez and his art.

Watch this episode of New Mexico PBS series, ¡COLORES!