Art & Soul
The Art of Justice in Honduras by Jo Kadlecek Saturday nights in the Nueva Suyapa neighborhood of Tegucigalpa can be tough. Dogs scavenge through unlit streets, gangs vie for power among the poor, and young people look for a way to pass the time. Last year a UN report ranked Honduras as having the world’s highest per capita homicide rate. But one Saturday night in June, I joined 20 others—pastors, scholars, and practitioners from places as far away as Cambodia, Guatemala, and Canada—for dinner with two local families living side by side in Nueva Suyapa. I had just arrived in the middle of a twoweek seminar called “Justice: Theory Meets Practice,” sponsored by the Association for a More Just Society (or AJS, which is the US-based development arm of Honduran-run Asociación para una Sociedad más Justa). The participants had already spent a week together, listening
those of his children. Through a translator, I discovered his story. Dennis Cerrato, the father of five boys and a girl, had started painting at age 14. As far as he knew, no family member or neighborhood friend showed any similar interest, but he kept at it, drawing or painting whenever he could, teaching himself or taking an occasional class. Then one day a friend whose relative was “high up in the culture” invited him to show some of his landscapes. “He was a divine person God put in my way, who helped me see I could do this,” Cerrato told me. “It was an open door to the artistic world for me.” He began to sell some work, exhibiting in small galleries and giving painting lessons when he could. (The daughter of AJS cofounder Kurt Ver Beek learned to paint from him; today she’s majoring in art at a Christian college in the US.) Now, after 13 years as a professional artist, Cerrato has exhibited his work in the Galería Nacional de Arte in Tegucigalpa, the Annual Exhibition of Honduran Paintings, the Nacional Theater Manuel Bonilla (sponsored by the Embassy of Japan), El Salvador, even Colorado. Still, Cerrato says it is hard to support his family from his art. The average annual income in Honduras is only $1,870, according to the World Bank, and artists there struggle daily, along with every other street vendor. Cerrato paints more pictures than he can sell. But he perseveres, developing a style uniquely Honduran with themes of “spirituality,” as he calls it. His children’s faces, he said, represent God’s protection; doors and doves symbolize
“I want my art to reflect a tranquility we need.” to lectures on justice from Yale scholar/author Nicholas Wolterstorff and learning about each other’s work as well as the work of others pursuing justice in Tegucigalpa. Amidst the smell of chicken and rice, beyond the main room where children ran in and out, the father of the family sat in the kitchen, paintbrush in hand. He was working at an easel, focusing intently on his canvas as the women cooked. Several of us gathered around him, intrigued by his work in progress—an oil painting with six panels, the face of a boy in the center, a door with a knocker in another. We admired his precision as well his other paintings, which hung on the wall behind him, a slew of newspaper clippings of recent exhibits taped on another wall. We recognized the faces in his paintings as
the peace he hopes for in his country. The colors resemble those of the city and the mountains beyond. Even a painted screw in the door reflects the “forced unity” he believes defines the church. I asked if he thought any of his children would be painters. He smiled. “One has begun to draw, so maybe,” he said. In the meantime, Cerrato models for them an artist’s life; he serves in his church and on the board of a collective of Honduran artists. This summer he helped to prepare an exhibit by local Central American artists around the theme of peace. And in September, his work is on display at the Embassy of Honduras in Canada, along with a consortium of visual artists. “This is both my passion and my work,” he said. “I want my art to reflect a tranquility we need.” When our conversation was interrupted with a plate of rice and beans, we turned toward Cerrato’s 2-year-old nephew who was dancing between us and the guests. One of his sons turned up the music, and eventually everyone joined in the dance. It turned out to be a really good Saturday night in Nueva Suyapa. (View Cerrato’s paintings at DennisCerratoArt.com. You’ll be glad you did.)
Jo Kadlecek is the senior writer and journalist-in-residence at Gordon College in Wenham, Mass. She hopes someday to move beyond her junior high Spanish to have a real conversation with new friends in Honduras.
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